Top 71 Ascetic Quotes
#2. Forgiveness is the true nature of the ascetic.
Ramakrishna
#3. When you reach your sixties, you have to decide whether you're going to be a sot or an ascetic. In other words if you want to go on working after you're sixty, some degree of asceticism is inevitable.
Malcolm Muggeridge
#5. Asceticism doesn't lie in mere words; He is an ascetic who treats everyone alike. Asceticism doesn't lie in visiting burial places; it lies not in wandering about nor in bathing at places of pilgrimage. Asceticism is to remain pure amidst impurities.
Guru Nanak
#6. The beauty of a cuckoo is in its notes, that of a woman in her unalloyed devotion to her husband, that of an ugly person in his scholarship, and that of an ascetic in his forgiveness.
Chanakya
#7. It is a perverse faith, in that it reveres the "environment" ahead of people who live in it. It is a most ascetic superstition, in that it demands we live less happily and less freely and with less prosperity - the opposite of, say, the Protestant work ethic that helped build Ontario.
Ezra Levant
#8. During a chess tournament a master must envisage himself as a cross between an ascetic monk and a beast of prey.
Alexander Alekhine
#9. When I was exposed to the history and the cultural background of why women whose husbands die, why they have to become ascetic or live a life that is completely deprived of emotional or social or cultural sustenance, I was really shocked.
Deepa Mehta
#10. no matter how intelligent, perceptive and gifted you were, no matter how entirely you lived for the ascetic rewards of the intellect and eschewed the material world and the ignobility of the flesh, if your heart just gave out . . . That
Iain M. Banks
#11. The religion of Jesus Christ is not ascetic, nor sour, nor gloomy, nor circumscribing. It is full of sweetness in the present and in promise.
Henry Ward Beecher
#12. At one moment we deplore our birth and state and aspire to an ascetic exaltation; the next we are overcome by the smell of some old garden path and weep to hear the thrushes sing.
Virginia Woolf
#13. A non-materialist. And yet you are unpleasantly fat. A gluttonous ascetic? Such a contradiction.
Orson Scott Card
#14. I'm a fairly ascetic person. And I do most of my writing at night. You don't get distracted, your brain goes into what you are writing about, into the world you're writing about, rather than into the world you're in.
Caleb Carr
#15. I love my work with a frenetic and perverse love, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt which scratches his belly.
Gustave Flaubert
#16. God, we are told, looked upon the world after he had created it and pronounced it good; but ascetic pietists, in their wisdom, cast their eyes over it, and substantially pronounce it a dead failure, a miserable production, a poor concern.
Christian Nestell Bovee
#17. I like prostitution. My heart has never failed to pound at the sight of one of those provocatively dressed women walking in the rain under the gaslamps, just as the sight of monks in their robes and girdles touches some ascetic, hidden corner of my soul.
Gustave Flaubert
#18. We need to become sidha (straightforward); there is no need to become a sadhu (ascetic).
Dada Bhagwan
#19. This severe, ascetic music, calm and horizontal as the line of the ocean, monotonous by virtue of its serenity, anti-sensuous, and yet so intense in its contemplativeness that it verges sometimes on ecstasy.
Charles Gounod
#20. No sane man can afford to dispense with debilitating pleasures. No ascetic can be considered reliably sane.
A.J. Liebling
#21. Shaking people up." Finally, art was for both of them not an end in itself but a way of achieving an ascetic renunciation of the world. "Art should be given the chance to phase itself out," Gould
Thomas Bernhard
#22. Mother Teresa was the very embodiment of saintliness: white-clad, sad-eyed, ascetic and often photographed with the wretched of the earth.
Steven Pinker
#23. Giving up all notions about country, caste, blemishless community,asrama (status as a bachelor, family man, ascetic or one who has renounced the world) and associated matters, hold on to and practise always meditation upon the Self, your own natural state.
Ramana Maharshi
#24. In every ascetic morality man worships a part of himself as God and for that he needs to diabolize the other part.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#25. If one's object is ascetic, it is far better to stay in London or Paris or New York; there is practically no extreme of heat or cold, physical risk, loneliness, hunger or thirst that cannot, with a little ingenuity, be conveniently achieved in the centres of civilization.
Evelyn Waugh
#26. Humility and ascetic hardship free a man from all sin, for the one cuts out the passions of the soul, the other those of the body. This is what the blessed David indicates when he prays to God, saying, "Look on my humility and my toil, and forgive all my sins" (Ps. 25:18).
Maximus The Confessor
#27. Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.
Bertrand Russell
#28. And showed him to be a villa-dwelling dependent and not an ascetic cave-dwelling guerrilla.
Christopher Hitchens
#29. A pale, thin, small woman, perfectly coiffed, perfectly dressed, without makeup, without a single piece of jewelry, ascetic (viperous?) (her heart sullied by the world's contagion?) stands beside Eduardo, making him gigantic: she smiles mechanically.
Margo Glantz
#30. The fearful ascetic runs on foot, along the surface.
Lovers move like lightning and wind.
No contest.
Jalaluddin Rumi
#31. He who, though dressed in fine apparel, exercises tranquillity, is quiet, subdued, restrained, chaste, and has ceased to find fault with all other beings, he indeed is an ascetic.
Max Muller
#32. Power and courtly influence form an intoxicating draught even when raised to the lips of an ascetic and a saint.
James Fitzjames Stephen
#33. All this fame and money, which have so thrilled me when they came to others, leave me cold when they come to me. I am not an ascetic, but I don't know what to do with them, and my daily life has never been so trying, and there is no one to fill it emotionally.
E. M. Forster
#34. The unwedded and ascetic life is the direct way to the heavenly, immortal life, for heaven is nothing else than life liberated from the conditions of the species, supernatural, sexless, absolutely subjective life.
Ludwig Feuerbach
#35. He might be living on mice, but Chesterton does not look like an animal who is governed by his appetites. He's an ascetic, if Cathbad ever saw one.
Elly Griffiths
#36. I think one of the things you and I have to learn is that we have to live without the consolation of belonging to a Church ...
Of one thing I am certain. The religion of the future will have to be extremely ascetic, and by that I don't mean just going without food and drink.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
#37. Ascetic spirituality is a symptom of the very disease which it intends to cure.
Anodea Judith
#38. A commercial society whose members are essentially ascetic and indifferent in social ritual has to be provided with blueprints and specifications for evoking the right tone for every occasion.
Marshall McLuhan
#39. The student who deceives himself into thinking that he is giving his life like an ascetic in the spirit of sacrifice for art, is the victim of a deplorable species of egotism.
Alma Gluck
#40. Wanted, a man "who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but whose passions are trained to heed a strong will, the servant of a tender conscience; who has learned to love all beauty, whether of nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to respect others as himself.
Brett McKay
#41. The ascetic remembrance of death is opposed to akedia, to anxiety, to depression, and becomes a powerful reminder of eternity, its joyful nostalgia.
Paul Evdokimov
#42. The rustic, the reader of novels, the pure ascetic: these three are truly happy men
Fernando Pessoa
#43. The devout life does not solely entail living as a monk or ascetic, though that is fine. The devout life requires bringing God into all things.
David Paul Kirkpatrick
#44. The ascetic ideal has an aim - this goal is, putting it generally, that all the other interests of human life should, measured by its standard, appear petty and narrow; it explains epochs, nations, men, in reference to this one end; it forbids any other interpretation, any other end; it
Friedrich Nietzsche
#45. The ascetic, for the greater glory of God, degrades and mortifies the flesh; Judas did the same with the spirit. He renounced honor, good, peace, the Kingdom of Heaven, as others, less heroically, renounced pleasure.
Jorge Luis Borges
#46. Fuck Master Liu! He's some ascetic who counts snowflakes on a mountain in China and dips his balls in ice water for the hell of it. You're not Liu. You live in the real world
Dakota Banks
#47. Neither my life of luxury in the palace -nor- my life as ascetic in the forest were ways to enlightenment.
Gautama Buddha
#48. Everywhere where detestable Islam has not yet driven out the ancient, profound religions of humanity with fire and sword, my ascetic results would have to fear the reproach of being trivial
Arthur Schopenhauer
#49. God is not an ascetic, otherwise there would be no flowers, there would be no green trees, only deserts. God is not an ascetic, otherwise there would be no song in life, no dance in life - only cemeteries and cemeteries. God is not an ascetic; God enjoys life.
Osho
#50. Asceticism doesn't lie in ascetic robes or in walking staff nor in the ashes. Asceticism doesn't lie in the earring nor in the shaven head nor blowing a conch. Asceticism lies in remaining pure amidst impurities.
Guru Nanak
#51. I typically don't adopt the ascetic approach. In part, that's because I do use the Net for research even as I'm writing (to check facts, or so on). But I think it's also because I find the possibility of distraction comforting.
James Surowiecki
#53. Everybody who does not live in a prostitute's bed and on a diet of cocaine snow is called an ascetic nowadays.
George Bernard Shaw
#54. The fruits of the earth are not brought to perfection immediately, but by time, rain and care; similarly, the fruits of men ripen through ascetic practice, study, time, perseverance, self-control and patience.
Anthony The Great
#55. If you want your sins to be "covered" by the Lord (Ps. 32.1), do not parade your virtues before others. God will treat our sins the same way that we treat our virtues. St. Mark the Ascetic
Thomas Mitrakos
#56. A holy life is not an ascetic, or gloomy or solitary life, but a life regulated by divine truth and faithful in Christian duty. It is living above the world while we are still in it.
Tryon Edwards
#57. Some have paid me an undeserved compliment by supposing that my Letters were the ripe fruit of many years' study in moral and ascetic theology. They forgot that there is an equally reliable, though less creditable, way of learning how temptation works.
C.S. Lewis
#59. The ascetic is often a sensualist who has reached the limit of his capacity.
Jacques Barzun
#60. My father was the church organist; the village curate was my mother's brother, a former monk from the order of Pijar, a very well-educated and ascetic man who loved nothing but solitude.
Wladyslaw Reymont
#61. I might become an ascetic, live in India. A little rice is about the best I can do now.
Gore Vidal
#62. For two thousand years or more man has been subjected to a systematic effort to transform him into an ascetic animal. He remains a pleasure-seeking animal.
Norman O. Brown
#63. Debauchery conceived of as a kind of ascetic experience is not new, either for men or for women, but until Story of O no woman to my knowledge had said it.
Anne Desclos
#64. Pope Gregory believed that successful pastoral leadership required a balance between the contemplation of the isolated ascetic and the action of the well-trained administrator.
Gregory The Great
#66. Fashions pass quickly, and nothing is more pathetic than those puppets of fashion outrageously made up one day, pale the next, pleated or ironed stiff, libertine or ascetic. Playing with fashion is an art. The first rule is don't burn your wings.
Yves Saint-Laurent
#67. Hey, come on!" Kail pushed into the hallway and saw an ascetic-looking man whose lapitect robes had some little stars on the collar. "We're trying to work, here! Do I go down to where your mother works and push the sailors out of her bed?
Patrick Weekes
#68. If you want to do something but cannot, then before God, who knows our hearts, it is as if we have done it. This is true whether the intended action is good or bad.
St. Mark The Ascetic
#71. It was a dictum of his that the soul's energy thrives when the body's desires are feeblest.
St.Athanasius
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