Asceticism Quotes by Tito Colliander, Friedrich Nietzsche, Malcolm Muggeridge, Hasan of Basra, Mason Cooley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and many others.
If you were not full of self-pity you would soon observe that we ourselves are to blame for all this evil, because we refuse to understand that it is in reality a good thing.
The most intelligent men, like the strongest, find their happiness where others would find only disaster: in the labyrinth, in being hard with themselves and with others, in effort; their delight is self-mastery; in them asceticism becomes second nature, a necessity, as instinct.
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.
The dunyГў distracts and preoccupies the heart and body, but al-zuhd (asceticism, not giving importance to worldly things) gives rest to the heart and body. Verily, AllГўh will ask us about the halГўl things we enjoyed, so what about the harГўm!
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.
Asceticism without religion is just another way of cultivating peculiar sensations.
Without asceticism, self-indulgence would be insignificant.
It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another.
Asceticism and celibacy can conceal many incapacities.
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.
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.
Asceticism is not that you should not own anything, but that nothing should own you.
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.
Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge.
Fie on the eloquence that leaves us craving itself, not things!
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.
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.
Yet in a kingdom containing seven constituent parts, which is upheld like the triple staff ,of an ascetic , there is no ,single part more important ,than the others , by reason of the importance of the qualities of each for the others.
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.
This obstinate will to personal happiness is the cause of unrest and division in your soul. Give it up and work against it: the rest will be given you without effort.
The ascetic remembrance of death is opposed to akedia, to anxiety, to depression, and becomes a powerful reminder of eternity, its joyful nostalgia.
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.
However weighed down and entangled in earthly fetters you may be, it can never be too late.
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.
Cast off the burden of sin and you will find within you the upward path that will make your ascent possible.
Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood, disgusted with too much ease.
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.
The ascetic makes a necessity of virtue.
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.
Renounce all things, and thou shalt find all things; give up thy lust, and thou shalt find rest.
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!
The main motive for nonattachment is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work.
