Denial of Pleasure Quotes

A man will renounce any pleasures you like but he will not give up his suffering.

Religions, which condemn the pleasures of sense, drive men to seek the pleasures of power. Throughout history power has been the vice of the ascetic.

Chastity is a monkish and evangelical superstition, a greater foe to natural temperance even than unintellectual sensuality; it strikes at the root of all domestic happiness, and consigns more than half the human race to misery.

The Quakers don't believe in music or art; they think it's a vanity.

I stopped painting in 1990 at the peak of my success just to deny people my beautiful paintings, and I did it out of spite.

I was raised Catholic in the Midwest, so I can't enjoy anything.

Everything's so repressive now - it's the No generation. You can't do anything, you can't eat anything, you have to abstain.

How defeated and restless the child that is not doing something in which it sees a purpose, a meaning! It is by its self-directed activity that the child, as years pass, finds its work, the thing it wants to do and for which it finally is willing to deny itself pleasure, ease, even sleep and comfort.

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.

No one wants to be 13 and not able to eat their ice cream after dinner.