Asceticism Quotations

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.

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.

If a hermit lives in a state of ecstasy, his lack of comfort becomes the height of comfort. He must relinquish it.

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.

To deny oneself is to be aware only of Christ and no more of self, to see only Him who goes before and no more the road which is too hard for us. Once more, all that self-denial can say is, 'He leads the way, keep close to Him.'

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.

Asceticism is not that you should not own anything, but that nothing should own you.

Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge.

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.

Fie on the eloquence that leaves us craving itself, not things!

Asceticism without religion is just another way of cultivating peculiar sensations.

Without asceticism, self-indulgence would be insignificant.

Asceticism and celibacy can conceal many incapacities.

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.

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.

Catholicism is not ritualism; it may in the future be fighting some sort of superstitious and idolatrous exaggeration of ritual. Catholicism is not asceticism; it has again and again in the past repressed fanatical and cruel exaggerations of asceticism. Catholicism is not mere mysticism; it is even now defending human reason against the mere mysticism of the Pragmatists.

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!

Everybody who does not live in a prostitute's bed and on a diet of cocaine snow is called an ascetic nowadays.

In every ascetic morality man worships a part of himself as God and for that he needs to diabolize the other part.

The ascetic makes a necessity of virtue.

Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood, disgusted with too much ease.