"Asceticism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... settlements in both Maryland and Virginia. But the life in the Southern states took on the more liberal tinge which had characterized that of the Royalists, even to the extent of affecting the Scotch Calvinists, while the asceticism of the Roundheads was the keynote of the Puritan character in New England. When this great country of ours began to develop, the streams moved westward; one over what became the plain states of Ohio and Indiana and Illinois, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... ascetic caricature. Through the selfish cowardice of the monastic life we often see the loving sympathy of Christian self-denial. Thus there was an element of true Christian zeal in the enthusiasm of the Eastern Churches; and thus it was that the rising spirit of asceticism naturally attached itself to the Nicene faith as the strongest moral power in Christendom. It was a protest against the whole framework of society in that age, and therefore the alliance was cemented ...
— The Arian Controversy • H. M. Gwatkin
... all," "In him we live and move and have our being," but the whole history of Christianity is the record of a spiritualism almost too excessive. It has appeared in the worship of the Church, the hymns of the Church, the tendencies to asceticism, the depreciation of earth and man. Christianity, therefore, fully meets Brahmanism on its positive side, while it fulfils its negations, as we shall see hereafter, by adding as full a recognition ...
— Ten Great Religions - An Essay in Comparative Theology • James Freeman Clarke
... up his cross and follow me;' but who has understood it? The letter of the law has indeed been observed by many earnest followers of Jesus to a degree not considered necessary in this age, but what has it demonstrated? What has come of all the fasting and renunciation, the cruel asceticism and severe discipline? ...
— The Right Knock - A Story • Helen Van-Anderson
... of his years, and in spite of his asceticism (or because of it, for all I know), was a very healthy and happy old gentleman. And as he swung on a bar above the sickening emptiness of air, he realized, with that sort of dead detachment which belongs to the brains of those in peril, the deathless ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... letters to Thirza he would deplore Edward's asceticism. "He eats nothing, he drinks nothing, he smokes a miserable cigarette once in a blue moon. He's as lonely as a coot; it's a thousand pities he ever lost his wife. I expect to see his wings sprout any day; but—dash it all I—I don't believe he's got the flesh to grow them on. Send him up some clotted ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... an expression in his 'Fra Lippo Lippi', fully recognizes "the value and significance of flesh." A healthy and well-toned spiritual life is with him the furthest removed from asceticism. To the passage from his 'Rabbi Ben Ezra' already quoted, "all good things are ours, nor soul helps flesh more, now, than flesh helps soul", should be added what David sings to Saul, in the poem entitled 'Saul'. Was the full physical ...
— Introduction to Robert Browning • Hiram Corson
... Schule," written in 1834 and '35, the doctrine of Pantheism is dwelt on with a fervor and unmixed seriousness which show that Pantheism was then an animating faith to Heine, and he attacks what he considers the false spiritualism and asceticism of Christianity as the enemy of true beauty in Art, and of social well-being. Now, however, it was said that Heine had recanted all his heresies; but from the fact that visitors to his sick-room brought away very various impressions as to his actual religious ...
— The Essays of "George Eliot" - Complete • George Eliot
... that meets us in the annals of Oriental thought is that of Confucius. To the popular mind he is the founder of a religion, and yet he has nothing in common with the great religious teachers of the East. We think of Siddartha, the founder of Buddhism, as the very impersonation of romantic asceticism, enthusiastic self-sacrifice, and faith in the things that are invisible. Zoroaster is the friend of God, talking face to face with the Almighty, and drinking wisdom and knowledge from the lips of Omniscience. Mohammed ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... most marked effect when the cycle of a thousand years after the birth of Christ was approaching completion; and the world was assured that was the limit of its present state. Numerous acts of piety were performed. Churches were built, religious houses founded, and asceticism became the order of the day, until the dreaded year was completed without the accompaniment of the supernatural horrors so generally feared; the world soon relapsed into forgetfulness, and went on as before. Very many prophecies ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Middle Ages, with their florid, romantic theology, beyond the bounds of orthodox tradition, giving so much new matter to art and poetry. They are a picturesque addition, also, to the exterior of Greek life, with [51] their white dresses, their dirges, their fastings and ecstasies, their outward asceticism and material purifications. And the central object of their worship comes before us as a tortured, persecuted, slain god—the suffering Dionysus—of whose legend they have their own special and esoteric version. That version, embodied ...
— Greek Studies: A Series of Essays • Walter Horatio Pater
... which led the young man to absent himself as much as possible from his uncle's house when he grew older and had more liberty of action. Comfortable living was not one of the factors in the Beethoven menage. Beethoven's requirements, so far as he himself was concerned, were simple almost to asceticism. He believed in discipline in the rearing of youth, but his belief in it did not extend to the point of inducing him to attempt it with his servants. The explanation of this is not far to seek. He would have had to conform to any rules made in the interest ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... the young enthusiast, not only in all the actions of his life, but also in all the thoughts of his mind and all the hesitations of his conscience. In it we find his whole self, simple to naivete, enthusiastic to madness, gentle even to weakness towards others, severe even to asceticism towards himself. One of his great griefs was the expense that his education occasioned to his parents, and every useless and costly pleasure left a remorse in his heart. Thus, on the 9th ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... voluptuous energy, Guido the placid self-possession, and Raphael and Correggio the religious sentiment of Italy; Watteau put on canvas the fete champetre; the peasant-life of Spain is pictured by Murillo, her asceticism by the old religious limners; what English rustics were before steam and railroads Gainsborough and Moreland reveal, Wilkie has permanently symbolized Scotch shrewdness and domesticity, and Lawrence framed and fixed ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various
... not as good as a feast, and since their income was always uncertain, the only way to get any real enjoyment out of life was to feast recklessly while they could, though only for a few days, and then to pay for extravagance with the strictest asceticism, till a rain of gold once more gladdened the garret to which they had retired ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... tree away from him. But Peter's blood was now warm with the chase—and it was the blood of Peter Nicholaevitch too. Forgotten were the studious hours of patience and toil. Here was a girl who challenged his asceticism—a beautiful young female animal who dared to mock at his self-restraint. She thought that she could get away. But he gained on her. She had ...
— The Vagrant Duke • George Gibbs
... ingenuity, and the study of Nature (in Bestiaries, Lapidaries, and the like) to an insane system of grotesque and pious quibbling. The conception of man's fall and of the incurable badness of this world bears poisonous fruit of cynicism and asceticism, that twofold bitter almond, hidden in the harsh monastic shell. The devil has become God upon this earth, and God's eternal jailer in the next world. Nature is regarded with suspicion and aversion; the flesh, with shame and loathing, broken by spasmodic outbursts ...
— Wine, Women, and Song - Mediaeval Latin Students' songs; Now first translated into English verse • Various
... immortal—they are the saints now whose lot was humblest upon earth. The Crusader has clashed through the ages with the noise of sword and armour, attracting the lover of romance, though he performed less doughty deeds than the monk of stern asceticism, whose rule forbade him to break peace. He enjoys glory still as he enjoyed the hour of victories, and the battle that might bring death but could not result in shame. The Brethren of St Dominic and St Francis shrank in life, at least, from the reverence ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead
... by Professor J.C. Oman, published not long ago, contains a clear and judicially sympathetic account of Hinduism. The sordid side of Indian asceticism receives due attention; the excesses of self-mortification, painful posturings, and equally painful impostures are by no means slurred over by the writer. And yet the essential origin of these ascetic practices is ...
— The Book of Delight and Other Papers • Israel Abrahams
... aim was to bring about a deep psychologic improvement, to change not so much the belief as the believer. It insisted on purity rather than profundity of thought. Unable to remove the galling yoke, it gave strength to its wearers by prohibiting sadness and asceticism, and emphasizing joy and fellowship as important elements in the ...
— The Haskalah Movement in Russia • Jacob S. Raisin
... had been pleased to assume towards her, this implied compliment to his supposed monastic vocations affected him almost as uncomfortably as the "Star's" extravagant eulogium. He was obliged to recall certain foolish experiences of his own to enable him to rise superior to this presumption of his asceticism. ...
— Cressy • Bret Harte
... apprehensive look of a guest. In these days New England life held the necessity of much dignity and discretion of behavior; there was the truest hospitality and good cheer in all occasional festivities, but it was sometimes a self-conscious hospitality, followed by an inexorable return to asceticism both of diet and of behavior. Miss Harriet Pyne belonged to the very dullest days of New England, those which perhaps held the most priggishness for the learned professions, the most limited interpretation of the word "evangelical," and the pettiest indifference ...
— The Queen's Twin and Other Stories • Sarah Orne Jewett
... have felt it my duty to become a vegetarian on trial. I don't know whether I can carry it out. The Chinese look up so much to this supposed asceticism that I am eager to acquire the influence a successful vegetarianism would give me, and I am trying it in true Chinese style, which forbids eggs, leeks and carrots, &c. As far as I have gone all is well. I am a little afraid that the great appetite ...
— James Gilmour of Mongolia - His diaries, letters, and reports • James Gilmour
... with earth and earthly things. The flesh, in its narrower sense, is no doubt a predominant part of this whole, but there is much in it besides the material organisation. The ethics of Christianity suffered much harm and were degraded into a false and slavish asceticism for long centuries, by monastic misunderstandings of what Paul meant by the flesh, but he himself was too clear-sighted and too high-toned to give his adhesion to the superficial notion that the body is the seat and source of sin. We need look no further than the catalogue of the 'works of the flesh' ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... her relatives, who would never sanction her present determination. Her confessor, the Abbe Premord, a Jesuit and man of the world, was likewise kindly discouraging; and perceiving that her zeal was leading her to morbid self-accusation and asceticism of mood, he shrewdly enjoined upon her as a penance to take part in the sports and pastimes with the rest as heretofore, much to her dismay. But she soon found her liking for these return, and with it her health of mind. ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... they will all be very seedy to-morrow," she croaked to Mr. Smith, whose asceticism seemed to have been left at home on this occasion. "Surely they are ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... perplexity she compared it with that of the weary man who had plodded beside the team. Winston was not arrogant, but resolute, and there was no stamp of indulgence in his face. Indeed, the girl had from the beginning recognized the virility in it that was tinged with asceticism and sprang from a simple strenuous life of toil in ...
— Winston of the Prairie • Harold Bindloss
... Monsieur Hulot's living masterpiece. Hortense, forewarned, at once identified him as the artist, from the color that flushed a face pale with endurance; she saw the spark lighted up in his gray eyes by her question; she looked on the thin, drawn features, like those of a monk consumed by asceticism; she loved the red, well-formed mouth, the delicate chin, and the Pole's ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac
... their origin in this department of the household. In India, certainly, food is a subject of prominent importance in the minds of the people of the country. Well-to-do Hindus find their chief interest and pleasure in the two big meals of the day. Very few practise any real asceticism concerning food. An orthodox Hindu does not break his fast until he has taken his bath and worshipped his household gods, so that he is habitually fasting till nearly noon. But those who have been always accustomed to this ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... who sits changeless amid infinite series of changes, all-wise amid infinite follies and wickednesses of His creatures, all-merciful and all-loving amid the hate and opposition of weak, finite hearts, becomes a gloomy asceticism, or a fierce inquisitorial despotism, perverting Him—this glorious and loving God—into a cold, selfish, unreasonable Being, as far removed from our sympathies and love as He is from caring for us, and only existing to receive the hateful homage of fearful and enslaved ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... is not "easy to give us a firm grasp of any great class of truths without loosening our grasp on some other class of truths perhaps nobler and more vital;" and undoubtedly Patmore and his school in emphasizing the fallacies of neo-platonic asceticism are in danger of precipitating us into fallacies every whit as uncatholic. It is therefore as professedly formulating the principles of a certain school that we are interested in the doctrine of which ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... I have chiefly to speak. By birth he was of the same Vaisya caste as Lona. Early in life his lot had fallen among fakirs and he had acquired all their secrets. This did not satisfy his ambitions, for he wished to be numbered among the rishis or adepts, and subjected himself to the most horrible asceticism to qualify himself for adeptship. His indifference to physical pain was truly marvellous. He had rolled his naked body to the Ganges over hundreds of miles of burning sands! He had held his hands clinched until the nails had worn through the palm and out at the back of the ...
— The Darrow Enigma • Melvin L. Severy
... and passing from one to the other, the traveller is more impressed by the subtle analogies they suggest than by the differences of their architectural forms. On week-days, when the church is empty, they seem to prefigure the two ideals of the religion which they serve—the stern, self-conquering asceticism of a Saint Dominic, and the exquisite, radiant visions which Saint Cecelia saw when heavenly music was vouchsafed her. Or, if one has time to fancy further, the nave is the epic of its great religion; ...
— Cathedrals and Cloisters of the South of France, Volume 1 • Elise Whitlock Rose
... to the light of intellectual truth, and emancipated from the bands of ancient superstition. The blessings of education, culture, mental development, and social expansion, have been accorded to the people. Gloomy asceticism has yielded to more hopeful views of life. Dark and depressing theological dogmas have received more cheerful interpretations; and the design of creation, the nature of man, and the destiny of humanity are seen in more alluring colors. The expectations of the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 5, November, 1863 • Various
... in a foreign land. In 1246, however, the Pope having threatened excommunication, the King gave way, and Richard at once began to reform his diocese, to discipline his priests, and to restore the ritual of his cathedral, and indeed of all the churches in his diocese. He lived a life of severe asceticism, and gave so much in alms that he was always a beggar. Usurers were punished by excommunication, and Jews were forbidden to build new synagogues. It was he, too, who first established the custom of the Easter offering contribution from the faithful to the Cathedral, ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton
... pleasure and to fly from joy appears to me the worst insult that one can offer to nature. I am assured that during their lives certain of the elect of thy god abstained from food and avoided women through love of asceticism, and voluntarily exposed themselves to useless sufferings. I should be afraid of meeting those, criminals whose frenzy horrifies me. A poet must not be asked to attach himself too strictly to any scientific or moral doctrine. ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France
... in character as well as in arms, was its master. It has lived through all these centuries, all their revolutions and convulsions, the usurpation, tyranny, and scandals of the Papacy. The most doubtful point of it, considered as a permanent exemplar, is its tendency, not to asceticism, for Christ came "eating and drinking," but to an excessive preference for poverty and antipathy to wealth which would arrest human progress and kill civilization. We have, however, a Nicodemus and a Joseph of Arimathea, as well as a Dives and ...
— No Refuge but in Truth • Goldwin Smith
... supreme physical education, without any attention to the moral and intellectual, and he will go to pieces like our prize-fighters and athletes. But the Christians went to the other extreme. They practiced the most absurd system of asceticism, depriving themselves of natural food and rest, and, of course, the results which followed on a grand scale were just what would follow in the individual. Let a person follow the course they did, denying himself necessary raiment and food, taking no exercise, and living in retirement, ...
— Brave Men and Women - Their Struggles, Failures, And Triumphs • O.E. Fuller
... unintelligible or visionary. For whereas some moralists would have us amend nature, and others bid us follow her, there is apt to be something impracticable in the first maxim, and something vague in the second. Asceticism, quietism, enthusiasm, ecstasy—all systems which imply an unnatural repression or an unnatural excitation of our faculties—are ill-suited for the mass of mankind. And on the other hand, if we are told to follow nature, ...
— Wordsworth • F. W. H. Myers
... Humanity were not lacking in passion; had they been they could not have moved the world; but their passion was transmuted to the service of Humanity itself, for nothing else was great or wide enough for such a love. Does anyone suppose that it was a mere instinct of asceticism that drove St. Francis to make out of snow, cold images of wife and child? Was it not rather the sudden resurgent desire of the greatest of the saints for some more humanly warm affection, something more individual, something that nestles more closely to the heart, than this great service of ...
— Sex And Common-Sense • A. Maude Royden
... whether vegetable or animal, will somehow benefit in propagating their species. Thus from the same crude philosophy, the same primitive notions of nature and life, the savage may derive by different channels a rule either of profligacy or of asceticism. ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer
... the Seven. Aru, Cumaha. Arucki. Aruk. Arulun Tsaghan Balghasun (Chagan-Nor). Arya Chakravarti. Aryavartta, the Holy Lands of Indian Buddhism. Arzinga (Erzingan). Arziron (Erzrum). Arzizi (Arjish). Asbestos, and the Salamander. Asceticism of the Sensin, of the Jogis. Asedin Soldan (Ghaiassuddin Balban, Sultan of Delhi). Ashar (Asciar), king of Cail. Ashishin, see Assassins. Ashod, founder of the Bagratid dynasty. Ashurada. Asikan, Mongol general. ...
— The Travels of Marco Polo, Volume 2 • Marco Polo and Rustichello of Pisa
... then, looking at the living, moral teaching of Christ from the lower standpoint of the conception of life, this doctrine appears as nothing but very indefinite and incongruous combination of Indian asceticism, Stoic and Neoplatonic philosophy, and insubstantial anti-social visions, which have no serious significance for our times. Its whole meaning is concentrated for them in its external manifestations— in Catholicism, Protestantism, ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy
... sake she had come to this church to pray. Once when she had been describing a haggard St Francis in the Sienese gallery to him, he had said: "Ah, women always pity him and admire his picturesque asceticism, but if married men look worried they do not notice it. Their troubles are no compliment ...
— Olive in Italy • Moray Dalton
... felicity of the centuries to come? Napoleon at the height of Imperial power, with thirty millions of devoted subjects behind him, and legions unequalled since those of Rome, did but make Rousseau's experiment. "The emotions of men," Rousseau argued, "have by seventeen hundred years of asceticism and Christianism been so disciplined, that they can now be trusted to their own guidance." The hour of his death, whether by a pistol bullet or by poison, or from sheer weariness, was also the hour of Rousseau's deepest insight into the human heart. That hour of penetrating vision ...
— The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain - Nineteenth Century Europe • J. A. Cramb
... implied the possession of a secret, which was to be communicated to their disciples. Ceremonial observances were the preparation, and symbolical rites the instrument, of initiation. Tatian and Montanus, the representatives of very distinct schools, agreed in making asceticism a ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various
... she was thirty-eight, but she was over forty. Goodness, some say, keeps women fresh. Mrs. Chepstow had tried a great many means of keeping fresh, but she had omitted that. The step between aestheticism and asceticism was one which she had never taken, though she had taken many steps, some of them, unfortunately, false ones. She had been a well-born girl, the daughter of aristocratic but impecunious and extravagant ...
— Bella Donna - A Novel • Robert Hichens
... eyes flamed. Just then a faint soprano bark came to them from outside the church door, a very discreet and even humble, but at the same time anxious, bark. The priest's face changed. The almost passionate asceticism of it was replaced by a ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens
... children of Israel, a man of the devout, for piety acclaimed and for continence and asceticism enfamed, whose prayers were ever granted and who by supplication obtained whatso he wanted; and he was a wanderer in the mountains and was used to pass the night in worship. Now Almighty Allah ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton
... and other lightnesses for her young girl. It should have been all sackcloth and ashes. Had it been all sackcloth and ashes there would not have been this terrible fall. But if the loved one would now come back to sackcloth and ashes,—if she would assent to the blackness of religious asceticism, to penitence and theological gloom, and would lead the life of the godly but comfortless here in order that she might insure the glories and joys of the future life, then there might be consolation;—then it might be felt that this tribulation had been ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope
... grace of love which is more terrible than the thunderbolt that fell on the road to Damascus. A woman oftenest yields to the passion of love only when age or solitude does not frighten her. Passion is an arid and burning desert. Passion is profane asceticism, as harsh as religious asceticism. Great woman lovers are as rare as great penitent women. Those who know life well know that women do not easily bind themselves in the chains of real love. They know that ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... dreamer as all that. I will make bold to say that neither at sea nor ashore have I ever lost the sense of responsibility. There is more than one sort of intoxication. Even before the most seductive reveries I have remained mindful of that sobriety of interior life, that asceticism of sentiment, in which alone the naked form of truth, such as one conceives it, such as one feels it, can be rendered without shame. It is but a maudlin and indecent verity that comes out through the strength of wine. I have tried ...
— A Personal Record • Joseph Conrad
... a sober temperament, and am, besides, a member of that sect which Dr. More has called, mistakenly indeed, "the most melancholy of all;" but I confess a special dislike of disfigured faces, ostentatious displays of piety, pride aping humility. Asceticism, moroseness, self-torture, ingratitude in view of down-showering blessings, and painful restraint of the better feelings of our nature may befit a Hindoo fakir, or a Mandan medicine man with buffalo skulls strung to his lacerated muscles; but they look to me sadly out of ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... captains of our own souls. There is an element of absurdity in the thought that the aim and purpose of human life is for each soul to hunt for the sins and imperfections in others. The enjoinment of self-criticism and self-culture seems a simpler and less circumstantial rule of life. Asceticism, abnegation, prayer, remoteness from the passions that rend the worldly, bring peace and content. But they limit experience and give a false simplicity to the problems of life. Early Christian monasticism held that as this world ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby
... opposition to the unique powers claimed by Christ and believed in by His followers. Apollonius is said to have studied the philosophy of the Platonic, Sceptic, Epicurean, Peripatetic and Pythagorean schools, and to have adopted that of Pythagoras. He schooled himself in early manhood in the asceticism of that philosophy. He abstained from animal food and strong drink, wore white linen garments and sandals made of bark, and let his hair grow long. For five years he preserved a mystic silence, and during this period the truths of philosophy became known to him. He had interviews ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott
... be true to herself,' he observed. 'It is singular how these unbalanced, pleasure-loving natures lean towards asceticism—how rapidly they pass from one extreme to another. Even her repentance is not free from selfishness. She would free herself from her maternal responsibilities, as she freed herself from her marriage vows, under the mistaken notion of expiating ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... all of them, nor always, repeating mere conventional platitudes. This singular limitation in the mediaeval perceptions of Nature—a limitation so important as almost to make it appear as if the Middle Ages had not perceived Nature at all—is most frequently attributed to the prevalence of asceticism, which, according to some critics, made all mediaeval men into so many repetitions of Bernard of Clairvaux, of whom it is written that, being asked his opinion of Lake Leman, he answered with surprise that, during his journey from Geneva ...
— Euphorion - Being Studies of the Antique and the Mediaeval in the - Renaissance - Vol. I • Vernon Lee
... walking up and down the alleys of their vegetable garden, and under the sunny wall where oranges glow and roses bloom, without the least asceticism, during the whole winter, I do not believe in their doctrine, nor envy them their life. And I cannot but think that the one hundred and fifty thousand Frati who are in the Roman States would do quite ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various
... essential preliminary to success in this art; and such a feeling can only arise among a people who set much store on feats of bodily strength and agility. This has never been the character of the Hindus, whose religion encourages asceticism and mortification of the body, and points to mental self-absorption and detachment from worldly cares and exercises as the ...
— The Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell
... doctor often finds himself quite nonplussed by something in the preparation of the patient's diet. The old doctrine preached years ago, on St. Paul's text of 'keeping the body under,' has worked as much damage as the asceticism of the middle ages. A good healthy body is the first requisite everywhere; and to keep it so, every one's first duty. When men began to consider the body a poor, vile thing, to be treated with contumely, and fed with what would just ...
— Hope Mills - or Between Friend and Sweetheart • Amanda M. Douglas
... him in a condition for the divination of things. The wise agree that much stimulant or much deprivation enables the brain convolutions to do their work well, though deprivation gets the cleaner end. The asceticism of Marcus Aurelius was productive of greater results than the deep drinking of any gallant young Roman man of letters of whom he was a patron. The literature of fasting thinkers is something fine. Ab, after exerting his strength to ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... inference from the fact as is 'Awake to righteousness and sin not,' if the fact itself only be taken into account. There is nothing religious in the clearest conviction of mortality, if it stands alone. It may be the ally of profligate and cynical sensuality quite as easily as it may be the preacher of asceticism. It may make men inactive, from their sense of the insignificant and fleeting nature of all human works, or it may stimulate to intensest effort, from the thought, 'I must work the works of Him that sent me while it is day. The night cometh.' ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... Establishment, was ere long my conviction; though I was at first offended by his apparent affectation of a mean exterior. But I soon understood, that in no other way could he gain equal access to the lower and lowest orders, and that he was moved not by asceticism, nor by ostentation, but by a self-abandonment fruitful of consequences. He had practically given up all reading except that of the Bible; and no small part of his movement towards me soon took the form of dissuasion ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman
... embracing that creed which upholds the divinity of tradition with Laud, consent of Fathers with Beveridge, a visible Church with Bramhall, dogma with Bull, the authority of the Pope with Thorndyke, penance with Taylor, prayers for the dead with Ussher, celibacy, asceticism, ecclesiastical discipline with Bingham.' What is this to say but that, according to the Cardinal, our great English divines have divided the Roman dress-suit ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell
... their system was a mischievous theosophy, which they endeavoured to popularize under catchwords like "wisdom" and "philosophy." The fact that there was at this time such a widespread tendency to adopt an exaggerated asceticism and theories about mediatorial spirits, makes it unnecessary to suppose that the Colossian heresy need be affiliated to any ...
— The Books of the New Testament • Leighton Pullan
... contemplation, which seems to me the quintessence of selfishness. In the reformed Brahmanism called Buddhism, there appeared along with the old principle of self-erasure a compassionate sympathy for others. Asceticism was not put aside, but regulated and ordered, wrought into a communal system. It was purged of some of its selfishness by appreciation of the loveliness of compassionate love as exemplified in the life of Cakya-Muni and ...
— A Book of Operas - Their Histories, Their Plots, and Their Music • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... sufficiently intense devotion to any ideal never fails of at least one moment of consummate realisation and enjoyment. Such a moment was granted to Matthew Arnold when he wrote A Summer Night. Whether that rather vague life-philosophy of his, that erection of a melancholy agnosticism plus asceticism into a creed, was anything more than a not ungraceful or undignified will-worship of Pride, we need not here argue out. But we have seen how faithfully the note of it rings through the verse of these years. And here it rings not only faithfully, but almost triumphantly. The lips are ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... vicarious penance brings. She did not perhaps consider sufficiently her niece's guiltlessness in the expiation. Margaret was not with her at St. Barnaby in the fatal fortnight she passed there, and never saw the Leightons till she went to call upon them. She never complained: the strain of asceticism, which mysteriously exists in us all, and makes us put peas, boiled or unboiled, in our shoes, gave her patience with the snub which the Leightons presented her for her aunt. But now she said, with this in mind: "Nothing ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... corrupt in doctrine and practice; that the Romish Church was rather an improvement on it; that Jerome, Ambrose, Gregory, and Athanasius are full of false doctrine; and that a Gnostic theology, a Pagan asceticism, and a corrupt morality prevailed in the ...
— Orthodoxy: Its Truths And Errors • James Freeman Clarke
... trace it back far into the beginnings of Christianity. Later there had come the stampede into the Thebaid, where both hermit life and the gathering together of many into a community seem to have been equally allowed as methods of asceticism. But by the fifth century, in the East and the West the movement had been effectively organised. First there was the canonical theory of life, introduced by St. Augustine. Then St. Basil and St. Benedict composed ...
— Mediaeval Socialism • Bede Jarrett
... attacked her generalisation. With some vehemence he developed against it a Neo-pagan doctrine of joy—love of the earth and its natural pleasures—courage to take and dare—avoidance of suffering—and war on asceticism. He poured out a number of undigested thoughts, which showed a great deal of reading, and at least betrayed a personality, whatever value they might ...
— Fenwick's Career • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... as well as his landscape; he might have been a more exquisite Crabbe if he had turned his mind that way, instead of writing sermons about a world which to him was little more than an abstraction, distorted moreover, and discoloured by his religious asceticism. ...
— Cowper • Goldwin Smith
... leopard of the dappled skin, which had often turned back Dante from the Mountain to the Dark Wood (see Canto i.); the type of sensual sin. The cord is the type of religions asceticism, of which the poet no longer has need. The meaning of its use as a signal ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri
... attending Pascal’s conversion, there never was a more absurd fancy than that Pascal’s mind suffered any eclipse in the great change that came to him. He may have been credulous, he may have been superstitious. The miracle of the Holy Thorn may be an evidence of the one, and the unnatural asceticism of his later years a proof of the other. But to speak of the author of the ‘Provincial Letters,’ of the problems on the Cycloid, and finally of the ‘Pensées,’ as if his intellect had suffered from his conversion, is to use words without meaning. All his noblest writings were the product of his ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... had placed me next to James, so I listened to more asceticism. "He oughtn't to do things like this! People will say he likes to eat rich food and to drink. It's bad for the movement for ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair
... book, he strode forward, still more swiftly as it seemed at every stride. A tall young man, his features seemed thin and almost haggard; out of correspondence with a large frame, they looked as if asceticism had drawn and sharpened them. There was earnestness and eagerness—almost feverish eagerness—in the expression of his face. He passed the meadows, the stubble fields, the green root crops, the men at plough, who noticed his swift walk, contrasting with their own slow motion; and as he went his way ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies
... the organizing of the Salvation Army. It was not exactly hostility, but a distrust which was all the deeper for hardly daring to show itself. The only counsel which the bishop could give Francis was to come into the ranks of the clergy, or, if asceticism attracted him, to join ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... in its stead there was only the undressed body, ill-developed, untrained, pinched, and distorted by the garments only just cast off, cramped and bent by sedentary occupations, livid with the plague-spots of the Middle Ages, scarred by the whip-marks of asceticism. This stripped body, unseen and unfit to be seen, unaccustomed to the air and to the eyes of others, shivered and cowered for cold and for shame. The Giottesques ignored its very existence, conceiving humanity ...
— The Contemporary Review, Volume 36, September 1879 • Various
... not one to be used lightly but I can find no other. Like most Catholics I have been wont to believe that to be a mystic a man must first be an ascetic and Gilbert was not an ascetic in the ordinary sense. But is there not for the thinker an asceticism of the mind, very searching, very purifying? In his youth he had told Bentley that creative writing was the hardest of hard labour. That sense of the pressure of thought that made Newman call creative writing "getting rid of ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... a king of the kings of Hind, who was goodly of polity, praiseworthy in administration, just to his subjects, beneficent to men of learning and piety and asceticism and devoutness and worship and shunning traitors and froward folk and those of lewd life. On this wise of polity he abode in his kingship what God the Most High willed of days and hours and years, and he married the daughter of his father's brother, a beautiful and lovesome woman, endowed ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne
... room Crozier hesitated, and his long face, with paleness added to its asceticism, took on a look which could have given no hope of happiness to Mona. It went to her heart as no look of his had ever gone. Suddenly she had a revelation of how little she had known of what he was, or ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... way of undoing," says Baxter, "is by overdoing. To bring religious zeal into disrepute, he makes some zealous to madness, to persecution, to blood. To discredit freedom he urges its advocates into lawlessness. To discredit Christian morality, he induces some to carry it to the extreme of asceticism. To discredit needful authority, he makes rulers of the State into despots, and persuades the rulers of the Church to claim infallibility. To discredit Christianity, he adds to it human inventions." Wesley has a similar sentiment. "If you place Christian perfection ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... beauty of this world, and the plain duty of taking our faithful, active share in the work of this world, struck me as sensible and true. Perhaps I am uncharitable, but I cannot understand the religion that sits apart and makes life miserable with its gloomy asceticism." ...
— The Old Stone House • Anne March
... dull and dreary world, without confidence in my companions. That we may be happy, that we may find sincere friends, that we may meet the good, and enjoy the beautiful on earth, is a creed that will find believers in all hearts unsoured by their own asceticism. Virtue will sanctify every fireside where we invite her to dwell, and if the clouds of misfortune darken and deform the whole period of our existence, it is a darkness that emanates from ourselves, and a deformity created by us to our ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Volume I. No. 8 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 19, 1850 • Various
... Martin's weaknesses, his suspicions and dreads, his temper and self-abasement. The nobility that Martin had in him was true nobility, his very weaknesses came from his sharp consciousness of what purity and self-sacrifice and asceticism really were, and that they were indeed the only things for man to live by. During those weeks he saw so truly the sweetness and fidelity and simplicity of Maggie that his conscience was killed, his scruples were numbed. ...
— The Captives • Hugh Walpole
... "Marvellous!"[FN217] exclaimed the man: "How canst thou be in our city and yet never have heard about the miracles of the Lady Fatimah? Evidently, O thou poor fellow, thou art a foreigner, since the fastings of this devotee and her asceticism in worldly matters and the beauties of her piety never came to thine ears." The Moorman rejoined, " 'tis true, O my lord: yes, I am a stranger and came to this your city only yesternight; and I hope thou wilt inform me concerning ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 3 • Richard F. Burton
... Accompanying this asceticism we find an extraordinary revival of the grossest superstition. It was a natural consequence of the essentially emotional character of Methodism that its disciples should imagine that every strong feeling or impulse within them was a direct inspiration of God or Satan. The ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... of humour, a weird and delicate sense of humour, is the new religion of mankind! It is towards that men will strain themselves with the asceticism of saints. Exercises, spiritual exercises, will be set in it. It will be asked, 'Can you see the humour of this iron railing?' or 'Can you see the humour of this field of corn? Can you see the humour of the stars? Can you see the humour of the sunsets?' ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis. [Sidenote: Thomas a Kempis, c. 1380-1471] Written in a plaintive minor key of {33} resignation and pessimism, it sets forth with much artless eloquence the ideal of making one's personal life approach that of Christ. Humility, self-restraint, asceticism, patience, solitude, love of Jesus, prayer, and a diligent use of the sacramental grace of the eucharist are the means recommended to form the character of the perfect Christian. It was doubtless because all this was so perfect an expression of ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... hippocras from his beak." The fact is that the situation in the Netherlands, in the second half of the fifteenth century, was very much the same as that in Florence at the same time, the people being swayed between an exuberant enjoyment of life and a severe asceticism. There are many points of contact between Charles the Bold and Lorenzo the Magnificent, and no figure comes closer to Savonarola than that of the Carthusian, Thomas Conecte, who stirred public feeling ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts
... be lessened; and thus their object has been to disengage as far as possible the hopes and affections of men from things which must always be fleeting. That is the principle which lies behind all asceticism, that, if one can be indifferent to wealth and comfort and popularity, one has a better chance of serenity. The essence of that teaching is not that pleasant things are not desirable, but that one is more miserable if one loses them than if one never cares for them at all. ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... not deep, not long-sustained, but, so far as it goes, logical, in the composer's application of the system of typical or representative phrases. There is, too, a measure of appositeness in the structure and character of his themes—the themes of asceticism, of Athanal, of Thas. There is mastery of local color which makes the composer's use of Oriental tints as dramatically appropriate as it is engaging in all the scenes of ancient profligacy which fill the center ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... temple properties they had plundered;—and amidst all this, and much more also, found time in the wee small hours of the nights to do a good deal of literary work: Theosophical treatises, correspondence, sketches....—And you will know of the spotless purity, the asceticism, of his life; and how he stedfastly refused to persecute;—whereby his opponents complained that, son of Satan as he was, he denied them the glory of the martyr's crown;—and of his plan to rebuild the Temple at Jerusalem, and to re-establish Jews and Judaism in their ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... humanity is not the extirpation, but the control, of the flesh by the spirit. And in accordance with this thought, we may see in the eating and drinking Christ, the pattern for the religious life. Asceticism is not the noblest form of sanctity. There is nothing more striking in Old Testament than the way in which its heroes and saints mingle in all ordinary duties. They are warriors, statesmen, shepherds, they buy, they ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - St. Matthew Chaps. IX to XXVIII • Alexander Maclaren
... We were discussing the change that took place in Greek thought between, say, Plato and the Neo-Platonists, or even between Aristotle and Posidonius, and which is seen at its highest power in the Gnostics. I had been calling it a rise of asceticism, or mysticism, or religious passion, or the like, when my friend corrected me. 'It is not a rise; it is a fall or failure of something, a sort of failure of nerve.'—We are treading here upon somewhat firmer ground than in the first two essays. The field for mere conjecture is less: we ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... to learning were great, and his turn toward naturalism was of immense value in the foundation of modern literature. He infused a new spirit in the common literature of the times. He turned away from asceticism, and frankly and openly sought to justify the pleasures of life. Although his teaching may not be of the most wholesome kind, it was far-reaching in its influence in turning the mind toward the importance and desirability of the things of this life. Stories of "beautiful gardens ...
— History of Human Society • Frank W. Blackmar
... enchanted land of the fable: princes immortal, princesses eternally young and fair. The St Agnes and Sir Galahad, companion pieces, contain the romance, as St Simeon Stylites shows the repulsive side of asceticism; for the saint and the knight are young, beautiful, and eager as St Theresa in her childhood. It has been said, I do not know on what authority, that the poet had no recollection of composing Sir Galahad, any more than Scott remembered composing The Bride ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... straight conscience; saw lovingly the error of Fra Filippo's way; saw with intense distant love the error of Simonetta's; and reflected on Florence and its way, and drew nearer and nearer to Savonarola, being yet too big a man for asceticism; and finally wearied of all things and sunk into ...
— Ariadne Florentina - Six Lectures on Wood and Metal Engraving • John Ruskin
... those who sleep in it. At such times he seems more like one who has come from a planet farther away from the sun than our earth, than like one of us terrestrial creatures. His home is truly in the heavens, and he practises an asceticism in the cause of science almost comparable to that of Saint Simeon Stylites. Yet they tell me he might live in luxury if he spent on himself what he spends on science. His knowledge is of that strange, remote character, that it seems ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... strange new feeling thrilled him. His comrades sang as if their lives depended on their efforts. Jim sat on, half pleased, half sulky, wholly puzzled. Then one of the speakers rose. At first sight the preacher looked like anything but an apostle; his plump, rounded body gave no hint of asceticism, and his merry, pure eye twinkled from the midst of a most rubicund expanse of countenance. He looked like one who had found the world a pleasant place, and Jim gruffly described him as a "jolly old bloke." ...
— The Chequers - Being the Natural History of a Public-House, Set Forth in - a Loafer's Diary • James Runciman
... be more completely contrasted with the desert asceticism which Buddha's tenets inculcated than the luxury into which Mohammed's creed has flowered, so nothing could have more strikingly broken in upon our discussions of the Buddhistic monuments than the view which we at last obtained of the lovely Mohammedan city of Bhopal. To the south and ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various
... scheme, gods and devils waged eternal war against each other with wretched man as the prize of victory; and the priest, self-constituted interpreter of the will of the gods, stood in front of the only refuge from harm and demanded as the price of entrance that ignorance, that asceticism, that self-abnegation which could but end in the complete subjugation of man to superstition. He was taught that Heaven, the refuge, was the very antithesis of Earth, which was the source of sin. To gain for himself a seat in Heaven, man devastated the Earth. Yet she renewed ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 1, March 1906 • Various
... novel "Lucinde" describes the relation in which Schlegel "permitted himself to be discovered. Love for Schlegel it was that consumed her, and led her to share with him a thousand follies—Catholicism, Brahmin theosophy, absolutism, and the Christian asceticism of which she was a devotee at the time of her death." Neither distress, nor misery, nor care, nor sorrow could alienate her affections. Finally, she became a bigoted Catholic, and in Vienna, their last residence, the ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... Siva has taken definite shape, attributes and epithets are lavished on it in profusion. He is the great ascetic, for asceticism in India means power, and Siva is the personification of the powers of nature. He may alternate strangely between austerities and wild debauch, but the sentimentality of some Krishnaite sects is alien to him. He is a magician, the lord of troops of spirits, and thus draws into his circle ...
— Hinduism And Buddhism, Volume II. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot
... an instinct, like all others, beautiful and useful when it remains in harmony with all our other instincts, and helps along in the common battle for Christ, who has given them to us. But this instinct can be perverted and run wild into asceticism and a passion for self-mortification, as hunger into ...
— The Bride of Dreams • Frederik van Eeden
... subject—the crisp and cheery New England temperament—lies another which any discussion of Emerson must bring up,—namely, Asceticism. It is probable that in dealing with Emerson's feelings about the plastic arts we have to do with what is really the inside, or metaphysical side, of the same phenomena which present themselves on the outside, or physical side, in ...
— Emerson and Other Essays • John Jay Chapman
... of his court. His Queen, the gay, haughty, and pleasure-seeking Eleanor of Guienne, never admired him in this trim, and continually reproached him with imitating, not only the headdress, but the asceticism of the monks. From this cause, a coldness arose between them. The lady proving at last unfaithful to her shaven and indifferent lord, they were divorced, and the Kings of France lost the rich provinces of Guienne and Poitou, ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions - Vol. I • Charles Mackay
... the girl laughed down at us. "I don't know what you are up to, but I like you. You don't look as austere as you talk. And I don't mind your asceticism. If you don't appreciate the entertainment offered you, you can have any sort of entertainment you prefer. A goblet of wine and an hour's chat won't enervate you or make you ...
— Andivius Hedulio • Edward Lucas White
... wrong," said Hawthorne, "by a too strenuous resolution to go right." Lady Byron was to him an intolerably irreproachable person, just as Stevenson felt a little of the same towards Thoreau; notwithstanding that he was the "sunnily-ascetic," the asceticism and its corollary, as he puts it: the passion for individual self-improvement was alien in a way to Stevenson. This is the position of the casuistic mystic moralist and not of the man who sees only the ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... something from the side of profits to that of wages, checks in any measure the growth of these colossal fortunes, it will benefit society and diminish no man's happiness. I say it without the slightest feeling of asceticism, and in the conviction that wealth well made and well spent is as pure as the rill that ...
— Lectures and Essays • Goldwin Smith
... and health to be crowned with garlands for ever, come down and see Kate Hickey, whom you suppose to be a little girl. Illusion, my lord cardinal, illusion! She is seventeen, with a bloom and a brogue that would lay your asceticism in ashes at a flash. To her I am an object of wonder, a strange man bred in wicked cities. She is courted by six feet of farming material, chopped off a spare length of coarse humanity by the Almighty, and flung ...
— The Miraculous Revenge - Little Blue Book #215 • Bernard Shaw
... Buddhist pyramids, the Buddhist habit of depositing certain bones in them, the Buddhist practice of foretelling events, the Buddhist practice of continence, the Buddhist Semnai or holy virgins. This, however, may he but so much asceticism. He mentions this and more. He supplies the name Bouta; Bouta being honored ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various
... of "Christmas Eve and Easter Day," Mrs. Browning questioned her husband about the apparent asceticism of the second part of the poem, and he replied that he meant it to show only one side of the matter. "Don't think," she wrote to a friend, "that Robert has taken to the cilix,—indeed he has not, but it is his way to see things as passionately ...
— The Brownings - Their Life and Art • Lilian Whiting
... variety of life. It is a remarkable fact that while the Jews have long ago been rebelled against and accused of blighting the world with a stringent and one-sided ethical standard, nobody has noticed that the Greeks have committed us to an infinitely more horrible asceticism—an asceticism of the fancy, a worship of one aesthetic type alone. Jewish severity had at least common-sense as its basis; it recognised that men lived in a world of fact, and that if a man married within the degrees of blood certain consequences might follow. But they did ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... Varsova. It was originally a German boat and was sold to the Turks to be used for a pilgrim ship to Mecca; and I can only conclude either that the Turkish ideas of comfort are very different to ours or that the pilgrimage has a marked element of asceticism. ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer
... is ineffectual whenever the real sentiment of mankind is opposed to it. The divine law is set aside as soon as it conflicts with the popular opinion. In exceptional cases, indeed, the credit attached to unreasonable practices leads to fanaticism, asceticism, and even insanity; but superhuman terrors fail at once when they try to curb the action of genuine substantial motives. Hence we must admit that they are useless in the case even of 'secret crimes.' Religion, in short, prescribes mischievous practices, becomes impotent except ...
— The English Utilitarians, Volume II (of 3) - James Mill • Leslie Stephen
... Old Man of the Mountains—the head of all the creed—explaining the manifestation in the most beautiful language and soaking up all the credit of it for himself. The Englishman, said the letter, was not there at all. He was a backslider without power or asceticism, who couldn't even raise a table by force of volition, much less project an army of kittens through space. The entire arrangement, said the letter, was strictly orthodox, worked and sanctioned by the highest authorities within the ...
— The Lock And Key Library - Classic Mystery And Detective Stories, Modern English • Various
... it is the young men do be leaving things behind for them that do be old." In the quavering rhythm of these words, there is poignantly present that quality of strangeness and remoteness in beauty which, as we are coming to realise, is the touchstone of Celtic literary art. However, the very asceticism of the play has begotten a corresponding power which lifts Synge's work far out of the current of the Irish literary revival, and sets it high in a timeless atmosphere ...
— Riders to the Sea • J. M. Synge
... Mantua was sumptuous in his tastes, liberal, chivalrous, voluptuous, extravagant. At the same time he had a cultivated mind, an eye for proportion, and an ear for harmony. He was even pious at times, and like all debauchees had periods of asceticism. He was much given to gallantry, and his pension-list of beautiful women was not small. He was a poet and wrote some very good sonnets; he was a composer who sang, from his own compositions, after the wine had gone round; he ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... as necessarily so fixed that they could not be altered to his prayer. The true son-faith is that which comes with boldness, fearless of the Father doing anything but what is right fatherly, patient, and full of loving-kindness. We must not think to please him by any asceticism even of the spirit; we must speak straight out to him. The true child will not fear, but lay bare his wishes to the perfect Father. The Father may will otherwise, but his grace will be enough ...
— Unspoken Sermons - Series I., II., and II. • George MacDonald
... who live by our laziness, intellectual or corporeal. I am a Voltaire, without his luxuries—a Robinson Crusoe, without his Bible—an anchorite, without a superstition—in short, my indulgence is asceticism, and my faith infidelity. Therefore, I shan't disturb your servants much with my bell, nor yourselves with my psalmody. You have got a rational lodger, who knows ...
— J. S. Le Fanu's Ghostly Tales, Volume 4 • Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu
... procure, and fruit of any kind is for him an unattainable luxury. Under these circumstances, abstinence from eggs and milk in all their forms during several months of the year seems to the secular mind a superfluous bit of asceticism. If the Church would direct her maternal solicitude to the peasant's drinking, and leave him to eat what he pleases, she might exercise a beneficial influence on his material and moral welfare. Unfortunately she has a great deal too much inherent immobility to attempt anything of the kind, ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... of consciousness: and we must remember that when these masters of the spiritual life speak of purity, they have in their minds no thin, abstract notion of a rule of conduct stripped of all colour and compounded chiefly of refusals, such as a more modern, more arid asceticism set up. Their purity is an affirmative state; something strong, clean, and crystalline, capable of a wholeness of adjustment to the wholeness of a God-inhabited world. The pure soul is like a lens from which all irrelevancies ...
— Practical Mysticism - A Little Book for Normal People • Evelyn Underhill
... inhabitants of the forest of Naimisha. Having been entertained with due respect by those holy men, he saluted those Munis (sages) with joined palms, even all of them, and inquired about the progress of their asceticism. Then all the ascetics being again seated, the son of Lomaharshana humbly occupied the seat that was assigned to him. Seeing that he was comfortably seated, and recovered from fatigue, one of the Rishis beginning the ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli
... Churchman. He had none of the fads which we associate with the Radical party. Total abstinence he condemned as a rigid rule, though there was no man more severe in his attitude to drunkenness. He believed that God's gifts were for man's enjoyment, and he set his face against asceticism. He trained his own body to vigorous manhood and he had remarkable self-control; and he wished to help each man to do this for himself and not to be driven to it by what he considered a false system. Logically it may be easy to find ...
— Victorian Worthies - Sixteen Biographies • George Henry Blore
... It was Erasmus who revived the study of the Greek Testament, the charter of the scholar's reformation. He gave the Renaissance, in its origin purely Pagan, a Christian direction, and prevented the divorce of learning from religion. He also protested against the confusion of Christianity with asceticism, and against belief in the superior sanctity of monks. He turned his satire upon corruption in high places, and did not spare the Holy See. His residence in England, his friendship with More, his admiration for the earlier and better part of Henry VIII.'s ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... is not to be accomplished by mere asceticism, as it were, mechanically; the alchemists warn us carefully against severe remedies. The work is to take a natural course; the work is also, although indeed a consummation of nature, ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... represented him; he is one of the most vivid of Mr. Browning's characters. The two transcripts from Euripides seem enough to prove that that poet was far more human than Aristophanes professed to think; but the belief of Aristophanes in the practical asceticism of his rival was in some degree justified by popular opinion, if not in itself just; and we can understand his feeling at once rebuked and irritated by a contempt for the natural life which carried with it so much religious ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... was it was true, neither a feast nor a fast day, nor had he to attend a morning service, but he had long ago constituted himself chief visitor among the sick and poorest of his flock, and such work occupied him from morning to night. Perhaps in a nature naturally inclined to asceticism, this daily mingling with the very poor and the very suffering, had helped to keep down all ambitions for earthly good things, whether those good things came in the guise of riches or honors; but though ...
— How It All Came Round • L. T. Meade
... Catholic Church which is found in the writer who most influenced me, Sir Walter Scott; and there was already a certain consciousness of artistic necessities and congruities which made me dimly aware that if you admit the glories of ecclesiastical architecture, it is only the asceticism of Puritan rebellion against art that can deny magnificence to ritual. I had occasionally, though rarely, been present at High Mass, and had felt a certain elevating influence, and if I had said to myself, "Religion is only a poem by which the soul ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al
... every woman, who has once begun to think, examine herself; see whether she does not suppose virtue possible and necessary to Man, and whether she would not desire for her son a virtue which aimed at a fitness for a divine life, and involved, if not asceticism, that degree of power over the lower self, which shall "not exterminate the passions, but keep them chained at the feet of reason." The passions, like fire, are a bad muster; but confine them to the hearth and the altar, and they give life ...
— Woman in the Ninteenth Century - and Kindred Papers Relating to the Sphere, Condition - and Duties, of Woman. • Margaret Fuller Ossoli
... gained it from the esoteric stand-point of Christian exegetical analysis; and agglutinating the polsynthetical ectoblasts of homogeneous asceticism, I perceive at once the ...
— Talkers - With Illustrations • John Bate
... The mere sight of his excellent appetite was an assurance of success; for I had very clear recollections of days and nights without a thought of food, when his baffled mind had chafed before some problem while his thin, eager features became more attenuated with the asceticism of complete mental concentration. Finally he lit his pipe, and sitting in the inglenook of the old village inn he talked slowly and at random about his case, rather as one who thinks aloud than as one ...
— The Valley of Fear • Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
... such parasites. It is impossible to believe that they, or such as they, were inspired by any strong religious feelings. Hackston and Balfour were men of some fortune, who had been free-livers in their youth, and were now professing to expiate those errors by a gloomy and ferocious asceticism. Both had a grudge against Sharp. Balfour had been accused of malversation in the management of some property for which he was the Archbishop's factor, and Hackston, his brother-in-law, had been arrested as his bail and forced to make the money good. Russell, who has left a curiously ...
— Claverhouse • Mowbray Morris
... chintz-covered sofa where he now lay practically completed the inventory of the room. Three or four bronzes, a Narcissus, a fifteenth-century Italian St. Francis, and a couple of Greek reproductions stood on the chimney-piece, but the whole room breathed an atmosphere of aesthetic asceticism. ...
— The Blotting Book • E. F. Benson
... everyday life are unknown? Indeed, though Cowper, as an orthodox Protestant, held that ascetic practices ministered simply to spiritual conceit, was he not bound to a sufficiently galling form of asceticism? His friends habitually looked askance upon all those pleasures of the intellect and the imagination which are not directly subservient to the religious emotions. They had grave doubts of the expediency of his studies of the pagan Homer. They looked with suspicion ...
— Hours in a Library - New Edition, with Additions. Vol. II (of 3) • Leslie Stephen
... they might have the blessing of death. Selfishness, fear of death, love of riches, and love of luxury, these were all unintelligible to the Kosekin, as much as to us would be self-abnegation, contempt of death, voluntary poverty, and asceticism. But as with us self-denying rulers may make others rich and be popular for this, so here among the Kosekin a selfish ruler might be popular by making others poor. Hence the words of Almah, as they were made known, gave rise ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille
... the critic firmly to refrain from calling cynical or shameless, he has told the whole story of this lifelong depravation. In the present state of knowledge, which in the region of the human character the false shamefacedness of science, aided and abetted by the mutilating hand of religious asceticism, has kept crude and imperfect, there is nothing very profitable to be said on all this. When the great art of life has been more systematically conceived in the long processes of time and endeavour, and when more bold, ffective, and far-reaching advance has been made in defining ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... of the individual cannot prevent the One Will from manifesting itself in other individuals. Curiously enough he appears to approve of suicide by starvation, as indicating a renunciation of the will to live. But his general recommendation is asceticism, renunciation of the striving for pleasure, the voluntary acceptance of pain. Through this the Will is to be taught to apprehend its own nature, and, thus, to deny itself. How a general asceticism on our part will rob the one universal Will, revealed in ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... massacre ceased. Over the spot where Albert met his death Agnes built a monastery; she named it Koenigsfelden and enriched it with the spoils of her victims. Here she took up her abode for the remainder of her life, and for nearly fifty years practised the most rigid asceticism, and here, by the side of her parents, she was eventually buried. Koenigsfelden stood on the road from Basel to Baden and Zurich, and within sight of the castle of Hapsburg, the cradle of the house ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... silly revelry. They could not stoop to such as that. It was beneath their high dignity. And it was beneath hers also. As for himself, he was a thing of patches. Here a patch of exalted chivalry—a noble patch—there a patch of bourgeois, childlike love of fun; here a patch of melancholic asceticism, there one of something quite the reverse. A hopeless patchwork he was. Must she not shrink from him when she knew? He could not quite imagine her understanding the wholly trivial and meaningless impulse that had prompted him to ride a galloping ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... she was 'a child of God without rebuke.' It was, in fact, the very ferocity and foulness of the time which, by a natural revulsion, called forth at the same time the Apostolic holiness and the Manichean asceticism of the Mediaeval Saints. The world was so bad that, to be Saints at all, they were compelled to go out of the world. It was necessary, moreover, in depicting the poor man's patroness, to show the material on which she worked; and those who know the poor, know also that ...
— The Saint's Tragedy • Charles Kingsley
... to fanaticism, in an obstinacy which might become rabidness, in a certain misplaced loudness and disregard of dignity. The dangers of Hellenism lay in proneness to sacrifice character to talent, and deeds to thought. Hebraism tended towards asceticism and bigotry; Hellenism towards indifference and self-indulgence. The narrow Puritans of the seventeenth century revealed some of the dangers of excessive Hebraism; some of the dangers of excessive Hellenism have appeared in France. The modern French are in ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... no asceticism, but they are more visionary than any ascetic, and their invisible life is but the life about them made more perfect and more lasting, and the invisible people are their own images in the water. Their gods may have been much besides ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory
... all manner of asceticism to be the vilest blasphemy— blasphemy towards the whole of the human race. I believe in the flesh and the body, which is worthy of worship—to see a perfect human body unveiled causes a sense of worship. The ascetics are the only persons who are impure. Increase of physical beauty is attended ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... one hand by humanism, and on the other by feelings of patriotism, if not of imperialism. Spain and England took the Renaissance fever more coldly, and at the same time more seriously, than did Italy. And in both the new movement eventually assumed the character of intellectual asceticism moulded by the sombre hand of religious fanaticism; for Spain was the cradle of the Counter-Reformation, ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... "The rishi," says Eitel, "is a man whose bodily frame has undergone a certain transformation by dint of meditation and asceticism, so that he is, for an indefinite period, exempt from decrepitude, age, and death. As this period is believed to extend far beyond the usual duration of human life, such persons are called, and popularly believed to be, immortals." Rishis are divided into various classes; and rishi-ism ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... fail. Some earth spell casts you back, incarnate once more. A little duodecimal of fairy love divides the desires of your heart and draws one wing down. "The beautiful things of the eye," that is your little personal footnote, O stranger, which clings like a sweet prophecy to all your asceticism and philosophy. And prophecies cannot be evaded. They must be fulfilled. They are predestined sentences which shape our doom, quite independently of our prayers I sometimes think,—like the lily that determined to be a reed, and wished itself tall enough, only to be crowned ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More
... almost universal trait of the religious temperament is in its delight in beauty. Sometimes it is repressed by an irreligious asceticism or narrowed and stunted by a literal and external faith. But when the religious man is left free, it is appropriate to his genius that he finds the world full of a high pleasure crowded with sound, color, fragrance, form, in which he takes exquisite delight. There is, ...
— Preaching and Paganism • Albert Parker Fitch
... no such excuses. I forget who it was that recommended men for their soul's good to do each day two things they disliked: it was a wise man, and it is a precept that I have followed scrupulously; for every day I have got up and I have gone to bed. But there is in my nature a strain of asceticism, and I have subjected my flesh each week to a more severe mortification. I have never failed to read the Literary Supplement of . It is a salutary discipline to consider the vast number of books that are written, the fair hopes with which ...
— The Moon and Sixpence • W. Somerset Maugham
... illusion of Maya. Only the inconceivable is real, for it is God, but God dwells in the heart of every man, who, if and when he can realise it and has detached himself from his unworthy because unreal surroundings, is himself God. Akin to Vedantic mysticism is the Yoga system, which teaches extreme asceticism, retirement into solitude, fastings, nudity, mortification of the flesh, profound meditation on unfathomable mysteries, and the endless reiteration of magic words and phrases as the means of accelerating that ineffable fusion of God and ...
— India, Old and New • Sir Valentine Chirol
... church and this convent, famous as having been the abode of Thomas Aquinas, was calculated to fire the enthusiasm of Bruno's soul; the leisure and quiet, far from inducing habits of indolence, or the sterile practices of asceticism, were stimulants to austere study, and to the fervour of mystical speculations. Here he passed nearly thirteen years of early manhood, until his intellect strengthened by study he began to long for independence of thought, and becoming, as he said himself, solicitous ...
— The Heroic Enthusiasts,(1 of 2) (Gli Eroici Furori) - An Ethical Poem • Giordano Bruno
... the new altruism, a new moral one. The reasons for doing one's best in this life, and doing it actively, are so much stronger and clearer than they were when so many good people could fall into asceticism and other-worldliness, that perhaps we are now fit to be trusted with proofs of an after life. It is very suggestive that these apparent proofs came contemporaneously with the new knowledge tending to ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various
... between physical and mental desires; but as the human race develops, the imagination, the sense of the opposition between the reason and the appetite, begins to emerge. Man becomes aware that his will and his wish may not coincide; and thus develops the medieval theory of asceticism, the belief that the body is essentially vile, and suggests base desires to the mind, which the mind has the power of controlling. That conception fitted closely to the feudal theory of government, in which the interests of the ruler and the subject ...
— Escape and Other Essays • Arthur Christopher Benson
... bars," he went on with strange elation, "are nothing. The old queer instinct of asceticism within me, that made a preacher of an Epicurean and an athlete, has come back to its kingship. Its sublime authority is now supreme. I despise life, and have learned to live. There is no task so hard but that the king within ...
— The One Woman • Thomas Dixon
... them are devoted Catholics, but liable at times to lapse into intoxication. The Jesuits have a thriving mission among them, with a neat church, whose clear ringing bell sounds strangely enough in the mountain recesses. The strict asceticism of the fathers, their careful nursing of the sick and wounded, and their cordial co-operation in all objects of philanthropy, have enabled them to wield an immense influence among the Indians. The white miners also, ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various
... proceeded, "but I cannot believe in the gap which some people seem to see yawning between East and West. It is deplorable that the world should think that there is such a complete difference between East and West. It is usually said that self-denial, asceticism, sacrifice, negation are opposed to self-affirmation, individualism, self-realisation; but I do not believe in such a gap. I wish to destroy the idea of a gap. It is an idea which was obtained analytically. ...
— The Foundations of Japan • J.W. Robertson Scott
... a scout of civilization. In his day he led the vanguard. He found the prosperous part of the world given over to greed and gluttony. The so-called religious element was in partnership with fraud, superstition, ignorance, incompetence, and an asceticism like that of Simeon Stylites, ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... middle and bourgeois class. Mademoiselle Linders had gained her present position not less by her superior birth and education, than by that to which she would more willingly have attributed her elevation—a certain asceticism of life which she affected, an extra observance of fasts and vigils, which the good nuns looked upon with reverence, without caring to emulate such peculiar sanctity in their own persons. The rule was not a strict one, nor, though ...
— My Little Lady • Eleanor Frances Poynter
... Athens is succeeded by the island of Corfu, the cradle of the literary renaissance of Modern Hellenism, which again fades before the vision of Egypt, whence the earliest lights of civilization shone upon the land of the Greeks. Christianity in its extreme form of asceticism is brought forth from one of its strong citadels, Mt. Athos, the holy mountain of Greece, and a contrast is made between the "gleaming beauties of the world" and the utter absorption of the ascetic by the intangible world beyond. The vision of "Queen Hellas," ...
— Life Immovable - First Part • Kostes Palamas
... suppressed. The apostles were imprisoned, and the Jesus Christ of Krivoziersk was sent for to the town of Kostroma, that he might give account of himself, his visions, and his crimes. Ultimately he was condemned to a spell of confinement, and forced to perform the most humiliating duties. His asceticism, his many virtues, his fasting and prayers, the love which God had manifested for him—all were forgotten, and Israil, who had held the Queen of Heaven in his arms, was in future obliged to clean out the stables of the monastery of Makariev, to ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... conception of the goodness of life by drawing without limit upon his hopes of the other world. With the exception of a few poems like Andrea del Sarto, this is the unbroken tone of his poetry. Calvinism, asceticism, pessimism in any form, he rejects. He sustains his position not by argument, but by hope and assertion. It is a matter of temperament: he is optimistic because he was born so. Different from the serene optimism of Shakespeare's ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... large, and I am fearful lest, in attempting a rough and ready asceticism, I should exclude as wrong some elements which are in reality God-given. I feel that in the case of our affections and our longing for beauty. They are implanted in us, and tended and watered by One who is perfect Love and perfect Beauty. They easily lead us into sin, but that ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson
... impossible it was to expect that such a union could prove anything but disastrous when it was not a love match. So, whether partly to escape from a married life which jarred his susceptibilities, or entirely on account of his religious asceticism, Efflam left his wife and crossed to Brittany to lead the life of a religious hermit. One of the Breton songs gives the beginning of the story in a much more picturesque way. It relates how Enora, "beautiful as an angel," had many suitors, but ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... underlie even the extravagances of its creed or the marvellous stability of the complex fabric based upon its social code. It may seem to us to present in many of its aspects an almost unthinkable combination of spiritualistic idealism and of gross materialism, of asceticism and of sensuousness, of over-weening arrogance when it identifies the human self with the universal self and merges man in the Divinity and the Divinity in man, and of demoralizing pessimism when it preaches ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... the man attacked, seemed to him to be in any case unpardonable. He certainly could not live on terms of friendship with the Dean immediately after such a deed. His wife must be taken away and secluded, and purified by a long course of Germain asceticism. ...
— Is He Popenjoy? • Anthony Trollope |
