Quotes About Asceticism

Genuine asceticism for finding one's own soul and for the good of humanity is worthy of reverence.

Even the Buddha is said to have practiced body denial through fasting and extreme forms of asceticism for six years, but he did not attain enlightenment until after he had given up this practice.

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.

Being a monk was the strangest and most perverted way of life imaginable. Monks spent half their lives putting themselves through pain and discomfort that they could easily avoid, and the other half muttering meaningless mumbo jumbo in empty churches at all hours of the day and night. They deliberately shunned anything good—girls, sports, feasting and family life.

That is, my experience is that when the bodymind is strong and healthy—not ascetically starved and despised—it is all the easier to drop it, transcend it, let it go.

The ascetic remembrance of death is opposed to akedia, to anxiety, to depression, and becomes a powerful reminder of eternity, its joyful nostalgia.

Il ne savait pas encore que tout événement de notre vie n'a d'importance que la résonance qu'il trouve en nous, que le degré qu'il nous fait franchir vers l'ascétisme

Quienes hablan de la riqueza espiritual de los ascetas merecerían sufrir anorexia. No hay mejor escuela de materialismo puro y duro que el ayuno prolongado. Más allá de determinado límite, lo que entendemos por alma se marchita hasta desaparecer. (...) Sería un erro ver en la anorexia una inteligencia propia. Sería bueno que esa evidencia fuera finalmente asumida: la ascesis no enriquece el espíritu. Las privaciones carecen de virtud.

I grew with it, and I used to go to see the monks, who had no possessions, even more extreme than my mother.

When prayer, rituals and ascetic life are just a means of self-indulgence, they are harmful rather than beneficial.

American life, in large cities, is a perpetual assault on the senses and the nerves; it is out of asceticism, out of unworldliness, precisely, that we bear it.

My father was the church organist; the village curate was my mother's brother, a former monk from the order of Pijar, a very well-educated and ascetic man who loved nothing but solitude.

In fact the Kabbalah rests upon the exoteric Judeo-Christian tradition. It consists of metaphysics and philosophy, from which can be drawn a mystical way, which is applied and regulated through personal asceticism.

My months in the Scrubs were a kind of desert in time: beyond their strict and ascetic routines they were featureless, and it is hard in retrospect to know what one did on any day or even in any month. I had had, of course, some experience of deserts, even a taste for them, and knew how to fall back, like a camel on its fat, on an inner reserve of fantasy and contemplation.

from that of other Tapasvins. Many Asuras and Devas

If there is no element of asceticism in our lives, if we give free rein to the desires of the flesh (taking care of course to keep within the limits of what seems permissible to the world), we shall find it hard to train for the service of Christ. When the flesh is satisfied it is hard to pray with cheerfulness or to devote oneself to a life of service which calls for much self-renunciation.

There is always a danger that in our asceticism we shall be tempted to imitate the sufferings of Christ. This is a pious but godless ambition, for beneath it there always lurks the notion that it is possible for us to step into Christ's shoes and suffer as he did and kill the old Adam. We are then presuming to undertake that bitter work of eternal redemption which Christ himself wrought for us. The motive of asceticism was more limited--to equip us for better service and deeper humiliation.

By the principle of asceticism I mean that principle, which, like the principle of utility, approves or disapproves of any action, according to the tendency which it appears to have to augment or diminish the happiness of the party whose interest is in question; but in an inverse manner: approving of actions in as far as they tend to diminish his happiness; disapproving of them in as far as they tend to augment it.

I'm a fairly ascetic person. And I do most of my writing at night. You don't get distracted, your brain goes into what you are writing about, into the world you're writing about, rather than into the world you're in.

I don't listen to music. I don't watch television, I don't read.

Mortification of the flesh has been held all the world over as a condition of spiritual progress.

A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism.

Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism.

Una deficiencia física puede producir una especie de exceso mental. Al parecer, el proceso era reversible. Un exceso mental podía producir, en bien de sus propios fines, la voluntaria ceguera y sordera de la soledad deliberada, la impotencia artificial del ascetismo.