Quotes About Ascetic

Henry's a perfectionist, I mean, really-really kind of inhuman — very brilliant, very erratic and enigmatic. He's a stiff, cold person, Machiavellian, ascetic and he's made himself what he is by sheer strength of will. His aspiration is to be this Platonic creature of pure rationality and that's why he's attracted to the Classics, and particularly to the Greeks — all those high, cold ideas of beauty and perfection.

Religion was not always a dread to me. For one of my great ambitions was to be a minister, and one of my favorite childish vocations was preaching. I see myself now, a pale-faced, anemic, slim chap of ten or eleven, with all the appearance but none of the habits of an ascetic, preaching to a congregation of empty chairs.

I do not wish to criticize any system that can nourish people's spirits, but I find that a lot of New Age writing cherry-picks the attractive bits from the ancient traditions and makes collages of them; it usually excises the ascetic dimension. In general it is not rigorously thought out, but is what I would call "soft" thinking.

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.

A commercial society whose members are essentially ascetic and indifferent in social ritual has to be provided with blueprints and specifications for evoking the right tone for every occasion.

The true religion is monastic, ascetic, authoritarian, hierarchical.