Thomas Mann Quotes

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

Fasting is, first and foremost, an exercise for identifying and managing adversity in all its forms. With faith, in full conscience, fasting calls women and men to an extra degree of self-awareness.

Abstinence is many times very helpful to the end of religion.

Celibacy goes deeper than the flesh.

A true Brahmachari will not even dream of satisfying the fleshly appetite

Desirelessness or renunciation does not come for the mere talking about it.

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

We must suffer. Our five sense are dulled by inordinate pleasure. Penance makes them keen, gives them back their natural vitality, and more. Penance clears the eye of conscience and of reason. It helps think clearly, judge sanely. It strengthens the action of our will.

Discipline, it has been suggested, is the means of human spiritual evolution. What provides the motive, the energy for discipline? This force I believe to be love. I define love thus: The will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth.

To arrive where you are, to get from where you are not / You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy.

Fasting is futile unless it is accompanied by an incessant longing for self-restraint.

Happie is hee that chastens himselfe.

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.

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.

Without asceticism, self-indulgence would be insignificant.

Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace. Leave gormandizing.

There cannot be self-restraint in the absence of desire: when there is no adversary, what avails thy courage? Hark, do not castrate thyself, do not become a monk: chastity depends on the existence of lust.

Dieting is our last tie with asceticism.

If reason dominates in man, he rises higher than angels. If lust overpowers man, he descends lower than the beast.

The secret is not in what you do to yourself but rather in what you don't do.

He whose intellect overcomes his lust is higher than the angels; he whose lust overcomes his intelligence is less than an animal.

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

The human body is meant solely for service, never for indulgence.