{"quotes":[{"text":"Wasn't that what Jesus said: do what I do? He was here as an example for us to follow. Same with all prophets. Didn't the prophets tell us to be like them? That's what's wrong with Christianity. They make Jesus and the prophets into icons, take them off of earth, and put them in heaven to worship them, so they're no longer accessible. You've taken a reality and made it into a worthless idol. Christians talk about the idolatry of other religions, but when they no longer live principles and just worship the people who taught them, that's exactly what they're doing.","author":"Daniel Suelo","tags":["2012","american-christianity","asceticism","christian-nation","do-as-god-would-do","hypocrisy","idolatry","poverty"],"id":3302,"author_id":"Daniel+Suelo"},{"text":"Mental discipline, prayer and remoteness from the world and its disturbing visions reduce temptation to a minimum, but they can never entirely abolish it. In medieval traditions, abbeys and convents were always considered to be expugnable centres of revolt against infernal dominion on earth. They became, accordingly, special targets. Satan, issuing orders at nightfall to his foul precurrers, was rumoured to dispatch to capital cities only one junior fiend. This solitary demon, the legend continues, sleeps at his post. There is no work for him; the battle was long ago won. But monasteries, those scattered danger points, become the chief objectives of nocturnal flight; the sky fills with the beat of sable wings as phalanx after phalanx streams to the attack, and the darkness crepitates with the splintering of a myriad lances against the masonry of asceticism.","author":"Patrick Leigh Fermor","tags":["asceticism","masochism","monastic-life","mythology"],"id":6789,"author_id":"Patrick+Leigh+Fermor"},{"text":"This is a nation that professes to be a Christian nation,' [Suelo] tells me, surveying his temporary kingdom. 'And yet it's basically illegal to live according to the teachings of Jesus.","author":"Mark Sundeen","tags":["2012","asceticism","christian-nation","poverty","suelo"],"id":37493,"author_id":"Mark+Sundeen"},{"text":"This kind of renunciation, in fact, has often been the strength, born of necessity, of the world's disinherited, of those who do not fit in with their surroundings or with their own body or with their own race or tradition and who hope, by means of renunciation, to assure for themselves a future world where, to use a Nietzschean expression, the inversion of all values will occur.","author":"Julius Evola","tags":["asceticism","buddhism","christianity","judaism","nietzsche","occident","religion","tradition"],"id":59085,"author_id":"Julius+Evola"},{"text":"Giving up alcohol is an asceticism for the modern do-gooder, drinking being, like sex, a pleasure that humans have always indulged in, involving a loss of self-control, the renunciation of which marks the renouncer as different and separate from other people. To drink, to get drunk, is to lower yourself on purpose for the sake of good fellowship. You abandon yourself, for a time, to life and fate. You allow yourself to become stupider and less distinct. Your boundaries become blurry: you open your self and feel connected to people around you. You throw off your moral scruples, and suspect it was only those scruples that prevented the feeling of connection before. You feel more empathy for your fellow, but at the same time, because you are drunk, you render yourself unable to help him; so, to drink is to say, I am a sinner, I have chosen not to help.","author":"Larissa MacFarquhar","tags":["asceticism","drinking"],"id":93271,"author_id":"Larissa+MacFarquhar"},{"text":"For two thousand years or more man has been subjected to a systematic effort to transform him into an ascetic animal. He remains a pleasure-seeking animal.","author":"Norman O. Brown","tags":["asceticism","pleasure","primacy-of-the-intellect"],"id":94328,"author_id":"Norman+O.+Brown"},{"text":"Does biblical psychology, then, merely ask us to value good things a little less? Does the Bible seek a reduction of guilt by an overall deflation of the currency of moral ideals, so we can live more comfortably with an uneasy conscience? That would exaggerate a valid point. Although the Bible holds that no finite relationship is of infinite value, it does not embrace an extreme ascetic view that the source of happiness lies essentially in the reduction of desire. Some ascetic strategies try to diminish desire and reduce all valuing so as not to allow any loss to become an overwhelming disappointment. According to this view, the less one values created goods, the happier one is.In contrast, life-affirming Christianity hopes that love, desire, and appreciation of limited values can be increased or decreased to the measure of their real proportional value. Jesus does not call for a stark reduction of all finite valuing merely as a preventative measure against disappointment. He calls for a love of good things with an awareness that they exist within the boundaries of birth and death, and are therefore under the judgment of the giver and source of all value (Matt. 6:19-21).","author":"Thomas C. Oden","tags":["asceticism","christianity","desire","jesus","the-bible","value"],"id":116316,"author_id":"Thomas+C.+Oden"},{"text":"It is a ridiculous thing for a man not to fly from his own badness, which is indeed possible, but to fly from other men's badness, which is impossible.","author":"Marcus Aurelius","tags":["asceticism","ethics","evil","morality","renunciation","stoic","stoicism"],"id":133872,"author_id":"Marcus+Aurelius"},{"text":"The rustic, the reader of novels, the pure ascetic: these three are truly happy men.","author":"Fernando Pessoa","tags":["asceticism","happiness","literature","reading"],"id":173923,"author_id":"Fernando+Pessoa"},{"text":"[N]othing is more easily corrupted than an artist.","author":"Friedrich Nietzsche","tags":["art","artist","asceticism","corruption"],"id":203887,"author_id":"Friedrich+Nietzsche"}],"pagination":{"page":1,"page_size":10,"total":19,"pages":2,"next":"?page=2\u0026page_size=10"}}