Celibacy Quotes

“It is better to lock up your heart with a merciless padlock, than to fall in love with someone who doesn't know what they mean to you.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, The Infinity Sign

“It is the fate of great achievements, born from a way of life that sets truth before security, to be gobbled up by you and excreted in the form of shit. For centuries great, brave, lonely men have been telling you what to do. Time and again you have corrupted, diminished and demolished their teachings; time and again you have been captivated by their weakest points, taken not the great truth, but some trifling error as your guiding principal. This, little man, is what you have done with Christianity, with the doctrine of sovereign people, with socialism, with everything you touch. Why, you ask, do you do this? I don't believe you really want an answer. When you hear the truth you'll cry bloody murder, or commit it. … You had your choice between soaring to superhuman heights with Nietzsche and sinking into subhuman depths with Hitler. You shouted Heil! Heil! and chose the subhuman. You had the choice between Lenin's truly democratic constitution and Stalin's dictatorship. You chose Stalin's dictatorship. You had your choice between Freud's elucidation of the sexual core of your psychic disorders and his theory of cultural adaptation. You dropped the theory of sexuality and chose his theory of cultural adaptation, which left you hanging in mid-air. You had your choice between Jesus and his majestic simplicity and Paul with his celibacy for priests and life-long compulsory marriage for yourself. You chose the celibacy and compulsory marriage and forgot the simplicity of Jesus' mother, who bore her child for love and love alone. You had your choice between Marx's insight into the productivity of your living labor power, which alone creates the value of commodities and the idea of the state. You forgot the living energy of your labor and chose the idea of the state. In the French Revolution, you had your choice between the cruel Robespierre and the great Danton. You chose cruelty and sent greatness and goodness to the guillotine. In Germany you had your choice between Goring and Himmler on the one hand and Liebknecht, Landau, and Muhsam on the other. You made Himmler your police chief and murdered your great friends. You had your choice between Julius Streicher and Walter Rathenau. You murdered Rathenau. You had your choice between Lodge and Wilson. You murdered Wilson. You had your choice between the cruel Inquisition and Galileo's truth. You tortured and humiliated the great Galileo, from whose inventions you are still benefiting, and now, in the twentieth century, you have brought the methods of the Inquisition to a new flowering. … Every one of your acts of smallness and meanness throws light on the boundless wretchedness of the human animal. 'Why so tragic?' you ask. 'Do you feel responsible for all evil?' With remarks like that you condemn yourself. If, little man among millions, you were to shoulder the barest fraction of your responsibility, the world would be a very different place. Your great friends wouldn't perish, struck down by your smallness.”
― Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man!

“It's cooler to be strong.”
― Lady Gaga

“Celibacy goes deeper than the flesh.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise

“Masturbation is not the happiest form of sexuality, but the most advisable for him who wants to be alone and think. I detect the aroma of this pleasant vice in most philosophers, and a happily married logicians is almost a contradiction in terms. So many sages have regarded Woman as temptress because fornication often leads to marriage, which usually leads to children, which always leads to a respectable job and pretending to believe the idiocies your neighbors believe. The hypocrisy of the sages has been to conceal their timid onanism and call it celibacy.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, Nature's God

“It is often said, inside the Church and out of it, that there is something grotesque about lectures on the sexual life when delivered by those who have shunned it. Given the way that the Church forbids women to preach, this point is usually made about men. But given how much this Church allows the fanatical Mother Teresa to preach, it might be added that the call to go forth and multiply, and to take no thought for the morrow, sounds grotesque when uttered by an elderly virgin whose chief claim to reverence is that she ministers to the inevitable losers in this very lottery.”
― Christopher Hitchens, The Missionary Position: Mother Teresa in Theory and Practice

“I'm not an advocate of promiscuity; but then I'm also not an advocate of being virginal. It's not like I put virginity or celibacy on a pedestal, and as long as I don't get your promiscuity rubbed into my face— I don't care about it! What I do care about is the ability to recognize the sanctity of a union of two souls— you just can't say your soul isn't being united with others' when you have sex with them. So I think you'd better own up to what you're doing— no matter how frequently or infrequently or with how many different people you do it. I mean, make good choices! You are, after all, entwining your soul with another's.”
― C. JoyBell C.

“[A]s though mindful of the wife of Lot, who looked back from behind him, thou deliveredst me first to the sacred garments and monastic profession before thou gavest thyself to God. And for that in this one thing thou shouldst have had little trust in me I vehemently grieved and was ashamed. For I (God [knows]) would without hesitation precede or follow thee to the Vulcanian fires according to thy word. For not with me was my heart, but with thee. But now, more than ever, if it be not with thee, it is nowhere. For without thee it cannot anywhere exist.”
― Héloïse, The Letters of Abélard and Héloïse

“Everyone agrees the celibacy rule is just a Church law dating from the 11th century, not a divine command.”
― Hans Küng

“The Pope would have an easier job than the President of the United States in adopting a change of course. He has no Congress alongside him as a legislative body nor a Supreme Court as a judiciary. He is absolute head of government, legislator and supreme judge in the church. If he wanted to, he could authorize contraception over night, permit the marriage of priests, make possible the ordination of women and allow eucharistic fellowship with this Protestant churches. What would a Pope do who acted in the spirit of Obama?”
― Hans Küng

“Horniness pretty much always oversells an orgasm.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana, P for Pessimism: A Collection of Funny yet Profound Aphorisms

“Imagination is all too often wasted on masturbation.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“An ejaculation is a waste of nutrients, unless it leads to pregnancy … and intentionally.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Celibacy is the Tesla family secret, passed down through the
generations.”
“Celibacy, passed down through the generations?”Victor asked dryly.
I flushed. “Its efficacy is not disproved by its imperfect application,”
I muttered.”
― Vinnie Tesla, The Erotofluidic Age

“To chase pleasure is to be chased by pain.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana, P for Pessimism: A Collection of Funny yet Profound Aphorisms

“A child is one of the most common results of the lack or loss of self-control.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Sexual energy is all too often wasted on masturbation … or sex.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Sex is a need … to the continuation of the life of the species; not that of the animal, or the person.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Most problems are caused by men. Most of them, because of women.”
― @Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Renounce we things carnal, that we may at length bear fruits spiritual. Seize the opportunity — albeit not earnestly desired, yet favourable — of not having any one to whom to pay a debt, and by whom to be (yourself) repaid! You have ceased to be a debtor. Happy man! You have released your debtor; sustain the loss. What if you come to feel that what we have called a loss is a gain? For continence will be a mean whereby you will traffic in a mighty substance of sanctity; by parsimony of the flesh you will gain the Spirit. For let us ponder over our conscience itself, (to see) how different a man feels himself when he chances to be deprived of his wife. He savours spiritually. If he is making prayer to the Lord, he is near heaven. If he is bending over the Scriptures, he is wholly in them. If he is singing a psalm, he satisfies himself. If he is adjuring a demon, he is confident in himself.”
― Tertullian, On Exhortation to Chastity

“People often ask if it is difficult to be a celibate monk or nun, but to practice mindfulness as a monastic is in many ways easier than to practice as a layperson. To refrain from sexual activity altogether is much easier than to have a healthy sexual relationship.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Fidelity: How to Create a Loving Relationship That Lasts

“Christians like Justin Martyr, one of the fathers of the church, shared such aspirations for self-mastery. Justin wholeheartedly admired Christians who practiced renunciation and celibacy; he even singled out for special praise a young convert in Alexandria who had petitioned Felix, the governor,asking that permission might be given to a surgeon to castrate him. For the surgeons had said they were forbidden to do this without the governor’s permission. And when Felix absolutely refused to sign such a permission, the young man remained celibate. (Justin, First Apology 29.) Origen, also revered as a father of the church, had been so determined to win his struggle against passion that as a young man he had castrated himself, apparently without asking anyone’s permission, least of all the governor’s.”
― Elaine Pagels, The Origin of Satan: How Christians Demonized Jews, Pagans and Heretics

“The celibacy of the machine entails the celibacy of Telecomputer Man. Thanks to his computer or word processor, Telecomputer Man offers himself the spectacle of his own brain, his own intelligence, at work. Similarly, through his chat line or his Minitel, he can offer himself the spectacle of his own phantasies, of a strictly virtual pleasure. He exorcizes both intelligence and pleasure at the interface with the machine. The Other, the interlocutor, is never really involved: the screen works much like a mirror, for the screen itself as locus of the interface is the prime concern. An interactive screen transforms the process of relating into a process of commutation between One and the Same. The secret of the interface is that the Other here is virtually the Same: otherness is surreptitiously conjured away by the machine. The most probable scenario of communication here is that Minitel users gravitate from the screen to telephone conversations, thence to face-to-face meetings, and ... then what?
Well, it's 'let's phone each other', and, finally, back to the Minitel - which is, after all, more erotic because it is at once both esoteric and transparent. This is communication in its purest form, for there is no intimacy here except with the screen, and with an electronic text that is no more than a design filigreed onto life. A new Plato's retreat whence to observe shadow-forms of bodily pleasure filing past. Why speak to one another, when it is so simple to communicate?”
― Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays in Extreme Phenomena

“He was simple and yet he was complex in his perception of the other sex. Remembering himself, and how he dealt with females, he often said: 'The easy gals are not for you - they're for themselves; the impossible girls are not for you either - they're for somebody else.”
― Criss Jami

“Consider again the life of Jesus. He, according to all reliable testimony, did not experience sexual relations. Yet despite this, faith attests him as the one complete human being....To be faithful to the revelation in Jesus, we must say that the experience of sexual union is not needed for a full and complete human life.”
― Victor Lee Austin, Friendship: The Heart of Being Human

“Sex for pleasure is chewing gum for genitals.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“There are two ways to live a celibate life. The first is to leave everything as it is and the second is to explore everything, without neglecting anything. Those who experiment a lot have little taste in things.”
― Mwanandeke Kindembo

“The causes of the decrease in vocations to the priesthood are the be found in the fact that individuals and families have lost their sense of God and of all that is holy, their esteem for the Church as the institution of salvation through faith and the sacraments. The problem must be examined at its real source.”
― Pope Paul VI, Sacerdotalis Caelibatus

“Celibacy is a spiritual and not a physical sacrifice, because one must renounce the corporeal in order to obtain the highest plane, or cosmic consciousness.”
― Mwanandeke Kindembo

“If only the nuns, in the name of virginity, knew that pregnant women had the same miraculous powers as them, they would not wish to follow the path of celibacy. It is only out of ignorance and disobedience to the holy scriptures.”
― Mwanandeke Kindembo