logo

Quotes About Self-denial

The more we deny ourselves, the more the gods supply our wants. [Lat., Quanto quisque sibi plura negaverit, A dis plura feret.]
~ Horace
Self-denial and self-discipline, however, will be recognized as the outstanding qualities of a good soldier.
~ William Lyon Mackenzie King
We need to learn how to deny ourselves, so we can do that which does not come naturally—to truly love God and others.
~ Nancy Leigh DeMoss
They are able to welcome, then, a scenario in which "Good and Evil meet in ultimate battle." The barrage of beauty pornography joins with recent social upheavals to constitute an entirely new, chaotic, and disorienting environment; the food self-denial most women undergo is a form of sensory deprivation. So good and evil become thin and fat, fighting for the woman's soul.
~ Naomi Wolf
Anorexics are sure they are embarked on a quest that no one else can understand by looking at them. Self-denial can lock women into a smug and critical condescension to other, less devout women.
~ Naomi Wolf
Poverty is love for the poor Jesus, and voluntary self-denial. Jesus could have been rich. He did not have to live the kind of life he lived. No, he wanted to be poor in order to share the restrictions of real poverty, to put up with the lack of comfort, to suffer in his body the hard reality which weighs down the man searching for bread, to experience the abiding instability of one who possesses nothing.
~ Carlo Carretto
Science prospers exactly in proportion as it is religious. The great deeds of philosophers have been less the fruit of their intellect than of the direction of that intellect by an eminently religious tone of mind. Truth has yielded herself rather to their patience, their love, their single-heartedness and their self-denial, than to their logical acumen.
~ Thomas Henry Huxley
What I eventually found out was that as soon as I started to fast and deny myself pleasures and devote time to prayer and meditation and to the various exercises that belong to the religious life, I quickly got over all my bad health, and became sound and strong and immensely happy.
~ Thomas Merton
Parents? affection is best shown by their teaching their children industry and self-denial.
~ Burmese Proverb
Who wants to do good in this world must deny oneself. A man does not live on this Earth to be happy or to be honest only - he has to do great things for humanity, achieve the generosity of the spirit and rise above the banality where most of the people are drowning and wasting their days.
~ Irving Stone
We have something weird in our brains, a sort of tumor that propels us toward love. We can't live without it. Out of love we put up with children and men. Our self-denial is a form of servitude. Have you noticed that individualism and selfishness are considered positive traits in men and defects in women? We
~ Isabel Allende
Self-denial is painful for a moment, but very agreeable in the end.
~ Jane Taylor
One is happy as a result of one's own efforts-once one knows the necessary ingredients of happiness-simple tastes, a certain degree of courage, self-denial to a point, love of work, and, above all, a clear conscience.
~ George Sand
For nothing is so hard to hear as that which is half known, and evaded. One never denies so hotly as in denying to one's self what one fears is true, and one never resents so bitterly as in resenting that which one cannot say one has the right to resent.
~ Susan Glaspell
I get what it's like to want something, but to try and force yourself to really believe that you don't.
~ Cora Carmack, Losing It
One is happy as a result of one's own efforts once one knows the necessary ingredients of happiness: simple tastes, a certain degree of courage, self denial to a point, love of work, and above all, a clear conscience.
~ George Sand
One is happy once one knows the necessary ingredients of happiness: simple tastes, a certain degree of courage, self denial to a point, love of work, and above all, a clear conscience.
~ George Sand
One is happy as a result of one's own efforts once one knows the necessary ingredients of happiness: simple tastes, a certain degree of courage, self denial to a point, love of work, and above all, a clear conscience.
~ George Sand
Men who have attained things worth having in this world have worked while others idled, have persevered when others gave up in despair, have practiced early in life the valuable habits of self-denial, industry, and singleness of purpose. As a result, they enjoy in later life the success so often erroneously attributed to good luck.
~ Grenville Kleiser
Ascetic: one who makes a necessity of virtue.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche
In the process of surviving in an environment that is void of trust, children also learn to deny themselves and their wounds in order to protect the image and needs of the big people in the environment.
~ Iyanla Vanzant
Buddhists make it very simple for you to reach your heavenly reward. To reach Nirvana, all you have to do is live right, think right, and deny yourself just about everything.
~ Catherine Coulter
Let men, therefore, practice self-denial; let them conquer their animal inclinations; let them refuse to be enslaved by luxury and pleasure; let them practice virtue, and grow daily into high and ever higher virtue, until at last they grow into the Divine
~ James Allen
Man is primarily a spiritual being, and as such, is of the nature and substance of the Eternal Spirit, the Unchangeable Reality, which men call God. Goodness, not sin, is his rightful condition; perfection, not imperfection, is his heritage, and this a man may enter into and realize now if he will grant the condition, which is the denial or abandonment of self, that is, of his feverish desires, his proud will, his egotism and self-seeking — all that which St. Paul calls the natural man.
~ James Allen