renunciation of worldly pleasures Quotes

Of all the follies the greatest is to love the world.

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

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

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

It needs a good deal of philosophy not to be mortified by the thought of persons who have voluntarily abandoned everything that for the most of us makes life worth living and are devoid of envy of what they have missed. I have never made up my mind whether they are fools or wise men.

To keep a faith pure, man had better retire to a monastery.

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.

If one's object is ascetic, it is far better to stay in London or Paris or New York; there is practically no extreme of heat or cold, physical risk, loneliness, hunger or thirst that cannot, with a little ingenuity, be conveniently achieved in the centres of civilization.