Mahatma Gandhi Quotes

If you would be chaste, you must be temperate.

Chastity is a virtue with some, but with many it is almost a vice.

Men who refrain from sexual acts are frequently stronger, owing to their conservation of energy.

I didn't sleep with anyone till I was 23.

I'd also gone through an entire year of celibacy based on my feeling that lust was the direct cause of birth which was the direct cause of suffering and death.

Virginity, like all monstrosities, possesses special riches and its own absorbing grandeur. Among the chaste, life forces are economized and thus gain in resistance and durability.

If there is no element of asceticism in our lives, if we give free rein to the desires of the flesh (taking care of course to keep within the limits of what seems permissible to the world), we shall find it hard to train for the service of Christ. When the flesh is satisfied it is hard to pray with cheerfulness or to devote oneself to a life of service which calls for much self-renunciation.

Chastity is a difficult long term matter, one must wait patiently for it to bear fruit for the happiness of loving kindness which it must bring. But at the same time chastity is the sure way to happiness.

Start the practice of self-control with some penance; begin with fasting.

Of all the sexual aberrations, perhaps the most peculiar is chastity.

I'm not an ascetic.

We may eventually come to realize that chastity is no more a virtue than malnutrition.

Celibacy is a great help, inasmuch as it enables one to lead a life of full surrender to God.

Celibacy is exhausting.

I’ve remained a virgin for you.

To set the mind above the appetites is the end of abstinence, which one of the Fathers observes to be not a virtue, but the groundwork of virtue.

Chastity more rarely follows fear, or a resolution, or a vow, than it is the mere effect of lack of appetite and, sometimes even, of distaste.

What is chastity? How shall a man know if he is chaste? He shall not know it. We have heard of this virtue, but we know not what it is.

In my own life, I don't have intercourse. That is my choice.

Because monks come from the midst of purity, they consider as good and pure what does not arouse desire among other people.

... chastity is not given once and for all like a wedding ring that is put on never to be taken off, but is a garden which each day must be weeded, watered, and trimmed anew, or soon there will be only brambles and wilderness.

Chastity is the most unpopular of the Christian virtues. There is no getting away from it; the old Christian rule is, "Either marriage, with completely faithfulness to your partner, or else total abstinence."

Deny yourself! You must deny yourself! That is the song that never ends.

Temperance is the nurse of chastity.

In every possible instance Saint Paul begged Christians to restrain themselves to contain their carnal yearnings to live solitary and sexless lives on earth as it is in heaven. "But if they cannot contain " Paul finally conceded then "let them marry for it is better to marry than to burn." Which is perhaps the most begrudging endorsement of matrimony in human history.