42 Quotes About Asceticism

Pleasure is not a need, but an incentive.

To chase pleasure is to be chased by pain.

The problem with pleasure is that it needs to be intermittent in order to retain its pleasantness.

It’s easy to open your eyes to the temptations of this world. Soon you forget how to close them. It’s equally easy to shut your eyes to the world and sit in a cave. Soon your senses become as dead as that of a corpse. Only the awakened ones know how to open and close their eyes naturally.

In ancient India, human being were simple. They would earn with their upper body (head and hands) and spend on their lower body (food, sex, travel). To break this circle and find God, technique was simple: Do fasting, abstain from sex and sit in a cave. Now you have a thousand such circles within your head. Techniques of body don’t work on you.

Sex is often an attempt to entertain oneself through one’s own genitals, through the use of someone else’s genitals.

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.

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.

Sex for pleasure is chewing gum for genitals.