Quotes About Self-denial

most of us can only deny short-term pleasures because we see a realistic path between self-denial now and something better down the road.

For more than twenty years I was a pious monk, read Mass daily, and so weakened myself with fasting and praying that I would not have been long for this life had I continued. Yet all this taken together cannot help me in even one little crisis to be able to say before God: 'All this I have done, now please consider it, and be gracious to me.' What else did I achieve with this than to plague myself uselessly, impair my health, and waste my time?

On the day you decide to intentionally start denying yourself, your life will improve in a thousand ways. It is a lesson I am now trying to figure out how best to teach my children. It is not about saying no to them; it is about teaching them to say no to themselves. These

The moral division of labor between newspapers, then, may parallel the moral division of the human faculties between the more respectable faculties of abstraction and the less respectable feelings. People control themselves to read of politics in fine print; they let themselves go to read of murders or to look at drawings of celebrities. Information is a genre of self-denial, the story one of self-indulgence.

Az irodalom mélységesen fogalmi m?vészet (...) Semmit sem lehet állítani, tagadni, relativizálni, kigúnyolni a fogalmak segítsége nélkül, szavak nélkül. Innen fakad az irodalmi tevékenység meglepÅ' robosztussága: az irodalom megtagadhatja magát, elpusztíthatja magát, lehetetlennek nyilváníthatja magát, miközben mégis önmaga marad.

Following Jesus means denying yourself, saying 'no' to the things that you imagine make up your 'self', and finding to your astonishment that the 'self' you get back is more glorious, more joyful than you could have imagined.

For two thousand years or more man has been subjected to a systematic effort to transform him into an ascetic animal. He remains a pleasure-seeking animal.

Self-denial in the pursuit of purpose generates true pleasure while self-indulgence in the pursuit of pleasure generates true misery.

Self denial is the shining sore on the leprous body of Christianity.

I must take my emotional opinions and intellectual beliefs and be willing to turn them into a moral verdict against the nature of sin; that is, against any claim I have to my right to myself. Paul said, "I have been crucified with Christ.

We have the idea that we can dedicate our gifts to God. However, you cannot dedicate what is not yours. There is actually only one thing you can dedicate to God, and that is your right to yourself (see Romans 12:1).

Give a boy twenty thousand dollars and put him in business, and the chances are that he will lose every dollar of it before he is a year older. Like buying a ticket in the lottery; and drawing a prize, it is "easy come, easy go." He does not know the value of it; nothing is worth anything, unless it costs effort. Without self-denial and economy; patience and perseverance, and commencing with capital which you have not earned, you are not sure to succeed in accumulating.

Through all the ages to come, the Indian church will rise up in gratitude to attest to the heroism and self-denying labors of the missionary body. You have given your goods to feed the poor; you have given your bodies to be burned. We also ask for love. Give us friends."3

In calling me to deny myself, God is freeing me from my bondage to me. Self-focus never leads to happiness, it never produces contentment, and it never results in a satisfied heart.

There is no investment as poor as investment in the kingdom of self!

That as long as I kept them apart, love would be sexless and sex loveless, endlessly repeating its cycle of self-denial and self-abuse.

We all have to recognize—no matter how great our strength," Truman declared, "that we must deny ourselves the license to do always as we please.

Is this the fast I have chosen: a day for a man to deny himself, to bow his head like a reed, and to spread out sackcloth and ashes? Will you call this a fast and a day acceptable to the LORD?

Then Jesus told His disciples, “If anyone wants to come after Me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me.

Then Jesus called the crowd to Him along with His disciples, and He told them, “If anyone wants to come after Me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow Me.

Then Jesus said to all of them, “If anyone wants to come after Me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow Me.