Mortification Quotes - Page 3

It is one of the vexatious mortifications of a studious man to have his thoughts disordered by a tedious visit.

Roger L'Estrange

Men, Bores, Tedious

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... many a heart is caught in the rebound ... Pride may be soothed by the ready devotion of another; vanity may be excited the more keenly by recent mortification.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Heart, Pride, Vanity

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1834). “Francesca Carrara”, p.51

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Mortification of the flesh has been held all the world over as a condition of spiritual progress.

Mahatma Gandhi

Spiritual, Progress, World

Mahatma Gandhi (1973). “Collected Works”

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The heroic minute.- It is the time fixed for getting up.- Without hesitation: a supernatural reflection and.-.-.- up! The heroic minute: here you have a mortification that strengthens your will and does no harm to your body.

Josemaria Escriva

Reflection, Doe, Body

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Marriage is a tyranny, a mortification of man's natural instincts. Man needs a multiplicity of relationships.

Federico Fellini

Men, Needs, Natural Instinct

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The perfection of a Christian consists in mortifying his will for the love of Christ. Where there is no great mortification, there is no great sanctity.

Philip Neri

Christian, Perfection, Sanctity

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The Buddha's message was simple but profound. Neither a life of self-indulgence nor one of self-mortification can bring happiness. Only a middle path, avoiding these two extremes, leads to peace of mind, wisdom, & complete liberation from the dissatisfactions of life.

Henepola Gunaratana

Simple, Two, Self

Henepola Gunaratana (2011). “Eight Mindful Steps to Happiness: Walking the Buddha's Path”, p.25, Simon and Schuster

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Mortifications are often more painful than real calamities.

Oliver Goldsmith

Real, Painful, Shame

Oliver Goldsmith (1855). “The Vicar of Wakefield: A Tale”, p.65

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Could the best and kindest of us who depart from the earth have an opportunity of revisiting it, I suppose he or she (assuming that any Vanity Fair feelings subsist in the sphere whither we are bound) would have a pang of mortification at finding how soon our survivors were consoled.

William Makepeace Thackeray

Opportunity, Vanity, Feelings

William Makepeace Thackeray (1848). “Vanity Fair: A Novel Without a Hero”, p.256

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We launch our souls from the cannons of art and discipline, and on any one night, hovering over the chimney tops of Europe, halfway to the stars, there are armies of brightly spinning spirits that have risen like fireworks, tethered to the souls of those men and women who, by reflection, mortification, and devotion, effortlessly outdazzle kings.

Mark Helprin

Art, Kings, Stars

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There are two things that we should avoid, oh disciple! A life of pleasures, that is low and vain. A life of mortification, that is useless and vain.

Gautama Buddha

Two, Useless, Pleasure

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... mortification is basic to the act of photographing. The person is mobile, ... then I freeze one moment in his movement, a mere five-hundredth of a second of that person's life-time. That's a very meager or small extract from a life.

August Sander

Movement, Moments, Life Time

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Let a man neither give himself over to pleasures ... nor yet let him give himself over to self-mortification ... To the exclusion of both these extremes, the Truth-Finder has discovered a middle course.

Gautama Buddha

Men, Self, Giving

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Have I mentioned that I expect death around every turn, that every blue sky has a safe sailing out of it, that every bus runs me over, that every low, mean syllable uttered in my direction seems to intimate the violence of murder, that every family seems like an opportunity for ruin and every marriage a ceremony into which calamity will fall and hearts will be broken and lives destroyed and people branded by the mortifications of love?

Rick Moody

Love, Running, Fall

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If I refuse to allow my leg to be amputated, its mortification and my death may prove that I was wrong; but if I let the leg go, nobody can ever prove that it would not have mortified had I been obstinate. Operation is therefore the safe side for the surgeon as well as the lucrative side.

George Bernard Shaw

Legs, May, Safe

From his Preface on Doctors published with The Doctor's Dilemma (1911)

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We know one another's faults, virtues, catastrophes, mortifications, triumphs, rivalries, desires, and how long we can each hang by our hands to a bar. We have been banded together under pack codes and tribal laws.

Rose Macaulay

Sister, Brother, Sibling

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To my deep mortification my father once said to me, "You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family."

Charles Darwin

Dog, Father, Science

Charles Darwin, Francis Darwin (1958). “Autobiography and Selected Letters”, p.9, Courier Corporation

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It's easy to see golf not as a game at all but as some whey-faced, nineteenth-century Presbyterian minister's fever dream of exorcism achieved through ritual and self-mortification.

Bruce McCall

Dream, Golf, Self

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Compare the emotional vocabulary available to a leader (confidence, satisfaction, indignation) with the emotions not permitted (regret, embarrassment, dread, angst, mortification, anger, surprise, wonder, doubt), and it becomes apparent why perfectly normal people, upon entering public life, transform into cartoons - because they are not free to express what a normal person would feel in their situation.

John MacLachlan Gray

Regret, Emotional, Vocabulary

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Providence has ordained that I should be the greatest liberator of humanity. I am freeing man from the restraints of an intelligence that has taken charge, from the dirty and degrading self-mortification of a false vision called conscience and morality, and from the demands of a freedom and independence which only a very few can bear.

Adolf Hitler

Dirty, Taken, Men

"Hitler Speaks". Book by Hermann Rauschning, p. 222, 1939.

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Among the innumerable mortifications which waylay human arrogance on every side may well be reckoned our ignorance of the most common objects and effects, a defect of which we become more sensible by every attempt to supply it. Vulgar and inactive minds confound familiarity with knowledge and conceive themselves informed of the whole nature of things when they are shown their form or told their use; but the speculatist, who is not content with superficial views, harasses himself with fruitless curiosity, and still, as he inquires more, perceives only that he knows less.

Samuel Johnson

Education, Peace, Truth

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But then back on lithium and rotating on the planet at the same pace as everyone else, you find your credit is decimated, your mortification complete: mania is not a luxury one can easily afford. It is devastating to have the illness and aggravating to have to pay for medications, blood tests, and psychotherapy. They, at least, are partially deductible. But money spent while manic doesn't fit into the Internal Revenue Service concept of medical expense or business loss. So after mania, when most depressed, you're given excellent reason to be even more so.

Kay Redfield Jamison

Depression, Loss, Luxury

Frederick K. Goodwin, Kay Redfield Jamison (2007). “Manic-Depressive Illness: Bipolar Disorders and Recurrent Depression”, p.40, Oxford University Press

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Those who live on vanity must, not unreasonably, expect to die of mortification.

Alice Thomas Ellis

Vanity, Dies

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He who wholly renounces himself, and relies not on mere human reason, will make good progress in the Scriptures; but the world comprehends them not, from ignorance of that mortification which is the gift of God's word.

Martin Luther

Ignorance, Progress, World

Martin Luther (1848). “The table talk or familiar discourse of Martin Luther, tr. by W. Hazlitt”, p.4

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It is a great mortification to the vanity of man, that his utmost art and industry can never equal the meanest of nature's productions, either for beauty or value. Art is only the under-workman, and is employed to give a few strokes of embellishment to those pieces, which come from the hand of the master.

David Hume

Art, Nature, Men

David Hume (1825). “Essays and treatises on several subjects: essays, moral, political and literary”, p.131

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