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Asceticism   Listen
noun
Asceticism  n.  The condition, practice, or mode of life, of ascetics.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Asceticism" Quotes from Famous Books



... limbs and tail, or, indeed, of any portion of the body not necessary to life, does not mean the loss of the essential dog—not the loss of that which the lover of the dog loves. Already, that which is not to be seen or handled has become the more real. In ourselves, it is a capital truth, which asceticism, old or new, perverted or sane, has always recognized, that the mind is the man, and must be master, and the body the servant. Yet, historically, this creature, who by the self means not the body, ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby

... a parable the other day in a legend of the Greek Church which is worth repeating. That Church has two favourite saints—St. Cassianus, the type of monastic asceticism, and St. Nicholas, the type of genial, active, unselfish, laborious Christianity. St. Cassianus enters Heaven, and Christ says to him, 'What hast thou seen on earth, Cassianus?' 'I saw', he answered, 'a peasant floundering with his wagon in a marsh'. ...
— Standards of Life and Service • T. H. Howard

... 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 is represented as snatched up into heaven, where he receives the ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous

... to address him who had thus arrived at that recluse abode of the 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 conversation, asked him, 'Whence comest thou, O lotus-eyed ...
— The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Volume 1 • Kisari Mohan Ganguli

... 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. ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker

... last, to be 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 is the domain of the devil, the only safety lies in flight ...
— Mountain Meditations - and some subjects of the day and the war • L. Lind-af-Hageby

... devoted his later days to the pursuit of medicine proper, to which he brought a mind stored with luminous analogies from the lower animals. His very appearance held one. Tall, thin, erect, with an ascetic profile not unlike Cardinal Manning's, he represented that abstract form of asceticism which consists in absolute self-sacrifice to a mental ideas, not that which consists in religious abnegation. Three years of travel in Africa had tanned his skin for life. His long white hair, straight ...
— Hilda Wade - A Woman With Tenacity Of Purpose • Grant Allen

... Cluny, had transformed the Catholic world, but in this England had but little part. Starting as a monastic reformation, it had just succeeded in bringing the whole Church under monastic control. Henceforth the asceticism of the monk, his ideals in religion and worship, his type of thought and learning, were to be those of the official Church, from the papal throne to the country parsonage. It was for that age a true reformation. The combined influence of the two great temptations ...
— The History of England From the Norman Conquest - to the Death of John (1066-1216) • George Burton Adams

... and throwing some dust on the ashes of Mandaravati, causes the maiden to rise up alive, more beautiful than ever. Then the three quarrel about her, each claiming her as his own. The first says, "She is mine, for I preserved her ashes and resuscitated her by asceticism." The second says, "She belongs to me, for she was produced by the efficacy of sacred bathing-places." The third says, "She is my wife, for she was won by the ...
— Filipino Popular Tales • Dean S. Fansler

... noisome condition was mainly owing to the presence of various fakirs, who, though still alive, were in advanced stages of putrefaction. Most people are supposed to go easily and pleasantly to the devil, but these elected to do so by way of a charnel-house asceticism, and an elaborate system of self-torture. Some were suspended from the ceiling by a rope tied to their arms, some embedded in plaster, some stiffened in a circle, some permanently distorted into the shape of the letter S; some were head downwards, some in a cruciform position. It ...
— Devil-Worship in France - or The Question of Lucifer • Arthur Edward Waite

... Wordsworth's precepts are not in themselves either 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

... set of contemplative philosophers among the Hindus who practised an extreme asceticism ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood

... them 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 paid ...
— Heroes of Modern Europe • Alice Birkhead

... 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 ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford

... concerned, and that success also which is derived from action (sacrifices). Do thou, for serving the regenerate ones endeavour to attain success in penances. Those that are crowned with ascetic success, can, by virtue of that success, do whatever they list; do thou, therefore, practising asceticism realise all thy wishes.'" ...
— Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa Bk. 3 Pt. 1 • Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa

... salvation of the afflicted nuns, and he begged him to accompany him to the convent. This priest, whose name was Pierre Barre, was exactly the man whom Mignon needed in such a crisis. He was of melancholy temperament, and dreamed dreams and saw visions; his one ambition was to gain a reputation for asceticism and holiness. Desiring to surround his visit with the solemnity befitting such an important event, he set out for Loudun at the head of all his parishioners, the whole procession going on foot, in order to arouse interest and curiosity; but ...
— Celebrated Crimes, Complete • Alexandre Dumas, Pere

... its effect upon literary art, or in certain directions has more potently influenced the ideals and more profoundly given expression to the ethical and philosophic thought of the time. Secluded as his life was, it was one not of obscurity or of mere asceticism; on the contrary, it was rich in all the elements that make for a great reputation, and ever devoted to strenuous, elevating purpose, and to an ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord

... satisfaction for its highest aspirations, is but too likely to betake itself to an unhealthy and exciting superstition. Ashamed of its own long self-indulgence, it is but too likely to flee from itself into a morbid asceticism. Not having been taught its God-given and natural duties in the world, it is but too likely to betake itself, from the mere craving for action, to self-invented and unnatural duties out of the world. Ignorant of true science, yet craving ...
— Sanitary and Social Lectures and Essays • Charles Kingsley

... expectation of change which instantly follows the suspension of our voluntary activity. The terror of cloudless noon, the emerald of Polycrates, the awe of prosperity, the instinct which leads every generous soul to impose on itself tasks of a noble asceticism and vicarious virtue, are the tremblings of the balance of justice through the heart and mind ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson

... their religion had very little in common with my father and Don Andreis, or with the religion professed by them and by the priests and the devout laity of Turin. I had not been able to detect the slightest trace of that which in the language of asceticism is called unction. I know not why, but that grave and downcast aspect, enlivened only by a few occasional flashes of ponderous clerical wit, the atmosphere depressing as the plumbeus auster of Horace, in which I had been brought up under the rule of my priest,—all seemed unknown ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol 3 • Various

... us in his pages. His gallery of priests is for all time. Frei Pa[c,]o comes, with his velvet cap and gilt sword, 'mincing like a very sweet courtier'; Frei Narciso starves and studies, tinging his complexion to an artificial yellow in the hope that his hypocritical asceticism may win him a bishopric; the worldly courtier monk fences and sings and woos; the Lisbon priest, like his confessor one of Love's train, fares well on rabbits and sausages and good red wine, even as the portly ...
— Four Plays of Gil Vicente • Gil Vicente

... Marble Faun. "We all go 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

... dogmatic Medievalism, with its crassly materialistic view of the Eucharist; its insistence on the saving grace of asceticism and celibacy; and its scarcely veiled contempt for women, overwhelmed the original conception. Certain of the features of the ancient ritual indeed survive, but they are factors of confusion, rather than clues to enlightenment. Thus, while the Grail still ...
— From Ritual to Romance • Jessie L. Weston

... mild sensuality as the gustatio to a feast of reason, and had Omar Khayyam lived in our own day he would doubtless have agreed with a reverend Erlington and Bosworth Professor in the University of Cambridge who boldly asserts that the literature redolent of nothing but the glories of asceticism "deserves the credit due to goodness ...
— The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Jr. (The Rubiyt of Omar Khayym Jr.) • Wallace Irwin

... or finds expression only in symbols that become finally but the basis of superstition, in order that it may concentrate attention upon laws that determine the happiness or misery of men upon this earth. Its lessons have never tended to the essential selfishness of asceticism, which is so prominent a feature in Brahmanism and Buddhism, and from which Christianity and Islamism have not been exempt. Its injunction has never been, "Leave the world to itself that you may save your own soul," but rather, "Do your duty in the world that you may be happier and ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 3 of 8 • Various

... thing that John the Baptist has not often attracted the notice of musical composers in search of a subject. No more remarkable personage, with one great exception, figures in Bible history than he whom the Master described as 'more than a prophet.' His striking appearance, stern asceticism, wrathful denunciation of 'wickedness in high places,' and tragic fate,—not to speak of his relation to One whose shoes he professed himself unworthy to loose,—throw his form into bold relief, and mark him as of heroic proportions. Yet, save that he holds a subordinate place in a very limited number ...
— The Standard Oratorios - Their Stories, Their Music, And Their Composers • George P. Upton

... Anglo-Saxon readers? No—that, surely, were unworthy of him. That surely must be considered unthinkable! Is it that, being himself of an abnormally nervous and sensitive temperament, he forces himself by a kind of intellectual asceticism to rush upon the pricks of a physiological brutality as the sort of penance a conscientious writer has to pay; has to pay to the merciless ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys

... 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

... 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 that life ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol

... 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

... 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

... 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 medieval ideal that ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith

... 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 ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 03 • Various

... bygone days we were ready to fight in defence of the Holy Sepulchre. Kings and great nobles have endowed us with a large number of estates, in order to maintain us as an army against Islam; and as such we do our duty. But to affect asceticism is out of date ...
— A Knight of the White Cross • G.A. Henty

... lofty and more pure, which were to rule a great part of the world for two thousand years—afterwards, alas, to decline in their turn; and men were about to throw themselves passionately into renunciation, asceticism and ...
— Egypt (La Mort De Philae) • Pierre Loti

... cross-roads, and the queer fact that Christianity had shown this weird harshness to the suicide. For Christianity had shown a wild encouragement of the martyr. Historic Christianity was accused, not entirely without reason, of carrying martyrdom and asceticism to a point, desolate and pessimistic. The early Christian martyrs talked of death with a horrible happiness. They blasphemed the beautiful duties of the body: they smelt the grave afar off like a field of flowers. All ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton

... courage in 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, ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley

... effeminate grace, Titian the 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 the elegant shapes of a London drawing-room; ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 4, February, 1858 • Various

... 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, ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence

... will always 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 ...
— Lover or Friend • Rosa Nouchette Carey

... is purpose, 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 of the ...
— Chapters of Opera • Henry Edward Krehbiel

... 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 this, ...
— Gods and Fighting Men • Lady I. A. Gregory

... idea that produced the wild asceticism prevalent in the Christian Church during the Middle Age and previously, the fearful macerations, scourgings, crucifixions of the flesh. It should be understood that, though some of the phraseology ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger

... A decided asceticism is the ethical tendency of this dialogue. It is markedly opposed to the view of the Protagoras. Still greater is the opposition between it and the two Erotic dialogues, Phaedrus and Symposium, where Bonum ...
— Moral Science; A Compendium of Ethics • Alexander Bain

... would come across some virile atheist's proclamation of the feeble, mattoid character of the religion in question, as illustrated by its quietist saints, the Quakers, the Tolstoyans, and non-resisters in general. When he had cooled down, he would run into a denunciation of the asceticism of Christianity, the monastic system, hair-shirts, and so on. Then he would come across a sweeping condemnation of its sensual luxuriousness, its bejewelled chalices, its pompous rituals, the extravagance of its archbishops, ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West

... 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

... 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 ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton

... was no blind asceticism; it was simply a choosing of the best. It was not a denial of love, but on the contrary a consecration of love. Some day Thyrsis would meet the woman he was to cleave to, and he would expect her to come to him a virgin; and he must honor her as much—he must save ...
— Love's Pilgrimage • Upton Sinclair

... without, the scenery within became continually more cheerless and terrific; and learning to dread in a future world the prolonged operation of that principle of cruelty under which he groaned in this, he sought to avert its everlasting action by practising upon himself the expiatory rigors of asceticism. The sequel of his melancholy history we shall have ...
— Memoirs of the Court of Queen Elizabeth • Lucy Aikin

... to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge. Has not Christianity declaimed against private property, against marriage, against the State? Has it not preached in the place of these, charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification of the ...
— The Communist Manifesto • Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

... 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 silky ...
— Poor Relations • Honore de Balzac

... valley,—the Flatheads and Pend' d'Oreilles. Many of 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, who have often lain sick ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 18, No. 106, August, 1866 • Various

... 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 ...
— The Divine Comedy, Volume 1, Hell [The Inferno] • Dante Alighieri

... This object should accordingly be scrutinized. Self-sacrifice is noble if its end is noble, but become reprehensible when its object is petty or undeserving. Omit or overlook that word for, and self-sacrifice loses its exalted character. It sinks into asceticism, one often most degrading of moral aberrations. In asceticism we prize self-sacrifice for its own sake. We hunt out what we value most; we judge what would most completely fulfill our needs; and then we ...
— The Nature of Goodness • George Herbert Palmer

... were limits to the advantages of too eccentric an asceticism in diet. No doubt the strange meals he prepared for himself on his oil-stove had proved stimulating by their very strangeness; but when the first shock and surprise of them had worn off he no longer obtained that agreeable result. Perhaps there was something ...
— The Divine Fire • May Sinclair

... Sister Mabel explained with some complacency, reserved for the lodging of the noble ladies who came to London as guests of my Lord Cardinal, or with petitions to the King; and certainly there was nothing of asceticism about them; but they were an advance even on those at Fotheringay. St. Helena discovering the Cross was carved over the ample chimney, and the hangings were of Spanish leather, with all the wondrous history of Santiago's relics, including ...
— Two Penniless Princesses • Charlotte M. Yonge

... see them 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 as good service ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. IV, No. 22, Aug., 1859 • Various

... irony of fate that the mansion which had been assigned as a permanent dwelling-place to the woman condemned to a life of asceticism, had been originally fitted up as a fairy love-palace for a beautiful creature, possessed of an unquenchable thirst for the fleeting joys of this earthly existence. Over the richly carved mantelpiece in Blanka's sleeping-room was what looked ...
— Manasseh - A Romance of Transylvania • Maurus Jokai

... 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 ...
— Tales from the Arabic Volumes 1-3 • John Payne

... 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 ...
— Obiter Dicta • Augustine Birrell

... practices are what he calls "ossified organisms." Why did he set up a lay monk as a model for 20th century Christians who long to devote their lives to uplifting their fellow-men? Did he not note the artificiality of asceticism—the waste of energy that comes with fasts and mortification of the flesh and morbidly pious excitement? When asked these questions by his followers he replied that he did not mean to preach asceticism as a rule for all; but that in individual ...
— The Saint • Antonio Fogazzaro

... abbe, "that I do not like monks, that I distrust their humility and abhor their lives of inaction. But this man spoke in so sad and kindly a manner; he was so filled with a sense of his duty; he seemed so ill, so emaciated by asceticism, so truly penitent, that he won my heart. In his looks and in his talk were bright flashes which betrayed a powerful intellect, indefatigable energy, and indomitable perseverance. We spent two whole hours together, and I was so moved by what he said ...
— Mauprat • George Sand

... 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. ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton

... much that I deem holy, and for that I fear no laughter. I am ready to defy ridicule. But if I talk to you of the asceticism of Stylites, and tell you that I admire it, and will imitate it, will you not then laugh at me? Of course we ridicule what we think is false. But ridicule will run off truth like water from a duck's back. Come, explain to me this about ...
— The Bertrams • Anthony Trollope

... but retained its primitive and magical character. The object of an ancient Indian sacrifice was partly to please the gods but still more to coerce them by certain acts and formulae[6]. Secondly all Hindus lay stress on asceticism and self-mortification, as a means of purifying the soul and obtaining supernatural powers. They have a conviction that every man who is in earnest about religion and even every student of philosophy ...
— Hinduism and Buddhism, Vol I. (of 3) - An Historical Sketch • Charles Eliot

... with beautiful things and beautiful thoughts tend to develop in us that healthy kind of asceticism so requisite to every workable scheme of greater happiness for the individual and the plurality: self-restraint, choice of aims, consistent and thorough-paced subordination of the lesser interest to the greater; above all, what sums up asceticism as ...
— Laurus Nobilis - Chapters on Art and Life • Vernon Lee

... Vittoria's sentiments. His nature, profoundly and simply religious from the outset, assumed a tone of deeper piety and habitual devotion during the advance of years. Vittoria Colonna's influence at this period strengthened his Christian emotions, which remained untainted by asceticism or superstition. They were further united by another bond, which was their common interest in poetry. The Marchioness of Pescara was justly celebrated during her lifetime as one of the most natural writers ...
— The Life of Michelangelo Buonarroti • John Addington Symonds

... 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 ...
— Outlines of Greek and Roman Medicine • James Sands Elliott

... among the 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 had ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 5 • Richard F. Burton

... just to speak of beauty in matters of scent and taste, to talk not only of beautiful skies and beautiful sounds but of beautiful beer and beautiful cheese! The balance as between asceticism and sensuality comes in, it seems to me, if we remember that to drink well one must not have drunken for some time, that to see well one's eye must be clear, that to make love well one must be fit and gracious and sweet and disciplined from top to toe, that the finest sense of all—the joyous ...
— First and Last Things • H. G. Wells

... and in his follower and boon-companion, Panurge, one can discern the spirit of the Renaissance—expansive, humorous, powerful, and, above all else, alive. Rabelais' book is the incarnation of the great reaction of his epoch against the superstitious gloom and the narrow asceticism of the Middle Ages. He proclaims, in his rich re-echoing voice, a new conception of the world; he denies that it is the vale of sorrows envisioned by the teachers of the past; he declares that it is abounding in glorious ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey

... apparatus of the Church 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 from all ...
— Phases of Faith - Passages from the History of My Creed • Francis William Newman

... ceremonial of the 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 is raised to the contemplation of the Eternal ...
— Philip Gilbert Hamerton • Philip Gilbert Hamerton et al

... I think it is R.H. Hutton who remarks that it 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 Patmore constitutes himself ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell

... 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

... 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; ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy

... 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 ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch

... 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, yet not ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer

... certainly not his reverence. While to her, his views on all that seeks to render the actual life attractive and embellished, through the accomplishments of Muse and Grace, would have seemed the narrow-minded asceticism of a bigot. But now, amid the direful calamities of the time, the beauty of both natures became visible to each. To the eyes of Isaura tenderness became predominant in the monastic self-denial of Raoul. ...
— The Parisians, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton

... Queen was satisfied, and the 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 ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various

... 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 sometimes almost superhuman. He knows the ridges and chasms of ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)

... mentions 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 ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Volume 7, Issue 42, April, 1861 • Various

... pottle in the Hall," was the reply, and the monk, with a laugh savouring little of asceticism, said he would seek him there, and accordingly crossed the court to the noble Hall, with its lofty dark marble columns, and the Round Table of King Arthur suspended at the upper end. The governor of the Castle had risen from his meal long ago, but the garrison in the piping ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... 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 ...
— The Queen's Twin and Other Stories • Sarah Orne Jewett

... doubt sincere and pious worthies. They gave their work a reflection of Heaven; they too reflected their own soul in the faces they depicted; but though they gave them a wonderful stamp of art, they could only infuse into them the semblance of the soul beginning the practice of Christian asceticism; they could only represent men still detained, like themselves, in the outer chambers of those Castles of the Soul of which Saint Theresa speaks, and not in the Hall where, in the centre, Christ sits and ...
— The Cathedral • Joris-Karl Huysmans

... fate 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 such things ...
— They Call Me Carpenter • Upton Sinclair

... no less than eleven hundred and forty, almost the proportions of a small epic. But in the brilliance and vigour of their language, their picturesque style, and the new joy that, in spite of their asceticism, burns throughout them, they gave an impulse of immense force towards the development of Christian literature. In merely technical quality they are superior to any poetry of the time, Claudian alone excepted; in their fullness of life, in the exultant tone which kindles and sustains ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail

... Labor was used for penance and for ascetic purposes. Often it was employed for useful results and with beneficial effect on useful arts. The purpose, however, was to ward off the vices of leisure. The ascetic temper and taste made labor sweet, so long as asceticism ruled the mores of the age.[368] Labor for economic production was not appreciated by the church. The production of wealth was not a religious purpose. It was even discouraged, since disapproval of wealth and luxury was one of the deep controlling principles ...
— Folkways - A Study of the Sociological Importance of Usages, Manners, Customs, Mores, and Morals • William Graham Sumner

... phyrroneste, as Louis XVIII., such tendencies were likely to spread themselves through all ranks of society—to permeate from the very highest to the very lowest classes: and not all the lately acquired asceticism of the monarch, his successor, nor all the efforts of the Jesuits could restrain or control the tendencies of the etudiants en droit. What the law-students were antecedently and subsequent to 1825, we know from the Physiologie de l'Homme de Loi; and it is not to ...
— The International Weekly Miscellany, Vol. 1, No. 7 - Of Literature, Art, and Science, August 12, 1850 • Various

... superior judgment," said Vane gravely. "But I've been commissioned to—er—go and find myself, so to speak, by one who must be obeyed. And in the intervals between periods of cold asceticism when I deal with the highbrows, and other periods when I tackle subjects of national importance first hand, I feel that I shall ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile

... surrounded by accomplished and witty hedonists, and happiest when adding to his collection of pictures, jewels, and sculpture, in particular did the priest rebuke. Savonarola stood for the spiritual ideals and asceticism of the Baptist, Christ, and S. Paul; Lorenzo, in his eyes, made only ...
— A Wanderer in Florence • E. V. Lucas

... metaphorical and spiritual sense.[7] In the sexual sphere sublimation is of vital importance because it comes into question throughout the whole of life, and our relation to it must intimately affect our conception of morality. The element of athletic asceticism which is a part of all virility, and is found even—indeed often in a high degree—among savages, has its main moral justification as one aid to sublimation. Throughout life sublimation acts by transforming some part at all events ...
— Little Essays of Love and Virtue • Havelock Ellis

... education, the aim of the one being chiefly to strengthen the will, and that of the other to guide the desires. The principal examples of the first are the Spartan and stoical systems of antiquity, and, with some modifications, the asceticism of the Middle Ages. The object of these systems was to enable men to endure pain, to repress manifest and acknowledged desires, to relinquish enjoyments, to establish an absolute empire over their emotions. On the other hand, there is ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)

... 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 ...
— John Caldigate • Anthony Trollope

... corner on the sea shore, as Aidan ruled Northumbria from Holy Island. There he lived among his brethren, of whom he gathered a great company. There was no provision for his mensa, for he was "a lover of poverty." He practised austere asceticism. Yet he was an active missionary. He travelled incessantly through the diocese, but always on foot, visiting the towns, and roaming about the country parts, surrounded by his disciples. He preached to the people whom he met on his way.[76] Nothing could be more unlike ...
— St. Bernard of Clairvaux's Life of St. Malachy of Armagh • H. J. Lawlor

... gloom; to remain in life when 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 to the wildest excitement ...
— A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder • James De Mille

... 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 to such a pitch that the people crowding to listen to his fiery speeches, ...
— Belgium - From the Roman Invasion to the Present Day • Emile Cammaerts

... philosophic progress is in the attempt to find the hidden truth. To the Sceptic there was no truth, and there could be no progress. As progress is a law in the evolution of the human race, so Scepticism as a philosophy could never be a permanent growth, any more than asceticism in religion can be a lasting influence. Both of them are only outgrowths. As the foundation principles of Scepticism were opposed to anything like real growth, it was a system that could never originate anything. Pyrrho ...
— Sextus Empiricus and Greek Scepticism • Mary Mills Patrick

... 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

... ideas of holiness. It is no longer asceticism, no longer the mystical trance, no longer the "fussiness," with which the early Christian reproached the Jew, which still haunts all the religions of taboo and merit, and even Christianity in some forms. Where men think of holiness as freedom from sin, the negative conception reacts ...
— The Jesus of History • T. R. Glover

... 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 nothing is less common ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet

... peculiar virtues, and the consideration for its weakness which forms one of the brightest pages of modern civilization. With the spread of Christianity, there was for centuries no improvement. The low standard by which the Jews had judged the sex exerted a strong and an evil influence. The spirit of asceticism, rapidly gaining ground in the Roman Church, pointed out absolute chastity in both sexes as the only praiseworthy condition of life, made marriage only an excusable sin, and recognized in that relationship, merely its ...
— A History of English Prose Fiction • Bayard Tuckerman

... Its message is that the cause of weakness lies in the inner life of the soul. It is in some break of harmony with the Good, some dissociation from the True. In the commencement of the poem we find that the God Shiva, the Good, had remained for long lost in the self-centred solitude of his asceticism, detached from the world of reality. And then Paradise was lost. But Kumara-Sambhava is the poem of Paradise Regained. How was it regained? When Sati, the Spirit of Reality, through humiliation, suffering, and penance, won the Heart of Shiva, the Spirit of Goodness. And thus, from the union of ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore

... learned 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, in certain dogmas, ...
— The Kingdom of God is within you • Leo Tolstoy

... big with the message that wickedness was for the young and must not be meddled with by any one over thirty—the age at which, till now, he had always proposed to himself to marry some rich girl and settle down to the rigid asceticism of Neapolitan ...
— A Spirit in Prison • Robert Hichens

... who made sensuality beautiful, ugliness seductive, and the sin-stained soul attractive, renounced all and followed the Monk of San Marco—sensuality and asceticism at the last are one. When the procession headed for the Piazza Signoria, where the fagots were piled high, Sandro stood afar off and his heart was wrung in anguish, as he saw the glare of the flames gild the eastern sky. And this anguish was not for the friends ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard

... 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 souls; and what ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No 3, September 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... practical. The great object of the mission of Jesus was to "save His people from their sins;" [198:4] and the tendency of all the teachings of the New Testament is to promote sanctification. But the holiness of the gospel is not a shy asceticism which sits in a cloister in moody melancholy, so that its light never shines before men; but a generous consecration of the heart to God, which leads us to confess Christ in the presence of gainsayers, and which prompts us to delight in works ...
— The Ancient Church - Its History, Doctrine, Worship, and Constitution • W.D. [William Dool] Killen

... life onwards Gregory seems to have suffered from bad health, due in part, probably, to his extreme asceticism while living in his monastery. During the last few years of his life he was in continual pain from gout, which makes his activity and his achievements still more astonishing. For long he was confined to his bed altogether. He died on March 12th, 604. In contrast to the enthusiasm with which ...
— St. Gregory and the Gregorian Music • E. G. P. Wyatt

... to face once more with the old problem. His life was sworn to the service of the people. He had crowded his days with thoughts and deeds and plans for them. Almost every personal luxury and pleasure had been abnegated. He had found a sort of fierce delight in the asceticism of his daily life, in the unflinching firmness with which he had barred the gates which might lead him into smoother and happier ways. To-night he was beset with a sudden fear. He rose and looked at himself in the glass. ...
— A Lost Leader • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... 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

... in the highest sense of the word, an intellectual race; but they never allowed the mind to tyrannize over the body. Spiritual perfection, accompanied by corporeal feebleness, was the invention of asceticism; and the Greeks were never ascetics. Diogenes might scorn superfluous luxuries, but if he ever rolled and tumbled his tub about as Rabelais says he did, it is clear that the victory of spirit over body formed no part of his theory ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske

... thing—the choicest gift of God. Andrea, my man here, is abstemious to the last degree; not, I am glad to say, from conviction or ill-health—it is the same thing—but because he is incurably desirous of saving my money. What is the consequence? You can taste his self-imposed asceticism in the very ZABBAGLIONE, for which I must really apologize! It speaks to the eye, but not to the heart. Let us hope the coffee will be ...
— South Wind • Norman Douglas

... monasticism, which was then in the ascendant throughout Europe. "The new monks," says Dr. Cosmo Innes, "of the reformed rule of St. Benedict or canons of St. Augustine, pushing aside the poor lapsarian Culdees, won the veneration of the people by their zealous teaching and asceticism.... The church, too, with all its dues and pertinents, was bestowed on the monastery and its patron saint for ever, reserving only a pittance for a poor priest to serve the cure, or sometimes allowing the monks to serve it by one of their own brethren. William the Lion gave thirty-three ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story

... hands on, and even winked at their stealing gold off his dress, to the great wrath of a second wife, the imperious Constance of Provence, who, coming from the more luxurious and corrupt south, hated and despised the roughness and asceticism of her husband. She was a fierce and passionate woman, and brought an element of cruelty into the court. In this reign the first instance of persecution to the death for heresy took place. The victim had been the queen's confessor; but so far ...
— History of France • Charlotte M. Yonge

... 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 ...
— Letters to His Friends • Forbes Robinson

... one hand, and in the other a 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; ...
— Hodge and His Masters • Richard Jefferies

... 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 ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot

... of these men can best be explained when one considers certain similarities between theological asceticism and scientific asceticism. And it is the duty of the freethinker clearly to point out why this confusion has arisen. During the ages of faith, the world beheld a swarm of men and women who retired from the grim realities of a world which at that time was made abhorrent ...
— The Necessity of Atheism • Dr. D.M. Brooks

... several fundamental changes in the process of adaptation to their new environment. An enervating climate did its work in slaking their energies; but more radical still was the change wrought by the contrast of poverty and abundance, enforced asceticism and luxury, presented by the old and new home. The restless, tireless shepherds became a sedentary, agricultural people; the abstemious nomads,—spare, sinewy, strangers to indulgence—became a race of rulers, revelling in luxury, ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple

... 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 language of Whitefield—the ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... and somewhat prevalent idea of godliness and poverty has absolutely no basis for its existence, and the sooner we get away from it the better. It had its birth in the same way that the idea of asceticism came into existence, when the idea prevailed that there was necessarily a warfare between the flesh and the spirit. It had its origin therefore in the minds of those who had a distorted, a one-sided view of life. True godliness is in a sense the same as true ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine

... state of mind of the Anglican bishops when they saw 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 some already existing ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier

... by English Churchmen. Their piety was of a type more frequent perhaps in the Church of England than in some other communions, very serious and devout, but wholly free from all gloom and moroseness; tinged in some instances, as in Dodwell, Ken, and Hooper, with asceticism, but serene and bright, and guarded against extravagance and fanaticism by culture, social converse, and sound reading. Such men could not fail to adorn the faith they professed, and do honour to the Church in which they had been nurtured. At the same ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton

... at which is seen either too obviously or with too much difficulty. Nothing is worth doing or well done which is not done fairly easily, and some little deficiency of effort is more pardonable than any very perceptible excess; for virtue has ever erred rather on the side of self-indulgence than of asceticism, and well-being has ever advanced through the ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler

... he develops in all its terrific meaning. To be a Christian, he tells them, is to crucify the body, to kill the animal passions, to live the pure life of the spirit, and, in short, to practise every austerity of asceticism. ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote

... can never pall, a vision of youth 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 into Wicklow to plough the fields. His name is Phil Langan; ...
— The Miraculous Revenge - Little Blue Book #215 • Bernard Shaw

... kind Prince, as he was—especially when the ladies were young and pretty. You surely did not expect to find an anchorite in a slashing Colonel of Fusileers—in perfect health, age, twenty-five. Not a grain of asceticism ever entered, you know, in the composition of "Farmer George's" big sons; York and Clarence, they were no saints; neither were they suspected of asceticism; not they, they knew better. And should royal Edward, within your sight, ...
— Picturesque Quebec • James MacPherson Le Moine

... between the self-denial, which has no other aim than mere self-mortification, and that, which is exercised to secure greater good to ourselves and others. The first is the foundation of monasticism, penances, and all other forms of asceticism; the latter, only, is that ...
— A Treatise on Domestic Economy - For the Use of Young Ladies at Home and at School • Catherine Esther Beecher

... symmetrical development of the limbs is an 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 Tribes and Castes of the Central Provinces of India - Volume IV of IV - Kumhar-Yemkala • R.V. Russell

... death by Old Testaments, and our Lord was killed like a felon by the law, which He came to repeal. I was thinking about Joseph Bullar's doctrine after I went to bed, founded on what I cannot but think a blasphemous asceticism, which has obtained in the world ever so long, and which is disposed to curse, hate, and undervalue the world altogether. Why should we? What we see here of this world is but an expression of God's ...
— The Bed-Book of Happiness • Harold Begbie

... history of asceticism proves this to be only too true. The Church, as well as Puritanism, has fought the flesh as something evil; it had to be subdued and hidden at all cost. The result of this vicious attitude is only now beginning to be recognized by modern thinkers ...
— Anarchism and Other Essays • Emma Goldman

... the cord in His hand, sitting as an ascetic in contemplation, it means that He is the supreme ideal of the ascetic life, and that men who come especially under His influence must pass out of home, out of family, out of the normal ties of evolution, and give themselves to a life of asceticism, to a life of renunciation, to share, however feebly, in that mighty yoga by which the ...
— Avataras • Annie Besant

... woman's natural tendency towards asceticism, self-extinction, self-abnegation. All through life she had made painful efforts to understand and follow out her duty. Ratcliffe knew her weak point when he attacked her from this side. Like all great orators and advocates, he was an actor; the more effective because ...
— Democracy An American Novel • Henry Adams

... could 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, Vol. XVII, No. 99, March, 1876 • Various

... brother-king, and cropped himself as closely as a monk, to the great sorrow of all the gallants 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 head-dress, 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 ...
— Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds • Charles Mackay

... always inconsistent. He contrived to pay regularly, whatever his own circumstances were, a pension of one hundred livres a year to a maternal aunt who had been kind to him in childhood. Nor was his asceticism a sham. He might have turned his gift into laced coats and chateaux as easily as Voltaire, had he not held it too sacred to be bartered away ...
— Among My Books - First Series • James Russell Lowell

... A.H. 105-125 (724-743), a wise and discreet ruler with an inclination to avarice and asceticism. According to some, the Ommiades produced only three statesmen, Mu'awayah, Abd al-Malik and Hisham; and the reign of the latter was the end of sage ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 7 • Richard F. Burton

... cannot be paralleled in ancient Greece, only they will there be seen, as it were, in their earlier and simpler forms. Traces of all the things that seem most un-Greek can be found somewhere in Greek literature: voluptuousness, asceticism, the worship of knowledge, the contempt for knowledge, atheism, pietism, the religion of serving the world and the religion of turning away from the world: all these and almost all other points of view one can think of are represented somewhere ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various

... were that it was to be of a certain length (later it was specified that it should reach the heels, talaris), and that it should be closed in front, but there was great licence as to colour; the 'black' or 'subfusc' prescribed by the Laudian Statutes is the result of the asceticism of the Reformation, and was unknown in Oxford before the sixteenth century. We have in the wills of students and in the inventories of their properties, abundant evidence that our mediaeval predecessors ...
— The Oxford Degree Ceremony • Joseph Wells

... 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 ...
— England of My Heart—Spring • Edward Hutton

... Oriental sentiment. The cults of Asia and Egypt bridged the gap between the old religions and Christianity, and in such a way as to make the triumph of Christianity an evolution, not a revolution. The Great Mother and Attis, with self-consecration, enthusiasm, and asceticism; Isis and Serapis, with the ideals of communion and purification; Baal, the omnipotent dweller in the far-off heavens; Jehovah, the jealous God of the Hebrews, omniscient and omnipresent; Mithra, deity of ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont

... so far as it goes beyond what is amusing and Gilbertian, is the statement of a kind of arid soul-culture more sterile than that of any cloister, the soul-culture of the scientist who thinks he has found out, and can master, the soul. It is a new asceticism, a denial of nature, a suicide of the senses which may lead to some literal suicide such as that in Rosmersholm, or may feed the brain on some air unbreathable by the body, as in When we Dead Awaken. It is the old idea of self-sacrifice creeping back under cover of a new idea of self-intensification; ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons

... and the imperative inner voice urging her to solitary self-discipline and prayer. So we may say that in the beginning of the life of the Spirit, as history shows it to us, if disillusion marks the first moment, some measure of asceticism, of world-refusal and painful self-schooling, is likely to mark ...
— The Life of the Spirit and the Life of To-day • Evelyn Underhill

... N. asceticism, puritanism, sabbatarianism[obs3]; cynicism|!, austerity; total abstinence; nephalism[obs3]. mortification, maceration, sackcloth and ashes, flagellation; penance &c. 952; fasting &c. 956; martyrdom. ascetic; anchoret[obs3], ...
— Roget's Thesaurus

... to asceticism. He ate largely and without much discrimination. His variously shaped and coloured glasses were not merely for display. When the door had closed behind the Mayoress and her two companions, he settled himself with an audible sigh, and for a few moments ...
— Denzil Quarrier • George Gissing

... expect you to see what amount of wisdom it contains. You follow one extreme, and we the other. I don't say that a middle course exists. The history of mankind shows our painful efforts to find one, but they have invariably resolved themselves into asceticism, or laxity, acting and reacting. The moral question is, if a naughty little man, by reason of his naughtiness, releases himself from foolishness, does a foolish little man, by reason of his ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith

... of warfare that morality always presents itself to Browning. It is not a mere equilibrium of qualities—the measured, self-contained, statuesque ethics of the Greeks, nor the asceticism and self-restraint of Puritanism, nor the peaceful evolution of Goethe's artistic morality: it is valour in the battle of life. His code contains no negative commandments, and no limitations; but he bids each man let out all the power that is within him, ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones

... 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 and hopeless contradiction which is involved ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton

... of decent, semi-educated families, and for such society he was altogether unfitted. The licence of the streets but seldom allured him. After his twenty-fourth year he was proof against the decoys of venal pleasure, and lived a life of asceticism exceedingly rare in young and lonely men. When Christian Moxey returned to London and took the house at Notting Hill, which he henceforth occupied together with his sister, a possibility of social intercourse at length appeared. Indeed it was a substantial gain to sit from time ...
— Born in Exile • George Gissing

... persons call a 'vocation.' It was not to disappear from the world for ever that she went there, and it was not in order to be alone with her sorrow, though that would have been a natural and human impulse; nor was it because she felt herself drawn to an existence of asceticism and mystic meditation. ...
— The White Sister • F. Marion Crawford

... acted as the late Duke's envoy to the French court, had frequented the Baron d'Holbach's drawing-room and familiarised himself with the views of the Encyclopaedists; though it was clear that he valued their teachings chiefly as an argument against asceticism. ...
— The Valley of Decision • Edith Wharton

... things, I put what we may call certain Christian virtues, renunciation, resignation, sympathy with suffering, and the desire to relieve sufferers. But out of those things spring very bad ones, useless renunciations, asceticism for its own sake, mortification of the flesh with nothing to follow, no corresponding gain that is, and that awful and terrible disease which devastated England some centuries ago, and from which by heredity of spirit we suffer now, Puritanism. That was a dreadful plague, ...
— The Best Ghost Stories • Various

... violence, directed there, as elsewhere, against the tax-receivers. The riot was easily suppressed, and for some weeks yet, the regular round of studious monotony in the young lieutenant's life was not disturbed except as his poverty made his asceticism more rigorous. "I have no other resource but work," he wrote to his mother; "I dress but once in eight days [Sunday parade?]; I sleep but little since my illness; it is incredible. I retire at ten, and rise at four in the morning. I take but one meal a ...
— The Life of Napoleon Bonaparte - Vol. I. (of IV.) • William Milligan Sloane



Words linked to "Asceticism" :   self-discipline, school of thought, nonindulgence, self-control, ism, ascesis, philosophical system, philosophy, monasticism



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