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Quotes About Celibacy

... Celibacy is not a matter of compulsion. Someone is accepted as a priest only when he does it of his own accord.
~ Pope Benedict XVI
When you really see how much God loves you, there's no greater love than that, and I had to match that amount of love He had for me, which is the reason why I decided to take a vow of celibacy.
~ Jessica White
Celibacy has few pleasures. I know, but marriage has many pains. And harems are not always what they're cracked up to be. Rarely in the long run are they worth the cost and endless bother... And if marriage has many pains, polygamous marriage multiplies those pains to an unforeseeable extent with the commotion generating from squabbling wives and contending offspring.
~ Joseph Heller
As recently as the fifties, respectable women were given the sexual choice of marriage or celibacy. Anything else meant ostracism. Women who demanded pleasure in sex were condemned as "nymphomaniacs," much as they are pitied today as "victims of male culture" by anti-porn feminists.
~ Wendy McElroy
Once converted, the former Anglicans are welcomed into the Roman Church as priests, even if they are married. So in that way, the rule of mandatory celibacy has indeed been lifted, if only for these self-acknowledged misogynists. That leaves the inferiority of women as the absolutely overriding Catholic moral principle. It is the keystone of clericalism.
~ James Carroll
Mr Blyth, you should remember one thing. A celibate island life fighting Turks is no particular guarantee of early maturity. Take a little crone-like advice, and don't rush your judgements.
~ Dorothy Dunnett
I felt condemned to obscurity and to celibacy. But when one is driven by passion, one can live on almost nothing, and I was driven by passion for writing. One does not starve in modern, Western societies, and one can do without such amenities as the telephone, a car, entertainment.
~ Alain Robbe-Grillet
I trained to be a priest - started to. I went to seminary school when I was 11. I wanted to be a priest, but when they told me I could never have sex, not even on my birthday, I changed my mind.
~ Johnny Vegas
The guilt and anxiety induced by hunting, combined with frustration resulting from ritual celibacy, could have been projected onto the image of a powerful woman, who demands endless bloodshed.27 The hunters could see that women were the source of new life; it was they – not the expendable males – who ensured the continuity of the tribe. The female thus became an awe-inspiring icon of life itself – a life that required the ceaseless sacrifice of men and animals.
~ Karen Armstrong
Celibacy bestows on a man the qualified freedom of a besieged city where one sometimes has to eat rats.
~ Sean O'Faolain
To suppose such a thing possible as a society, in which men, who are able and willing to work, cannot support their families, and ought, with a great part of the women, to be compelled to lead a life of celibacy, for fear of having children to be starved; to suppose such a thing possible is monstrous.
~ William Cobbett
As Meier observes, 'Perhaps one reason that we have so little from the historical Jesus on sexual topics is that, apart from the two special cases of divorce and celibacy, where he diverged from mainstream Judaism, his views were those of mainstream Judaism.'14
~ William Loader
The vow of celibacy is a matter of keeping one's word to Christ and the Church. a duty and a proof of the priest's inner maturity; it is the expression of his personal dignity.
~ Pope John Paul II
It is impossible to believe that the same God who permitted His own son to die a bachelor regards celibacy as an actual sin.
~ H. L. Mencken
I'm religiously celibate except in LA, NOLA, FLA, because there is certainly no God in any of those places. So unless you live in one of those places I'm really no good to you.
~ Jessicka
Celibacy sucks, no pun intended.
~ Lois Greiman, Unplugged
He spoke as if He rather sympathized with the feeling in favor of celibacy,--as if to abstain from marriage were the better and wiser way, and only not to be required of men because for the majority it was impracticable. "But he said unto them, All men cannot receive this saying, save they to whom it is given.
~ Alexander Balmain Bruce
A celibate, like the fly in the heart of an apple, dwells in a perpetual sweetness, but sits alone, and is confined and dies in singularity.
~ Jeremy Taylor
The Bible undercuts our cultural obsession with sexual fulfillment. Scripture (along with many subsequent generations of faithful Christians) bears witness that lives of freedom, joy, and service are possible without sexual relations. Indeed, however odd it may seem to contemporary sensibilities, some New Testament passages (Matt. 19:10–12, 1 Cor. 7) clearly commend the celibate life as a way of faithfulness.
~ Richard B. Hays
Despite the smooth illusions perpetrated by mass culture in the United States, sexual gratification is not a sacred right, and celibacy is not a fate worse than death.
~ Richard B. Hays
In every possible instance Saint Paul begged Christians to restrain themselves to contain their carnal yearnings to live solitary and sexless lives on earth as it is in heaven. But if they cannot contain Paul finally conceded then let them marry for it is better to marry than to burn. Which is perhaps the most begrudging endorsement of matrimony in human history.
~ Elizabeth Gilbert
Foster had in common with every great religious leader of that planet two traits: he had an extremely magnetic personality, and sexually he did not fall near the human norm. On Earth great religious leaders were always either celibate or the antithesis. Foster was not celibate. (p.289)
~ Robert A. Heinlein
about his belief in God and the fact that he seemed to have a huge amount of respect for her and her decision to remain celibate.
~ Kimberla Lawson Roby
Swimbos," Rök said with an aggrieved shrug. Swimbos —Rök's play on "She Who Must Be Obeyed". "Can I help it?" "Yeah, you can, Rök." Smoke demons formed temporary pacts every time they had intercourse. Pacts allowed one to summon a demon at will. "Give celibacy a chance." "Anything else you'd like me to do? Maybe something possible .
~ Kresley Cole