Evelyn Waugh Quotes

Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood, disgusted with too much ease.

Asceticism is the trifling of an enthusiast with his power, a puerile coquetting with his selfishness or his vanity, in the absence of any sufficiently great object to employ the first or overcome the last.

Asceticism in most cases is either the result of a sordid imagination or of passion diverted from its natural course, and experience has shown that when the protection of public morals is entrusted to its votaries, the consequences are usually appalling.

The ascetic is often a sensualist who has reached the limit of his capacity.

Asceticism and celibacy can conceal many incapacities.

I might become an ascetic, live in India. A little rice is about the best I can do now.

Asceticism without religion is just another way of cultivating peculiar sensations.

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.

To gain victory over the flesh was the purpose of fasting and celibacy, which denied the pleasures of this world for the sake of reward in the next.

Everybody who does not live in a prostitute's bed and on a diet of cocaine snow is called an ascetic nowadays.

Pleasure and guilt are synonymous terms in the language of the monks, and they discovered, by experience, that rigid fasts, and abstemious diet, are the most effectual preservatives against the impure desires of the flesh.

Wherever on earth the religious neurosis has appeared we find it tied to three dangerous dietary demands: solitude, fasting, and sexual abstinence.

Asceticism, it is evident, has a double motivation. If men and women torment their bodies, it is not only because they hope in this way to atone for past sins and avoid future punishments; it is also because they long to visit the mind's antipodes and do some visionary sightseeing.

Because monks come from the midst of purity, they consider as good and pure what does not arouse desire among other people.

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.

Set aside a certain number of days, during which you shall be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with course and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: " Is this the condition that I feared?"

Asceticism is the right way of thinking for those who have to extirpate their sensual drives because they are ravening beasts of prey. But only for those!

Intend to live in continual mortification, and never to expect or desire any worldly ease or pleasure.

This detachment (poverty, chastity, etc.) must not be mere amputation; everything which is shaken off must be simultaneously found again at a higher level.

He who wishes to find Jesus should seek Him, not in the delights and pleasures of the world, but in mortification of the senses.

If any man would come after me, let him deny himself." The disciple must say to himself the same words Peter said of Christ when he denied him: "I know not this man." Self-denial is never just a series of isolated acts of mortification or asceticism. It is not suicide, for there is an element of self-will even in that. To deny oneself is to be aware only of Christ and no more of self, to see only him who goes before and no more the road which is too hard for us. Once more, all that self denial can say is: "He leads the way, keep close to him.

The convent is supreme egotism resulting in supreme self-denial.

Christ sayeth not, Abstain from the flesh, from marrying, from housekeeping, etc., as the Papists teach, for that were even to invite the devil and all his fellows to a feast.

There is more security in self-denial, mortification, and other like virtues, than in an abundance of tears.

As for the spirit of poverty, I do not remember any moment when it was not in me, although only to that unhappily small extent compatible with my imperfection. I fell in love with Saint Francis of Assisi as soon as I came to know about him. I always believed and hoped that one day Fate would force upon me the condition of a vagabond and a beggar which he embraced freely. Actually I felt the same way about prison.