Quotes About Ascetics

Let no one reduce us to the status of ascetics. There is no pleasure more complex than that of thought and we surrendered ourselves to it.

Nihangs, the body of militant ascetics who for generations had served as 'the suicide squads of the Khalsa armies'.

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.

Whatever good deeds have been done by me, those the people accept and those they follow. Therefore they have progressed and will continue to progress by being respectful to mother and father, respectful to elders, by courtesy to the aged and proper behavior towards Brahmans and ascetics, towards the poor and distressed, and even towards servants and employees.

Ascetics and fakirs come to mitigate human suffering to heal us and lead us on the path. They put up with criticism they go through many worldly trials. Some of them have even become martyrs for our sake. But they have done all this with a smile and with gratitude to God. Hence sacrifice is a great virtue.

Emerson and Darwin each found in nature a portal between the realm of the profane and the realm of the sacred. Even if the hive switch was originally a group-related adaptation, it can be flipped when you're alone by feelings of awe in nature, as mystics and ascetics have known for millennia.

Ascetics and fakirs come to mitigate human suffering; to heal us and lead us on the path. They put up with criticism; they go through many worldly trials. Some of them have even become martyrs for our sake. But they have done all this with a smile and with gratitude to God. Hence sacrifice is a great virtue.

It's why action and adventure athletes routinely risk life and limb for their sports and why spiritual ascetics willingly trade creature comforts for a chance to glimpse God.

it would seem that these super-religious ascetics would be extremely so. But the witness of everyone who visited them for counsel was the opposite. They were some of the

obsession with sensual pleasures, holding firmly to sensual pleasures that khattiyas fight with khattiyas, brahmins with brahmins, and householders with householders." "Why is it, Master Kacc?na, that ascetics fight with ascetics?" "It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.

The comprehensive organization of the church, with its solid roots and the manifold forms of charitable help to the many who were poor and in distress; • Christian monotheism, which commended itself as the progressive and enlightened position in the face of polytheism, with its wealth of myths; • The lofty ethic, which, tested by ascetics and martyrs to the point of death, showed itself to be superior to pagan morality;

Ascetics are "strict" only because they want to reserve a major portion of their lives for their passionate pursuit of God.

Christianity is not stoicism. The Cross does not sanctify us by destroying human feeling. Detachment is not insensibility. Too many ascetics fail to become great saints precisely because their rules and ascetic practices have merely deadened their humanity instead of setting it free to develop richly, in all its capacities, under the influence of grace.

In 1929, George Macdonald recalled that there "has always been a considerable fringe of ascetics in the Freethought ranks—foes of rum, tobacco, corsets, sex, meat, and white bread. . . . Their slogan is: 'The whiter the bread the sooner you're dead.

The yogi is greater than body-disciplining ascetics, greater even than the followers of the path of wisdom (jnana yoga), or of the path of action (karma yoga); be thou, O disciple Arjuna, a yogi!

The notion of our leaders as patrician ascetics of unassailable virtue is risible.