Ascetical Quotes & Sayings

The folly of others is ever most ridiculous to those who are themselves most foolish. — Oliver Goldsmith

I was the good girl who never needed disciplining, who made straight A's. I applied and was accepted to Stanford University. — Kathryn Harrison

Is man merely a mistake of God's? Or God merely a mistake of man? — Friedrich Nietzsche

Yes, I laugh at all mankind, and the imposition that they dare to practice when they talk of hearts. I laugh at human passions and human cares, vice and virtue, religion and impiety; they are all the result of petty localities, and artificial situation. One physical want, one severe and abrupt lesson from the colorless and shriveled lip of necessity, is worth all the logic of the empty wretches who have presumed to prate it, from Zeno down to Burgersdicius. It silences in a second all the feeble sophistry of conventional life, and ascetical passion. — Charles Robert Maturin

Who takes the blame: the leader who talks of poverty but lives in luxury, or the poor who choose a leader of that type? — Goparaju Ramachandra Rao

Never marry for money. You'll borrow it cheaper. — Scottish Proverb

We have a bad habit of not being able to do things cheap. — Alain Wertheimer

There is nothing in the world more soft and weak than water, and yet for attacking things that are firm and strong there is nothing that can take precedence of it; - for there is nothing (so effectual) for which it can be changed. — Lao-Tzu

In the younger days of the Republic there lived in the county of - two men, who were admitted on all hands to be the very best men In the county; which, in the Georgia vocabulary, means they could flog any other two men in the county. — Augustus Baldwin Longstreet

Looking out the window of a large women's monastery after Divine Liturgy, my friend saw a few nuns walking toward the woods with satchels on their backs. Inquiring who they were, she was told they were ascetics who lived in the wilderness and had come to the monastery to attend Liturgy and to receive some food. Although we are much weaker in our times and far less ascetical than the early desert fathers and mothers, let it never be said that extreme Christian asceticism is extinct. Who knows how many St. Mary of Egypts are hidden in the wilderness? — Constantina R. Palmer

I would have had my patent long, long ago, and it would have run out long, long ago. I would have made, maybe, $100.000, much less that the patent has brought me now. — Gordon Gould

I have finally decided to write my book on the spiritual life. I mean to put down as simply as possible the sort of ascetical or mystical teaching that I have been living and preaching so long. I call it 'Le Milieu Divin,' but I am being careful to include nothing esoteric and the minimum of explicit philosophy. — Pierre Teilhard De Chardin

The growth of all the plants of the garden from seeds and roots keep us mindful, in accordance with of the Parable of the Sower, of the need for our loving, mortified reception and cultivation in our hearts and souls of the seeds and roots of the supernatural gifts and virtues necessary for progress in the ascetical/mystical ascent of our souls toward union with God and with the divine will for Creation and Kingdom — John Stokes