Asceticism is not that you should not own anything, but that nothing should own you.
Mastering our emotions has nothing to do with asceticism or repression, for the purpose is not to break the emotions or deny them but to "break in" the emotions, making them teachable because they are tamed.
When you reach your sixties, you have to decide whether you're going to be a sot or an ascetic. In other words if you want to go on working after you're sixty, some degree of asceticism is inevitable.
Give up a member to save a family, a family to save a village, a village to save a country, and the country to save yourself.
Renounce all things, and thou shalt find all things; give up thy lust, and thou shalt find rest.
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.
Asceticism may be a mere expression of organic hardihood, disgusted with too much ease.
Fie on the eloquence that leaves us craving itself, not things!
A truly unselfish act is not mine, but God's. It cannot be obstructed. Only for my own plans, my own wishes to study, to work, to rest, eat, or do a service to my fellowman- can some external circumstance "get in the way," and then I am grieved.
Nothing happens accidentally or in such a way that you cannot learn from it; you must understand this at once, for this is how your trust grows in the Lord whom you have chosen to follow.
Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge.
American life, in large cities, is a perpetual assault on the senses and the nerves; it is out of asceticism, out of unworldliness, precisely, that we bear it.
Asceticism without religion is just another way of cultivating peculiar sensations.
Without asceticism, self-indulgence would be insignificant.
Through practice he has accustomed himself to wish for nothing, and for a person with no wishes, everything goes just as he wishes, explains the Abbot Dorotheus. His will has coincided with God's will, and whatever he asks, he will receive.
It is true, we shall be monsters, cut off from all the world; but on that account we shall be more attached to one another.
The ascetic makes a necessity of virtue.
Yet in a kingdom containing seven constituent parts, which is upheld like the triple staff ,of an ascetic , there is no ,single part more important ,than the others , by reason of the importance of the qualities of each for the others.
The most intelligent men, like the strongest, find their happiness where others would find only disaster: in the labyrinth, in being hard with themselves and with others, in effort; their delight is self-mastery; in them asceticism becomes second nature, a necessity, as instinct.
If a hermit lives in a state of ecstasy, his lack of comfort becomes the height of comfort. He must relinquish it.