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ascetic
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  • ...the Manichaeans believed that the world and all matter were created by nefarious forces, and that the only way to battle them was through asceticism and a pure life.   (source)
    asceticism = the practice of extreme self-denial
  • I've always known that under that ascetic look of yours you were a plain, crude sensualist who sought nothing from a woman except an animal satisfaction which I pride myself on not having given you.   (source)
    ascetic = extremely self-denying
  • She lay for a day in Muller's Funeral Chapel in an ebony and silver casket, her lean and severe profile made even more ascetic by the four large candles set at the four corners of the casket.   (source)
    ascetic = severely plain  (without adornment)
  • But I am no longer the one I was, I am no ascetic any more, I am not a priest any more, I am no Brahman any more.   (source)
    ascetic = someone who practices self-denial
  • He had lank, unruly hair and the gray, meager complexion of an ascetic.   (source)
  • Instil into him an overweening asceticism and then, when you have separated his sexuality from all that might humanise it, weigh in on him with it in some much more brutal and cynical form.   (source)
    asceticism = the practice of extreme self-denial (often to encourage spiritual growth)
  • In any case, the austere, not to say ascetic life of Joseph Grand was, in the last analysis, a guarantee against any anxiety in this respect.   (source)
    ascetic = practicing self-denial
  • Living rather ascetically, travelling third-class ... and penalizing himself for any extravagances, he maintained a qualified financial independence.   (source)
    ascetically = in the manner of someone who practices self-denial
  • he could not forget the cool ascetic hours in the laboratory   (source)
    ascetic = relating to self-denial (of comfort and luxury)
  • However it was, the Dansker in his ascetic way rather took to Billy.   (source)
    ascetic = severely plain (without decoration)
  • He was pleased to think that his shaven face gave him the look of a priest, and in his youth he had possessed an ascetic air which added to the impression.   (source)
    ascetic = suggesting self-denial
  • Love, say the ascetics, reveals our shameful kinship with the beasts.   (source)
    ascetics = people who practices self-denial
  • He had sunken cheeks, a yellow complexion, a straight back, an ascetic aspect, and, with his arms dropped, the palms of hands outwards, resembled an idol.   (source)
    ascetic = like someone who practices self-denial (especially to encourage spiritual growth)
  • the asceticism that deadens the senses   (source)
    asceticism = self-denial
  • Romance and Asceticism ... are equally unreal in the great Philistine world.   (source)
    asceticism = the practice of self-denial (especially to encourage spiritual growth)
  • Hester sought not to acquire anything beyond a subsistence, of the plainest and most ascetic description, for herself, and a simple abundance for her child.   (source)
    ascetic = basic (without luxury -- as of someone who practices self-denial)
  • it is the law of the ascetic.   (source)
    ascetic = someone who practices self-denial (especially to encourage spiritual growth)
  • There was something ascetic in her look, which was augmented by the extreme plainness of a straight-skirted, black, stuff dress, a starched linen collar, hair combed away from the temples, and the nun-like ornament of a string of ebony beads and a crucifix.   (source)
    ascetic = severely plain -- like one who practices self-denial (often to encourage spiritual growth)
  • ...and you think that they must be ascetic fish that find a subsistence there.   (source)
    ascetic = practicing self-denial
  • I picture her as a thinnish girl, with a hesitant smile, a little ascetic; lovely though, with her grave eyes blue as Laura's, her long dark hair coiled like sleeping serpents around her head.†   (source)
  • The star-flooded nights, the dew-soaked dawns, the hushed ambulatories, the enforced asceticism—never has Werner felt part of something so single-minded.†   (source)
  • Tall, thin, ascetic, with white hair receding from a noble brow and eyes too filled with the sharp edge "of experience to hide their pain, Paul Dur was a follower of St Tellhard as well as an archaeologist, ethnologist, and eminent Jesuit theologian.†   (source)
  • He's a cheerful, burly looking man, not at all the cerebral, ascetic type I imagine hovering over datascreens in the Match Department.†   (source)
  • There was a frown on his narrow, ascetic face as he turned away from the glass and strode across the floor, the heels of his boots echoing against the marble floor.†   (source)
  • The manager stands and spins, he is spinning with his arms spread wide—maybe it's an ascetic rapture, a thing they do in mosques in Anatolia.†   (source)
  • In his voice was all the unconscious distaste of the ascetic.†   (source)
  • It was neither Protestantism nor asceticism that made him so enthusiastic; it was something else, something highly personal, something he did not dare discuss with Sabina.†   (source)
  • An ascetic.†   (source)
  • Holy men, ascetics, fanatics, sorcerers, dragon-slayers, demonhunters …. there were many tales about them.†   (source)
  • With nothing to do but think and be cold, Alessandro watched him climb onto a huge boulder and settle at the top like a Biblical ascetic.†   (source)
  • Though he was about my age, he had prematurely thinning hair, a gray complexion, and a gaunt ascetic face, which made him seem much older.†   (source)
  • An ascetic was seated on a prayer mat before the statue of Ganesha.†   (source)
  • For them, as for young, unattached, dashing boys, or renegade old men far gone, the roulette wheel all evening in some smoke-filled but ascetic room … how would it be?†   (source)
  • Guitar, eschewing his recent asceticism, allowed himself the pleasure of waking up old dreams:   (source)
    asceticism = practice of extreme self-denial
  • He will never surrender himself either to lust or to asceticism.   (source)
    asceticism = the practice of extreme self-denial (often to encourage spiritual growth)
  • Then she did not want him to stop or glance at her, because she wanted to watch the ascetic purity of his person, the absence of all sensuality; to watch that—and to think of what she remembered.   (source)
    ascetic = characteristic of someone who practices self-denial
  • He had been a celebrated ascetic, rigid in fasting and silence,   (source)
    ascetic = someone who practices self-denial (especially to encourage spiritual growth)
  • The most thorough-going ascetic could feel that he had a natural right to wander on Egdon:   (source)
    ascetic = someone who practices self-denial
  • For all his culture, Cecil was an ascetic at heart, and nothing in his love became him like the leaving of it.   (source)
  • you are an ascetic, a monk, a hermit!   (source)
  • Others choose lives of asceticism within our cloistered residence halls.†   (source)
  • His companion was older, clean-shaved, with a lined ascetic face.†   (source)
  • All this time, I guess I've just assumed you were an ascetic.†   (source)
  • I am still a Samana, he thought, I am still an ascetic and beggar.†   (source)
  • Indeed, one of the books found in the bus with his remains was a collection of stories that included Tolstoy's "The Kreutzer Sonata," in which the nobleman-turned-ascetic denounces "the demands of the flesh."†   (source)
  • McCandless's contrived asceticism and a pseudoliterary stance compound rather than reduce the fault…… McCandless's postcards, notes, and journals .†   (source)
  • The face was like his words-as if the line of a single theme ran from the steady glance of the eyes, through the gaunt muscles of the cheeks, to the faintly scornful, downward curve of the mouth-the line of a ruthless asceticism.†   (source)
  • Of course (I thought but did not say), the various cousins who had served a year or so during this annexation or that and retired to take ascetic vows or paint tea sets hadn't done so because they had been unsteady.†   (source)
  • …of the Gods, in the midst of a place of stone where the colors are few and the only sound is the wind — there, since slightly after the days of the First, have sat the philosopher and the sorceress, the sage and the magus, the suicide, and the ascetic freed from the desire for rebirth or renewal; there, in the center of renunciation and abandonment, withdrawal and departure, are the five rooms named Memory, Fear, Heartbreak, Dust and Despair; and this place was built by Kubera the Fat,…†   (source)
  • He had heard that this alleged Buddha used to be an ascetic before and had lived in the forest, but had then turned back to luxury and worldly pleasures, and he had no high opinion of this Gotama.†   (source)
  • I take it that you feel the same way concerning what you do, or you would not put up with this life of miserable asceticism — though I note that you are not so gaunt as your followers.†   (source)
  • It is told that Pannalal the Sage, having sharpened his mind with meditation and divers asceticisms, had divined the operation of the lock and entered Hellwell, spending a day and a night beneath the mountain.†   (source)
  • In the night when he slept in the straw hut of a ferryman by the river, Siddhartha had a dream: Govinda was standing in front of him, dressed in the yellow robe of an ascetic.†   (source)
  • He was said to wander through the land, teaching, surrounded by disciples, without possession, without home, without a wife, in the yellow cloak of an ascetic, but with a cheerful brow, a man of bliss, and Brahmans and princes would bow down before him and would become his students.†   (source)
  • When he had left in this very morning from the grove Jetavana, the grove of that exalted one, already awakening, already on the path towards himself, he he had every intention, regarded as natural and took for granted, that he, after years as an ascetic, would return to his home and his father.†   (source)
  • No Brahman, who would not be regarded as Brahmans and lived with them, no ascetic who would not find his refuge in the caste of the Samanas, and even the most forlorn hermit in the forest was not just one and alone, he was also surrounded by a place he belonged to, he also belonged to a caste, in which he was at home.†   (source)
  • As a youth, I had only to do with asceticism, with thinking and meditation, was searching for Brahman, worshipped the eternal in the Atman.†   (source)
  • Just as a potter's wheel, once it has been set in motion, will keep on turning for a long time and only slowly lose its vigour and come to a stop, thus Siddhartha's soul had kept on turning the wheel of asceticism, the wheel of thinking, the wheel of differentiation for a long time, still turning, but it turned slowly and hesitantly and was close to coming to a standstill.†   (source)
  • I came to tell you that it is my longing to leave your house tomorrow and go to the ascetics.†   (source)
  • Neither Yoga-Veda shall teach me any more, nor Atharva-Veda, nor the ascetics, nor any kind of teachings.†   (source)
  • All tales and answers, which the two young ascetics had received in their search for Gotama's abode, had pointed them towards this area.†   (source)
  • WITH THE SAMANAS In the evening of this day they caught up with the ascetics, the skinny Samanas, and offered them their companionship and—obedience.†   (source)
  • Once, Samanas had travelled through Siddhartha's town, ascetics on a pilgrimage, three skinny, withered men, neither old nor young, with dusty and bloody shoulders, almost naked, scorched by the sun, surrounded by loneliness, strangers and enemies to the world, strangers and lank jackals in the realm of humans.†   (source)
  • My father was spartan, ascetic, puritanical.†   (source)
  • He lies on his back, his thin profile in silhouette, ascetic and profound against the sky.†   (source)
  • Then he returned to the less rigorous life of the ascetic wanderer.†   (source)
  • And it is the same in other directions; you will find us neither profligate nor ascetic.†   (source)
  • I had built up the ideal of a new life, inspired by the asceticism of the intellect.†   (source)
  • But Mr. Ramsay kept always his eyes fixed upon it, never allowed himself to be distracted or deluded, until his face became worn too and ascetic and partook of this unornamented beauty which so deeply impressed her.†   (source)
  • Mental excess could produce, for its own purposes, the voluntary blindness and deafness of deliberate solitude, the artificial impotence of asceticism.†   (source)
  • He looks across the desk at the other's still, stubborn, ascetic face: the face of a hermit who has lived for a long time in an empty place where sand blows.†   (source)
  • He wore a short coat with fur collar, large glasses, his cheek was somewhat soft but that didn't take away from an ascetic impression he gave.†   (source)
  • He was not an ascetic; he enjoyed the good things of the world, and was careful to teach his converts cooking as well as catechism.†   (source)
  • The two faces looked down on the scene, two faces as different as could be possible in two men at the helm of so momentous an undertaking: Davis with the flat cheeks and cold eyes of an ascetic, his thin proud lips set firmly; Stephens with dark burning eyes deep socketed in a face that had known nothing but sickness and pain and had triumphed over them with humor and with fire—two faces that were greatly loved.†   (source)
  • BEFORE WE PROCEED to the last episode of the life, one more hero-type remains to be mentioned: the saint or ascetic, the world-renouncer.†   (source)
  • His face was drawn, austere in cruelty, ascetic in passion, the cheeks sunken, the lips pulled down, set tight.†   (source)
  • The ascetic replied, "Good sir, I am sorry; but will you kindly take my feet and place them where there is no such sacred lirigam?"†   (source)
  • Heller looked at them and thought that it was almost indecent to see them together: Roark's tall, ascetic figure, with that proud cleanliness peculiar to long-lined bodies, and beside him the smiling ball of meat whose decision could mean so much.†   (source)
  • Art, literature, myth and cult, philosophy, and ascetic disciplines are instruments to help the individual past his limiting horizons into spheres of ever-expanding realization.†   (source)
  • The priest seized the ankles of the ascetic and lifted them to the right, but when he set them down a phallus sprang from the ground and they rested as before.†   (source)
  • And so he departed from them again, retreated to the highest mountains, and there dedicated himself to the ascetic practices that should finally release him from his last attachment to the forms of being.†   (source)
  • A certain Hindu ascetic who lay down to rest beside the holy Ganges placed his feet up on a iva-symbol (a "lirigam-yoni," a combined phallus and vulva, symbolizing the union of the God with his Spouse).†   (source)
  • …as the divinity within the heart, meanwhile leading one's life in the world as the servant of this god (Early and Medieval Christianity); (3) a rejection of most of the instruments supporting meditation, meanwhile, however, continuing to lead one's life in the world as the servant or vehicle of the god whom one has ceased to visualize (Protestant Christianity): (4) an attempt to interpret Jesus as a model human being, but without accepting his ascetic path (Liberal Christianity).†   (source)
  • The asceticism of the medieval saints and of the yogis of India, the Hellenistic mystery initiations, the ancient philosophies of the East and of the West, are techniques for the shifting of the emphasis of individual consciousness away from the garments.†   (source)
  • He went home desolately ascetic, and longed for Orchid all the night.†   (source)
  • Their room was a Mediterranean room, almost ascetic, almost clean, darkened to the glare of the sea.†   (source)
  • Did I understand you to say that the work is ascetic and witty?†   (source)
  • You will never find me guilty of ascetic tendencies.†   (source)
  • It was a purely ascetic exercise, a part of the discipline of penitence, a means of salvation.†   (source)
  • It is not until the Gothic that tastes turn to true pessimistic asceticism.†   (source)
  • Asceticism—indulgence—sensual lust—let me say that—by all means!†   (source)
  • This was a trait of Miss Brooke's asceticism.†   (source)
  • There is to be nothing ascetic; there's just to be a certain little sense of sequestration.†   (source)
  • It is narrow asceticism; I don't like to see you persisting in it, Maggie.†   (source)
  • "Yes; but—but not too fond," said Pansy with a trace of asceticism.†   (source)
  • Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge.†   (source)
  • It inculcated universal asceticism and social levelling in its crudest form.†   (source)
  • Genius is always ascetic; and piety, and love.†   (source)
  • In this respect, the ascetic and the sage converge.†   (source)
  • Of course it's all an ideal, and in the 'poor knight' that spirit reached the utmost limit of asceticism.†   (source)
  • If only they could have also heard Carducci's interpretation of Dante—celebrating him as a citizen of a great city, who had defended the revolutionary and reforming spirit of human enterprise against asceticism and all denial of the world.†   (source)
  • Don Juan himself is almost ascetic in his desire to avoid that misunderstanding; and so my attempt to bring him up to date by launching him as a modern Englishman into a modern English environment has produced a figure superficially quite unlike the hero of Mozart.†   (source)
  • He had a handsome face, thin, ascetic, with dark eyes; he wore his fantastic garb with the dashing air of a buccaneer.†   (source)
  • Well educated, well endowed, and not deficient physically, he remained in the grip of a certain devil whom the modern world knows as self-consciousness, and whom the medieval, with dimmer vision, worshipped as asceticism.†   (source)
  • The foundations of Property and Propriety are laid bare, twin rocks; Family Pride flounders to the surface, puffing and blowing and refusing to be comforted; Theology, vaguely ascetic, gets up a nasty ground swell.†   (source)
  • His imagination pushed ahead—the old asceticism, the actual unfamiliarity, triumphed: God, I might as well go back to the Riviera and sleep with Janice Caricamento or the Wilburhazy girl.†   (source)
  • And that is why our scriptures and other art works, when they deal with love, turn from honest attempts at science in physics to romantic nonsense, erotic ecstasy, or the stern asceticism of satiety ("the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom" said William Blake; for "you never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough").†   (source)
  • With her large brown eyes, thin, ascetic face, her pale skin, and broad forehead, she might have stepped out of a picture by Burne-Jones.†   (source)
  • On the stone steps of the Main Medical, two minutes after, appeared beneath the arc-light a tall figure, ascetic, self-contained, apart.†   (source)
  • Outwardly he was cheerful, reliable, and brave; but within, all had reverted to chaos, ruled, so far as it was ruled at all, by an incomplete asceticism.†   (source)
  • Twyford looked doubtful, his mother looked delicately shocked, and the five sons beefily looked nothing at all, while Martin raged on, trying to convey his vision of the barbarian, the ascetic, the contemptuous acolyte of science.†   (source)
  • It represented a thin young curate, with long hair that fell over his head in natural curls, with dark eyes, large and dreamy, and a pale ascetic face.†   (source)
  • For him the boundaries of asceticism were differently marked—he could see it as a means to an end, even as a carrying on with a glory it would itself supply, but it was hard to think of deliberately cutting life down to the scale of an inherited suit.†   (source)
  • She had the fine black eyes, languid but passionate, the thin face, ascetic but sensual, the skin like old ivory, which under the influence of Burne-Jones were cultivated at that time by young ladies in Chelsea.†   (source)
  • And it really doesn't matter much whether one is wearing a stiff uniform collar or a starched ruff, the end result is the same, an 'ascetic' result, as you put it so splendidly just now.†   (source)
  • Herr Settembrini was certainly a zealous pedagogue, zealous to the point of being a tiresome bother; but his principles could not approach Naphta's when it came to ascetic, self-mortifying objectivity.†   (source)
  • What constituted man's true state and condition: obliteration in all-devouring, all-leveling community, which was a simultaneously voluptuous and ascetic act; or "critical subjectivity," where bombast and strict bourgeois virtue were at loggerheads?†   (source)
  • For the ascetic Spirit—if he might be permitted a tautology—the Spirit that denied and destroyed the world, was nobility itself, the aristocratic principle in its purest form; it could never be popular, and indeed the Church had been essentially unpopular throughout the ages.†   (source)
  • Naphta was told to be silent on that account—first, because it was an outrage to humane feelings, and second, because he, Settembrini, had heard enough evasions and could see through the tricks of his opponent's apologetics to the thoroughly infamous and devilish cult of nihilism, which desired to be called Spirit and managed to perceive something legitimizing and sanctifying in the acknowledged unpopularity of the ascetic principle.†   (source)
  • Whereupon Naphta felt obliged to offer cold, caustic proof—and his proof was almost blindingly incontrovertible—that the Church was the embodiment of the religious, ascetic ideal, and at her core not even remotely an advocate or supporter of forces whose concern was to maintain themselves: worldly education and civil authority, for instance; rather, from time immemorial the Church had inscribed radical overthrow upon her banner—destruction, root and branch.†   (source)
  • And so he had never heard of the refined priestly concept of indulgence, under which even a sacrament was included—marriage, to be precise, which unlike the other sacraments was not a positive good, but a defense against sin, conferred solely to limit sensual desire and to instill moderation, so that the ascetic principle, the ideal of chastity, might be affirmed without defying the flesh with unpolitic severity?†   (source)
  • Could it be that Herr Settembrini had never been touched by that breath of humane irony with which the Church continually made concessions to the world, to the flesh, cleverly acquiescing in order to disguise the ultimate consequences of the ascetic principle and letting the influence of the Spirit establish order by not opposing nature all too sternly?†   (source)
  • There is something devilishly earnest about it all, something 'ascetic,' if you will—that was, I believe, the term you were kind enough to use just now—and one must always reckon that one will have to deal with death, just as, ultimately, the clergy must deal with it as well—with what else, really?†   (source)
  • If Herr Settembrini would bother to do a little research on the literature of the Middle Ages he would discover that fact: the people—taken in the widest sense—had always had a crude distaste for the Church and her ways, as evidenced, for example, in their regard for certain legendary monks, creations of popular fantasy, who opposed the ascetic ideal with wine, women, and song in a downright Luther-like fashion.†   (source)
  • …was reminded of that humanist's spare garret with its lectern and rush-bottom chairs and water carafe; whereas Naphta, after first claiming that lust could never be without guilt and that nature should, if you please, have a bad conscience in the presence of the Spirit, went on to refute the nihilism of the ascetic principle by defining the Church's policy of spiritual indulgence as "love"—and Hans Castorp found the word "love" sounded very odd coming from caustic, gaunt little Naphta.†   (source)
  • For each was as much a military calling as the other, in every sense: in asceticism and hierarchy, in obedience and Spanish sense of honor.†   (source)
  • And, of course, what prompted Naphta to call patriotism a plague was asceticism—what all did he not subsume under that concept, what all, in his opinion, did not oppose asceticism and the kingdom of God!†   (source)
  • But if the kingdom is to come, the dualism between good and evil, between this world and the next, between power and the Spirit, must be temporarily abrogated and transformed in a principle that unites asceticism and dominion.†   (source)
  • Asceticism was even his basis for reproaching the humanist whenever he trumpeted peace and happiness; Naphta would belligerently accuse him to his face of love of the flesh (amor carnalis) and love of physical comfort{commodorum corporis), call it utter bourgeois irreligion to ascribe the least value to life and health.†   (source)
  • The features expressed nothing of monastic austerity, or of ascetic privations; on the contrary, it was a bold bluff countenance, with broad black eyebrows, a well-turned forehead, and cheeks as round and vermilion as those of a trumpeter, from which descended a long and curly black beard.†   (source)
  • The Seeker—he who had invited the lama to that haven from far-away Tibet, a silver-faced, hairless ascetic—took no part in it, but meditated, as always, alone among the images.†   (source)
  • The terror of cloudless noon, the emerald of Polycrates,[130] 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 of man.†   (source)
  • It is not supposable that he intended a satire upon Babcock's own asceticism, for this would have been a truly cynical stroke.†   (source)
  • More akin to our way of looking at life was the spirit of the Middle Ages, to whom heaven and the life of the next world was such a reality, that it became to them a part of the life upon the earth; which accordingly they loved and adorned, in spite of the ascetic doctrines of their formal creed, which bade them contemn it.†   (source)
  • Visvamitra, the greatest of the ascetic heroes of the Iliad of the East, had in him a perfect representative.†   (source)
  • He had been better pleased with Maggie since she had been less odd and ascetic; he was even getting rather proud of her; several persons had remarked in his hearing that his sister was a very fine girl.†   (source)
  • He was a tall, thin, but still vigorous old man, with black hair streaked with gray, and a long, grave, ascetic face.†   (source)
  • Despite his familiarity with the ascetic colonists in En-Gedi—their dress, their indifference to all worldly opinion, their constancy to vows which gave them over to every imaginable suffering of body, and separated them from others of their kind as absolutely as if they had not been born like them—and notwithstanding he had been notified on the way to look for a Nazarite whose simple description of himself was a Voice from the Wilderness—still Ben-Hur's dream of the King who was to be…†   (source)
  • It represented a gaunt, ascetic-looking monk, in a tattered gown and cowl, kneeling with clasped hands and pulling a portentously long face.†   (source)
  • In a word, the stern ascetic rigour of the Temple discipline, which had been so long exchanged for prodigal and licentious indulgence, seemed at once to have revived at Templestowe under the severe eye of Lucas Beaumanoir.†   (source)
  • But there was nothing of an ascetic's expression in her bright full eyes, as she looked before her, not consciously seeing, but absorbing into the intensity of her mood, the solemn glory of the afternoon with its long swathes of light between the far-off rows of limes, whose shadows touched each other.†   (source)
  • The mother was getting fond of her tall, brown girl,—the only bit of furniture now on which she could bestow her anxiety and pride; and Maggie, in spite of her own ascetic wish to have no personal adornment, was obliged to give way to her mother about her hair, and submit to have the abundant black locks plaited into a coronet on the summit of her head, after the pitiable fashion of those antiquated times.†   (source)
  • To speak the truth, even with some austerity, to live with some rigor of temperance, or some extremes of generosity, seems to be an asceticism which common good-nature would appoint to those who are at ease and in plenty, in sign that they feel a brotherhood with the great multitude of suffering men.†   (source)
  • That this superb woman, in whom he had seen all human grace and household force, should turn from him and all the brightness that he offered her—him and his future and his fortune and his fidelity—to muffle herself in ascetic rags and entomb herself in a cell was a confounding combination of the inexorable and the grotesque.†   (source)
  • So, given the nineteenth century, we are opposed, as a general proposition, and among all peoples, in Asia as well as in Europe, in India as well as in Turkey, to ascetic claustration.†   (source)
  • For it would have been discreditable to insist on burdening with the common regulations so great an ascetic, who prayed day and night (he even dropped asleep on his knees).†   (source)
  • A formidable warrior, his thin and severe features retained the soldier's fierceness of expression; an ascetic bigot, they were no less marked by the emaciation of abstinence, and the spiritual pride of the self-satisfied devotee.†   (source)
  • What made him formidable was that a number of monks fully shared his feeling, and many of the visitors looked upon him as a great saint and ascetic, although they had no doubt that he was crazy.†   (source)
  • When they had reached the little moonlight glade, having in front the reverend, though ruinous chapel, and the rude hermitage, so well suited to ascetic devotion, Wamba whispered to Gurth, "If this be the habitation of a thief, it makes good the old proverb, The nearer the church the farther from God.†   (source)
  • Nevertheless, at certain points and in certain places, in spite of philosophy, in spite of progress, the spirit of the cloister persists in the midst of the nineteenth century, and a singular ascetic recrudescence is, at this moment, astonishing the civilized world. obstinacy of antiquated institutions in perpetuating themselves resembles the stubbornness of the rancid perfume which should claim our hair, the pretensions of the spoiled fish which should persist in being eaten, the…†   (source)
  • The quarter has an air of modern opulence and convenience which seems at variance with the ascetic institution, and the impression made upon Newman's gloomily-irritated gaze by the fresh-looking, windowless expanse behind which the woman he loved was perhaps even then pledging herself to pass the rest of her days was less exasperating than he had feared.†   (source)
  • —Could I guess the unexpected arrival of yon dotard, whom some flashes of frantic valour, and the praises yielded by fools to the stupid self-torments of an ascetic, have raised for the present above his own merits, above common sense, above me, and above the hundreds of our Order, who think and feel as men free from such silly and fantastic prejudices as are the grounds of his opinions and actions?†   (source)
  • A cloister, caught in the very act of asceticism, in the very heart of the city of '89 and of 1830 and of 1848, Rome blossoming out in Paris, is an anachronism.†   (source)
  • He felt no impulse to sell all he had and give to the poor, or to retire into meditative economy and asceticism.†   (source)
  • He was seventy-five or more, and he lived in a corner beyond the apiary in an old decaying wooden cell which had been built long ago for another great ascetic, Father Iona, who had lived to be a hundred and five, and of whose saintly doings many curious stories were still extant in the monastery and the neighborhood.†   (source)
  • …and, to a certain extent, detected, Albert Malvoisin listened with such respect and apparent contrition to the rebuke of his Superior, and made such haste to reform the particulars he censured,—succeeded, in fine, so well in giving an air of ascetic devotion to a family which had been lately devoted to license and pleasure, that Lucas Beaumanoir began to entertain a higher opinion of the Preceptor's morals, than the first appearance of the establishment had inclined him to adopt.†   (source)
  • There is a certain state of inert asceticism in which the soul, neutralized by torpor, a stranger to that which may be designated as the business of living, receives no impressions, either human, or pleasant or painful, with the exception of earthquakes and catastrophes.†   (source)
  • He was not originally a cruel or even a severe man; but with passions by nature cold, and with a high, though mistaken, sense of duty, his heart had been gradually hardened by the ascetic life which he pursued, the supreme power which he enjoyed, and the supposed necessity of subduing infidelity and eradicating heresy, which he conceived peculiarly incumbent on him.†   (source)
  • The same meek and humble ascetics will rise up and go out to work for the great cause.†   (source)
  • He read sermons on discipline, and hunted up passages in Church history that treated of the Ascetics of the second century.†   (source)
  • On that they were in fierce agreement—as worlds, as orders, as professions; and a child of peace found it worth his while to listen to Naphta talk about the martial monks of the Middle Ages, who, although ascetics to the point of exhaustion, were likewise filled with a spiritual lust for power and did not refrain from bloodshed in order to bring about the City of God and its transcendent world dominion; or about belligerent Knights Templar, who considered death in battle against…†   (source)
  • The madness of ascetics.†   (source)
  • It was revived among us towards the end of last century by one of the great "ascetics," as they called him, Paissy Velitchkovsky, and his disciples.†   (source)
  • And among these were some of the oldest monks, strictest in their devotion, genuine ascetics, who had kept silent during the life of the deceased elder, but now suddenly unsealed their lips.†   (source)
  • ...the penances of those of the present day do not come up to the asceticism and austerity of former times;   (source)
    asceticism = the practice of extreme self-denial (often to encourage spiritual growth)
  • The cord is the type of religions asceticism, of which the poet no longer has need.†   (source)
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