Asceticism Quotes

We find nothing easier than being wise, patient, superior. We drip with the oil of forbearance and sympathy, we are absurdly just, we forgive everything. For that very reason we ought to discipline ourselves a little; for that very reason we ought to cultivate a little emotion, a little emotional vice, from time to time. It may be hard for us; and among ourselves we may perhaps laugh at the appearance we thus present. But what of that! We no longer have any other mode of self-overcoming available to us: this is our asceticism, our penance. - Friedrich Nietzsche

Truth, self control, asceticism, generosity, non-injury, constancy in virtue — these are the means of success, not caste or family. - Mahabharata

They had both noticed that a life of dissipation sometimes gave to a face the look of gaunt suffering spirituality that a life of asceticism was supposed to give and quite often did not. - Katherine Anne Porter

The principle of asceticism never was, nor ever can be, consistently pursued by any living creature. Let but one tenth part of the inhabitants of the earth pursue it consistently, and in a day's time they will have turned it into a Hell. - Jeremy Bentham

The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals. - George Orwell

Allowing for all the restrictions involved when trying to rank individual artists by using general criteria, we have to say it is a measure of inscrutability and hardness, mostly already perceptible in their craftsmanship, an elusive asceticism, a stubbornness which manifests itself most clearly in a total lack of accommodation to public taste. - Simon Vestdijk