Top 73 Quotes About Asceticism
#1. In fact the Kabbalah rests upon the exoteric Judeo-Christian tradition. It consists of metaphysics and philosophy, from which can be drawn a mystical way, which is applied and regulated through personal asceticism.
Robert Ambelain
#2. Without asceticism, self-indulgence would be insignificant.
Mason Cooley
#4. They had both noticed that a life of dissipation sometimes gave to a face the look of gaunt suffering spirituality that a life of asceticism was supposed to give and quite often did not.
Katherine Anne Porter
#5. The simplicity that all this presupposes is not easy to attain. I find that my life constantly threatens to become complex and divisive. A life of prayer is basically a very simple life. This simplicity, however, is the result of asceticism and effort: it is not a spontaneous simplicity.
Thomas Merton
#6. 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
#7. I never did calligraphy ... But handwriting is an entirely different kind of thing. It's part of the syndrome of modernism ... It's part of that asceticism.
Paul Rand
#8. 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
#9. Asceticism for St. Anthony and others like him was never the end, only the means. Ward explains, "The aim of the monk's life was not asceticism, but God. It was important to follow Christ's example, to help the poor and sick, and to love the neighbor.
Norris J Chumley
#10. The principle of asceticism never was, nor ever can be, consistently pursued by any living creature. Let but one tenth part of the inhabitants of the earth pursue it consistently, and in a day's time they will have turned it into a Hell.
Jeremy Bentham
#11. The star-flooded nights, the dew-soaked dawns, the hushed ambulatories, the enforced asceticism - never has Werner felt part of something so single-minded.
Anthony Doerr
#12. The only way of living acceptably to God was not to surpass worldly morality in monastic asceticism, but solely through the fulfillment of the obligations imposed upon the individual by his position in the world. That was his calling.
Max Weber
#13. Mastering our emotions has nothing to do with asceticism or repression, for the purpose is not to break the emotions or deny them but to "break in" the emotions, making them teachable because they are tamed.
Os Guinness
#14. only a foolish asceticism, usually vicarious, makes us continue to insist on work in excessive quantities now that the need no longer exists.
Bertrand Russell
#15. Impulsive enjoyment of life, which leads away both from work in a calling and from religion, was as such the enemy of rational asceticism, whether in the form of seigneurial sports, or the enjoyment of the dance-hall or the public - house of the common man.
Max Weber
#16. Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge.
Karl Marx
#17. Asceticism without religion is just another way of cultivating peculiar sensations.
Mason Cooley
#19. Asceticism is the right way of thinking for those who have to extirpate their sensual drives because they are ravening beasts of prey. But only for those!
Friedrich Nietzsche
#20. Sensuality, too, which used to show itself course, smiling, unmasked, and unmistakable, is now serious, analytic, and so burdened with a sense of its responsibilities that it passes muster half the time as a new type of asceticism.
Agnes Repplier
#22. What are we to say when we see asceticism preached to the poor by fat and comfortable retainers of the rich?
Upton Sinclair
#23. Rational conduct on the basis of the idea of calling, was born... from the spirit of Christian asceticism.
Max Weber
#24. The cacophony of contemporary popular culture makes it hard to discern the call of truth and wisdom. There is no area in which practicing asceticism is more important.
Rod Dreher
#25. 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
#26. Asceticism, it is evident, has a double motivation. If men and women torment their bodies, it is not only because they hope in this way to atone for past sins and avoid future punishments; it is also because they long to visit the mind's antipodes and do some visionary sightseeing.
Aldous Huxley
#27. The radical elimination of magic from the world allowed no other psychological course than the practice of worldly asceticism. Since
Max Weber
#28. Asceticism in most cases is either the result of a sordid imagination or of passion diverted from its natural course, and experience has shown that when the protection of public morals is entrusted to its votaries, the consequences are usually appalling.
Rudolf Rocker
#29. Asceticism is not that you should not own anything, but that nothing should own you.
Ali Ibn Abi Talib
#30. American life, in large cities, is a perpetual assault on the senses and the nerves; it is out of asceticism, out of unworldliness, precisely, that we bear it.
Joseph McCarthy
#31. Liberty coincides with heroism. It is the asceticism of the great man, the bow bent to the breaking-point.
Albert Camus
#32. Asceticism and celibacy can conceal many incapacities.
Mason Cooley
#33. Genuine asceticism for finding one's own soul and for the good of humanity is worthy of reverence.
Rama Swami
#34. Asceticism, also called ascesis, is the practice of rigorous self-denial and active self-restraint and is performed as a spiritual discipline. Like
Randi Fredricks, Ph.D.
#35. Asceticism is the trifling of an enthusiast with his power, a puerile coquetting with his selfishness or his vanity, in the absence of any sufficiently great object to employ the first or overcome the last.
Florence Nightingale
#36. Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood, disgusted with too much ease.
William James
#37. In the Church, bodily asceticism has always been the supreme road to
theological knowledge. It is not possible for man to come to know the truth of life, the truth of Godand the truth of his own existence purely through intellectual categories ...
Christos Yannaras
#38. Out of the doctrine of original sin grew the crimes and miseries of asceticism, celibacy and witchcraft; woman becoming the helpless victim of all these delusions.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#39. All art is, indeed, a monotony in external things for the sake of an interior variety, a sacrifice of gross effects to subtle effects, an asceticism of the imagination.
W.B.Yeats
#40. Denying themselves sweets and fatty foods, they cultivate a taste for fine wines and locally produced cheese. This is how we live: asceticism by day and hedonism by night, giving each god its due in its season. One
R. R. Reno
#41. The irony is that in our decades, the combination of rationalism, asceticism, and individualism (the so-called Protestant Ethic) has produced precisely the system of boondoggling, luxury-consumption, and status.
Paul Goodman
#42. A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism.
Aldous Huxley
#43. Asceticism means that a man resolves to live as a man.
Romano Guardini
#44. Asceticism is giving up selfish activities, as poets know, and the wise declare renunciation is giving up fruits of action. - Krishna.
Anonymous
#45. It is the privilege of the gods to want nothing, and of godlike men to want little.
Diogenes Of Sinope
#46. The saints' deep secret is this: do not seek freedom, and freedom will be given you.
Tito Colliander
#47. This is a nation that professes to be a Christian nation," [Suelo] tells me, surveying his temporary kingdom. "And yet it's basically illegal to live according to the teachings of Jesus.
Mark Sundeen
#49. We notice the person who is for ever bowing and fussily servile, and perhaps say, How humble he is! But the truly humble person escapes notice: the world does not know him.
Tito Colliander
#50. He has made peace with himself, as Isaac the Syrian says, and heaven and earth have made peace with him. He is gathering the fruit of humility. But this takes place only on the narrow way, and few there be that find it.
Tito Colliander
#51. It is a ridiculous thing for a man not to fly from his own badness, which is indeed possible, but to fly from other men's badness, which is impossible.
Marcus Aurelius
#53. It was a dictum of his that the soul's energy thrives when the body's desires are feeblest.
St.Athanasius
#54. A truly unselfish act is not mine, but God's. It cannot be obstructed. Only for my own plans, my own wishes to study, to work, to rest, eat, or do a service to my fellowman- can some external circumstance "get in the way," and then I am grieved.
Tito Colliander
#55. In every ascetic morality man worships a part of himself as God and for that he needs to diabolize the other part.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#56. Nietzsche is no more or less than the Schliemann of asceticisms. In the midst of the excavation sites, surrounded by the psychopathic rubble of millennia and the ruins of morbid palaces, he was completely right to assume the triumphant expression of a discoverer.
Peter Sloterdijk
#57. Remember: there is no place, no community, no external circumstance that is not serviceable for the battle you have chosen. The exception is only such work as directly serves your vices.
Tito Colliander
#58. Give up a member to save a family, a family to save a village, a village to save a country, and the country to save yourself.
Vyasa
#59. Cast off the burden of sin and you will find within you the upward path that will make your ascent possible.
Tito Colliander
#60. 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
#61. Say nothing of the new life you have begun or of the experiment you are making and experiences you expect to have. All this is a matter between God and you, and only between you two.
Tito Colliander
#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
#64. Thus you are led from moment to moment in your halter of preoccupation with self, and kindled instantly to displeasure, impatience or anger if an obstacle intervenes.
Tito Colliander
#65. Nothing happens accidentally or in such a way that you cannot learn from it; you must understand this at once, for this is how your trust grows in the Lord whom you have chosen to follow.
Tito Colliander
#66. You must learn to follow privately the Lord's bidding: not to speak empty words, not to adorn yourself, always to obey authority, not to look at a woman with desire, not to be angry and much else.
Tito Colliander
#67. It begins here, and has no end, and no earthly power can coerce it; and it is to be found in the human heart.
Tito Colliander
#69. 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
#70. The rustic, the reader of novels, the pure ascetic: these three are truly happy men
Fernando Pessoa
#71. Through practice he has accustomed himself to wish for nothing, and for a person with no wishes, everything goes just as he wishes, explains the Abbot Dorotheus. His will has coincided with God's will, and whatever he asks, he will receive.
Tito Colliander
#72. Renounce all things, and thou shalt find all things; give up thy lust, and thou shalt find rest.
Thomas A Kempis
#73. However weighed down and entangled in earthly fetters you may be, it can never be too late.
Tito Colliander
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