A physical shortcoming could produce a kind of mental excess. The process, it seemed, was reversible. Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism.
Quotes about asceticism (5 Quotes)
They had both noticed that a life of dissipation sometimes gave to a face the look of gaunt suffering spirituality that a life of asceticism was supposed to give and quite often did not.
The principle of asceticism never was, nor ever can be, consistently pursued by any living creature. Let but one tenth part of the inhabitants of the earth pursue it consistently, and in a day's time they will have turned it into a Hell.
For most men, and most circumstances, pleasure tangible material prosperity in this world is the safest test of virtue. Progress has ever been through the pleasures rather than through the extreme sharp virtues, and the most virtuous have leaned to excess rather than to asceticism.
The strongest argument for the unmaterialistic character of American life is ... that we tolerate conditions that are, from a materialistic point of view, intolerable ... the food we eat, the cramped apartments ... the crowded subways.... American life, in large cities, at any rate, is a perpetual assault of the senses and the nerves it is out of asceticism, out of unworldliness, precisely, that we bear it.