Top 100 Quotes About Renunciation
#2. A self-respecting nation is ready for anything, including war, except for a renunciation of its option to make war.
Simone Weil
#3. a starched collar affected him as a renunciation of freedom.
Jack London
#4. I found myself facing a Christian Science Reading Room. My God! It had been eight years. There had never been any renunciation of religion on my part, but like so many people, it was a gradual fading away.
Henry Fonda
#5. Zarathustra received his revelations from the archangels at age thirty, when he began his prophetic mission; Siddhartha's great renunciation of his princely life took place in his thirtieth year. Thoreau at age thirty finished his self-imposed isolation at Walden Pond.
Kevin Dann
#6. Every time we are willing to let the story line go, and every time we are willing to let go at the end of the out-breath, that's fundamentally renunciation: learning how to let go of holding on and holding back.
Pema Chodron
#7. That renunciation of human closeness, of our deepest instincts: is it, in the end, simply too much to ask? Good men-sound, healthy men-can't make the sacrifice, or don't want to; has Holy Mother settled for the unsound and unhealthy? Has the Church, ever pragmatic, made do with what is left?
Jennifer Haigh
#8. A swami may conceivably follow only the path of dry reasoning, of cold renunciation; but a yogi engages himself in a definite, step-by-step procedure by which the body and mind are disciplined, and the soul liberated.
Paramahansa Yogananda
#9. Meditation means this opening out of the soul to the Divine and letting the Divine shine in without obstruction from the personal self. Therefore it means renunciation. It means throwing away everything that one has, and waiting empty for the light to come in.
Annie Besant
#10. Our music draws the listener away, beyond the limits of everyday human joys and sorrows, and takes us to that lonely region of renunciation which lies to the root of the universe, while European music leads us to a variegated dance through the endless rise and fall of human grief and joy.
Rabindranath Tagore
#11. An act of renunciation is an act of union with God. The Divine Master looks lovingly upon a person who gains a victory over self.
Madeleine Sophie Barat
#12. The survival of democracy depends on the renunciation of violence and the development of nonviolent means to combat evil and advance the good.
A.J. Muste
#14. Marriage is a state of penance. It calls for prayer, fasting, alms-deeds, renunciation, and the intention to increase the Kingdom of God.
Anne Catherine Emmerich
#15. Deliverance is not for me in renunciation. I feel the embrace of freedom in a thousand bonds of delight.
Rabindranath Tagore
#16. Yes - it was happiness she still wanted, and the glimpse she had caught of it made everything else of no account. One by one she had detached herself from the baser possibilities , and she saw that nothing now remained to her but the emptiness of renunciation.
The House of Mirth
Edith Wharton
#17. The highest and greatest goal that every soul has to reach is God. As everything needs renunciation, that highest goal needs the highest renunciation.
Hazrat Inayat Khan
#18. He reminds us that true renunciation is mental, not necessarily physical. We are not required to disown our husbands or wives and turn our children out of doors. We must only try to realize that they are not really ours; to love them as dwelling-places of Brahman, not as mere individuals.
Swami Vivekananda
#19. O Lord, self-renunciation is not the work of one day, nor children's sport; yea, rather in this word is included all perfection.
Thomas A Kempis
#20. Renunciation-is a piercing Virtue-The letting go A Presence-for an Expectation-.
Emily Dickinson
#21. What an unilateral life, when from the material of a renunciation, we must fashion something we love.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#22. Industry, technology, and commerce can thrive only as long as an idealistic national community offers the necessary preconditions. And these do not lie in material egoism, but in a spirit of sacrifice and joyful renunciation.
Adolf Hitler
#23. Alas! it is not the renunciation of our past and future selves that is difficult; it is the steady denial of our present self which makes the disciple.
Amelia E. Barr
#24. It is impossible to overlook the extent to which civilization is built up upon a renunciation of instinct ...
Sigmund Freud
#25. Each and every object in Nature teaches us something. Renunciation and selflessness are the greatest lessons to learn from Nature.
Mata Amritanandamayi
#26. How seek the way which leadeth to our wishes? By renouncing our wishes. The crown of excellence is renunciation.
Hafez
#28. Truth, purity, self-control, firmness, fearlessness, humility, unity, peace, and renunciation - these are the inherent qualities of a civil resister.
Mahatma Gandhi
#30. The reward of renunciation is some good greater than the thing renounced. To renounce with no vision of such a good, from fear or in automatic obedience to a formula, is to weaken the springs of life, and to diminish the soul's resistance to this world.
Hugh Kingsmill
#31. People who are involved in self-discovery lead different types of lives. The lives they lead are not necessarily the lives of renunciation. Rather, it is a structuring of the elements in your life in a particular way.
Frederick Lenz
#32. "I do not want to get material life, do not want the sense-life, but something higher." That is renunciation. Then, by the power of meditation, undo the mischief that has been done.
Swami Vivekananda
#33. All excess, as well as renunciation, brings its own punishment.
Oscar Wilde
#34. Decision invariably involves renunciation: for every yes there must be a no, each decision eliminating or killing other options (the root of the word decide means "slay," as in homicide or suicide).
Irvin D. Yalom
#35. the sight of her lying there utterly without resistance, yet armored by the power of her own renunciation, was so intense as to bring tears to his eyes.
Han Kang
#36. The first level of practice is illuminated by the qualities of courage and renunciation.
Jack Kornfield
#37. The life of Gautama Buddha illustrates the power of service, compassion and, most importantly, renunciation. He was convinced that material wealth is not the sole goal.
Narendra Modi
#38. Faith itself has no merit; in fact, by its nature it is self-emptying. It involves our complete renunciation of any confidence in our own righteousness and a relying entirely on the perfect righteousness and death of Christ.
Jerry Bridges
#39. Renunciation of thinking is a declaration of spiritual bankruptcy.
Albert Schweitzer
#40. Renunciation of objects, without the renunciation of desires, is short-lived, however hard you may try.
Mahatma Gandhi
#41. Both renunciation of action and the performance of action lead to Nirvana (Liberation); but these performance of action is superior to renunciation of action. The action of today becomes the destiny of tomorrow.
Chinmayananda Saraswati
#42. An ideal sanctified by the sacrifices of such master spirits as Lenin cannot go in vain, the noble example of their renunciation will be emblazoned for ever and quicken and purify the ideal as time passes.
Mahatma Gandhi
#43. The desert Arab found no joy like the joy of voluntarily holding back. He found luxury in abnegation, renunciation, self restraint. He made nakedness of the mind as sensuous as nakedness of the body. He saved his own soul, perhaps, and without danger, but in a hard selfishness.
T.E. Lawrence
#44. Therefore by the example of Abram, entire self-renunciation is enjoined, that we may live and die to God alone.
John Calvin
#45. There is a great force in renunciation of power that those who are blinded by the lust for domination cannot understand because those who truly love do not desire power.
Alison Croggon
#46. Many a time comes when we want to interpret our weakness and cowardice as forgiveness and renunciation.
Swami Vivekananda
#47. Renunciation is not about pushing something away, it is about letting go. It's facing the fact that certain things cause us pain, and they cause other people pain. Renunciation is a commitment to let go of things that create suffering. It is the intention to stop hurting ourselves and others.
Noah Levine
#48. For it was an unjust mirror, this mirror of his soul that he was looking at. Vanity? Curiosity? Hypocrisy? Had there been nothing more in his renunciation than that? There had been something more.
Oscar Wilde
#49. A mass movement attracts and holds a following not because it can satisfy the desire for self-advancement, but because it can satisfy the passion for self-renunciation.
Eric Hoffer
#50. Don't love too blindly: blindly you will love if you love at all, but a little care is still possible to a well-disciplined heart. May that heart be yours as it was not mine. Cultivate the art of renunciation.
Thomas Hardy
#51. Renunciation means absence of hankering after fruit.
Mahatma Gandhi
#52. Without parlaying with the renunciation of the world, a person must establish a means to live in harmony with the uncertainties of a chaotic world.
Kilroy J. Oldster
#53. Even in this secular country, the threat posed by religious fundamentalists is never very far away. Every major religious text exhorts the same principles - that of unyielding obedience to a supernatural being, and renunciation of the intellect and personal aspirations.
Andrew Bernstein
#54. Asceticism is giving up selfish activities, as poets know, and the wise declare renunciation is giving up fruits of action. - Krishna.
Anonymous
#55. Hours before the Georgian invasion, Russia had been working to secure a United Nations Security Council statement calling for a renunciation of force by both Georgia and South Ossetians. The statement that could have averted bloodshed was blocked by western countries.
Sergei Lavrov
#56. His retreat into himself is not a final renunciation of the world, but a search for quietude, where alone it is possible for him to make his contribution to the life of the community.
C. G. Jung
#57. 2.27 THE ULTIMATE
With compassion and renunciation walking,
With wants and desires ever shedding,
With love within one's heart flowing,
Peace and Divinity shall never be wanting.
[158] - 2
Munindra Misra
#58. I dare predict that the influence of the Treaty of Renunciation of War will be felt in a large proportion of all future international acts.
Herbert Hoover
#59. We can never judge the lives of others, because each person knows only their own pain and renunciation. It's one thing to feel that you are on the right path, but it's another to think that yours is the only path.
Paulo Coelho
#60. Globally, democracies have also acted in ways that suggest an outright renunciation of their principles at home.
Nayef Al-Rodhan
#61. I feel moved to express what I feel more strongly than anything else, and what in my opinion is of immense importance, namely, what we call the renunciation of all opposition by force, which really simply means the doctrine of the law of love unperverted by sophistries.
Mahatma Gandhi
#62. In our life sometimes we have to make painful choices. And it takes a bit of courage to make up our mind for it involves an element of renunciation, something hard to accept in a world steeped in pleasure and comfort.
Fr. Henry Bocala
#63. Religion is something infinitely simple, ingenuous. It is not knowledge, not content of feeling ... it is not duty and not renunciation, it is not restriction: but in the infinite extent of the universe it is a direction of the heart.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#64. In a truly global world, the renunciation of violent reprisal is bound to become, in a more and more obvious way, the indispensable condition of our survival.
Rene Girard
#65. The renunciation of doing harm is the perfection of discipline
Shantideva
#66. With our young, awakened eyes, we saw that the classical conception of the fatherland held by our teachers resolved itself here into a renunciation of personality such as one would not ask of the meanest servants.
Erich Maria Remarque
#67. Our camera does not produce pretty pictures, but exact duplications that, through our renunciation of photographic effects, turn out to be relatively objective. The photo can optically replace its object to a certain degree. This takes on special meaning if the object cannot be preserved.
Bernd Becher
#68. The secret of a happy life lies in renunciation. Renunciation is life.
Mahatma Gandhi
#69. Humility is not renunciation of pride but the substitution of one pride for another.
Eric Hoffer
#71. Renunciation is not getting rid of the things of this world, but accepting that they pass away.
Robert Baker Aitken
#72. There is a difference between seeking to know things for the sake of knowledge itself and being willing to undergo renunciation to be possessed by the truth.
James M. Houston
#73. Renunciation of many good things is needed to break our bondage to the fragmenting forces of our society, which most of us have internalized, as if busyness on many fronts were a virtue instead of a vice.
David Janzen
#74. The renunciation of the Gita is the acid test of faith.
Mahatma Gandhi
#75. The church I mentioned will be established, but its foundation, in order to be truly solid, will be dug in flesh, its walls made from the cement of renunciation, tears, agony, anguish, every conceivable form of death.
Jose Saramago
#76. The price of civilization is instinctual renunciation.
Sigmund Freud
#77. It is always for greater joy that you give up the lesser. This is practical religion-the attainment of freedom, renunciation. Renounce the lower so that you may get the higher. Renounce! Renounce! Sacrifice! Give up! Not for zero. Not for nothing. But to get the higher.
Swami Vivekananda
#78. He was a worker whose only desire was to penetrate with all his forces into the humble and difficult significance of his tools. Therein lay a certain renunciation of Life, but in just this renunciation lay his triumph, for Life entered into his work.
Rainer Maria Rilke
#79. So few things we need to know.
And the old wisdoms shudder in us and grow slack.
Like renunciation. Like the melancholy beauty
of giving it all up. Like walking steadfast
in the rhythms, winter light and summer dark.
And the time for cutting furrows and the dance
Robert Hass
#80. Each life has its share of heroism, an obscure heroism, born of abdication, of renunciation and acceptance under the merciless whip of fate.
Mariama Ba
#81. Not by refraining from action does man attain freedom from action. Not by mere renunciation does he attain supreme perfection.
Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa
#82. I'm no Buddhist monk, and I can't say I'm in love with renunciation in itself, or traveling an hour or more to print out an article I've written, or missing out on the N.B.A. Finals. But at some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn't want or need, not all I did.
Pico Iyer
#84. One felt that in her renunciation of life she had deliberately abandoned those places in which she might at least have been able to see the man she loved, for others where he had never trod.
Marcel Proust
#85. Faith implies four things: self-renunciation, reliance with utter confidence on Christ, obedience, and a changed life.
Billy Graham
#86. She had learned the lesson of renunciation and was as familiar with the wreck of each day's wishes as with the diurnal setting of the sun.
Thomas Hardy
#87. We need a total renunciation of war. We must renounce war totally, because now we can destroy all life on earth.
Benjamin Creme
#88. This world is nothing. It is at best only a hideous caricature, a shadow of the Real. We must go to the Real. Renunciation will take us to It. Renunciation is the very basis of our true life; every moment of goodness and real life that we enjoy is when we do not think of ourselves.
Swami Vivekananda
#89. To be ignorant or unconvinced of one's own needs has become the unforgivable anti-social act. The good citizen is one who imputes standardized needs to himself with such conviction that he drowns out any desire for alternatives, much less the renunciation of need.
Ivan Illich
#90. The act the act must not be a revenge. It must be a calm, weary renunciation, a closing of accounts, a private, rhythmic deed. The last remark.
Cesare Pavese
#91. I have lived hard and ruined the essential innocence [sic] in myself that could make it that possible [sic], and the fact that I have abused liquor is something to be paid for with suffering and death perhaps but not renunciation.
F Scott Fitzgerald
#92. Renunciation, or refusing to identify with that which one gathers (however precious it may be), is the ultimate doorway to knowing.
Sadhguru
#93. What is marriage, is marriage protection or religion, is marriage renunciation or abundance, is marriage a stepping-stone or an end. What is marriage.
Gertrude Stein
#94. Let us never be afraid of innocent joy; God is good and what he does is well done; resign yourself to everything, even happiness; ask for the spirit of sacrifice, of detachment, of renunciation, and above all, for the spirit of joy and gratitude.
Henri Frederic Amiel
#95. Commitment becomes hysterical when those who have nothing to give advocate generosity, and those who have nothing to give up preach renunciation.
Eric Hoffer
#96. ... the more emphatic the renunciation, the less absolute its character.
Thomas Hardy
#97. Knowledge and devotion, to be true, have to stand the test of renunciation of the fruits of action.
Mahatma Gandhi
#98. Renunciation, and renunciation alone, is the real secret, the Mulamantra, of all Realisation.
Swami Vivekananda
#99. In the Bible, man is only free to submit or be damned. His one freedom is the renunciation of that freedom. He finds his "salvation" by freely accepting his subjugation. The Christian ideal, says Saint Paul, is to be freely "subservient to God" (Romans 6:22).
Alain De Benoist
#100. Always remember that renunciation is the root idea. Unless one is initiated into this idea, not even Brahma and the World - gods have the power to attain Mukti
Swami Vivekananda
