Celibacy quotes:

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Celibacy is not a matter of compulsion. Someone is accepted as a priest only when he does it of his own accord. -- Pope Benedict XVI
Celibacy is not just a matter of not having sex. It is a way of admiring a person for their humanity, maybe even for their beauty. -- Timothy Radcliffe
Celibacy goes deeper than the flesh. -- F. Scott Fitzgerald
Celibacy is the worst form of self-abuse. -- Peter De Vries
Celibacy doesn't make you enlightened, otherwise every nun or priest in Buddhism or Christianity would be enlightened. People who don't date and can't get any action would be enlightened. -- Frederick Lenz
I consider my greatest accomplishment to be lifelong celibacy. -- Isaac Newton
The church may hold whatever it holds with regard to clerical celibacy. -- William P. Leahy
If, hypothetically, Western Catholicism were to review the issue of celibacy, I think it would do so for cultural reasons, not so much as a universal option. -- Pope Francis
The vow of celibacy is a matter of keeping one's word to Christ and the Church. a duty and a proof of the priest's inner maturity; it is the expression of his personal dignity. -- Pope John Paul II
Celibacy is exhausting. -- Beatrice Wood
Celibacy is the worst form of self-abuse -- Peter De Vries
Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures. -- Samuel Johnson
Marriage may often be a stormy lake, but celibacy is almost always a muddy horsepond. -- Thomas Love Peacock
God has set the type of marriage through creation. Each creature seeks its perfection in another. -- Martin Luther
A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism. -- Carl Sagan
Celibacy bestows on a man the qualified freedom of a besieged city where one sometimes has to eat rats. -- Sean O Faolain
Celibacy is a great help, inasmuch as it enables one to lead a life of full surrender to God. -- Mahatma Gandhi
As to marriage or celibacy, let a man take which course he will, he will be sure to repent -- Socrates
Most people that commit to a life of celibacy weren't leaving that much on the table in the first place. -- Dov Davidoff
It is impossible to believe that the same God who permitted His own son to die a bachelor regards celibacy as an actual sin. -- H. L. Mencken
Celibacy is not natural to men or to women; all bodily needs require their legitimate satisfaction, and celibacy is a disregard of natural law. -- Annie Besant
I think that one of the qualifications of artists should be a vow of celibacy. They should be confined to ruining only their own lives. -- Roger Lewis
Celibacy and suicide are a similar levels of understanding, suicide and a martyr's death not so by any means, perhaps marriage and a martyr's death. -- Franz Kafka
A celibate, like the fly in the heart of an apple, dwells in a perpetual sweetness, but sits alone, and is confined and dies in singularity. -- Jeremy Taylor
But Rosa soon made the discovery that Miss Twinkleton didn't read fairly. She cut the love-scenes, interpolated passages in praise of female celibacy, and was guilty of other glaring pious frauds. -- Charles Dickens
If our sex life were determined by our first youthful experiments, most of the world would be doomed to celibacy. In no area of human experience are human beings more convinced that something better can be had only if they persevere. -- P. D. James
Celibacy, like the fly in the heart of an apple, dwells in perpetual sweetness, but sits alone, and is confined and dies in singularity but marriage, like the useful bee, builds a house, and gathers sweetness from every flower, and labors and unites -- Jeremy Taylor
Italian women are some of the most beautiful in the world. This is why the Vatican is in Italy. If a man can walk across Italy and retain his celibacy, he's got what it takes to be a priest - or an interior decorator. -- Craig Ferguson
He who neither drinks, nor smokes, nor dances, he who preaches & even occasionally practice piety, temperance and celibacy, is generally a saint, or a mahatma or more likely a humbug but he certainly won't make a leader or for that matter a good soldier -- Sam Manekshaw
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That's why real awareness always leads you beyond sex, and celibacy happens on its own accord. Because to be in sex you have either to be identified with the male or identified with the female. A real celibate is one who has gone beyond, who is neither. -- Rajneesh
To suppose such a thing possible as a society, in which men, who are able and willing to work, cannot support their families, and ought, with a great part of the women, to be compelled to lead a life of celibacy, for fear of having children to be starved; to suppose such a thing possible is monstrous. -- William Cobbett
Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures -- Samuel Johnson
As to marriage or celibacy, let a man take which course he will, he will be sure to repent. -- Socrates
For both Protestants and Catholics, and whether or not absolute continence is demanded of the clergy, celibacy remains a blessed spiritual state. -- Meir Soloveichik
I've tried everything but celibacy, and I really want to know what it feels like to be touched by someone with a mental touch and not a physical touch. -- LisaRaye McCoy-Misick
I have stepped off the relationship scene to come to terms with myself. I have spent most of my adult life being someone's girlfriend, and now I am happy being single -- Penelope Cruz
I took the vow of celibacy in 1906. I had not shared my thoughts with my wife until then, but only consulted her at the time of making the vow. She had no objection. -- Mahatma Gandhi
The vow of celibacy is a matter of keeping one's word to Christ and the Church. a duty and a proof of the priest's inner maturity it is the expression of his personal dignity -- Pope John Paul II
I decided to try celibacy because I heard it would help the meditation, and I tried meditation because I heard it would help with the music. So, it all really comes back to the music. -- Rivers Cuomo
The truly longstanding tradition in the church is that some are called to celibacy. Some feel called to it. But the church has never supported that celibacy be mandated for someone not called to it. It's never imposed on someone. -- Gene Robinson
When you really see how much God loves you, there's no greater love than that, and I had to match that amount of love He had for me, which is the reason why I decided to take a vow of celibacy. -- Jessica White
For the standard of Christian life was to be strained to a higher pitch; more fasting was required, and more careful separation from the manners and enjoyments of the world; celibacy and martyrdom had great value set upon them, and second marriages were prohibited. -- Robert Rainy
You know, in some ways, the celibacy tradition goes back to the tribe of Levi and, certainly, sacrifice and the notion of sacrifice. In the Old Testament, the shedding of blood was for a man to perform. It was not for the woman, who gave life. -- Vincent Nichols
The one thing that is sort of sneered at and not really believed is bisexuality. Any bisexual man is just seen as a closeted gay man. That shows how narrow-minded people are. The other thing that's totally neglected and which nobody approves of is celibacy. People again assume that you're just repressing something. -- Edmund White
I took a vow of political celibacy. -- Mitch Daniels
Asceticism and celibacy can conceal many incapacities. -- Mason Cooley
To me, the most obscene word in our language is celibacy. -- Robert Green Ingersoll
The ideal state for a philosopher, indeed, is celibacy tempered by polygamy. -- H. L. Mencken
I never cheated on my wife. I took seriously those vows of celibacy. -- Emo Philips
Unlike celibacy, which people choose, asexuality is an intrinsic part of who we are. -- Mallory Ortberg
There is a line between sexualityand promiscuity, and the line is closer to celibacy than not. -- Betty Jane Wylie
When I was nine, I wrote a vow of celibacy on a piece of paper and ate it. -- Lena Dunham
Everyone agrees the celibacy rule is just a Church law dating from the 11th century, not a divine command. -- Hans Kung
Try to force celibacy upon yourself and your dreams will become sexual, they will have a quality of sexuality. -- Rajneesh
Couples should abstain from sexual relations at least 2 or 3 days a week. Gradually try to reach a stage of celibacy most days. -- Mata Amritanandamayi
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I would like to sit still for a while but I'm restless you know and sitting still is only an ideal like celibacy and complete cleanliness. -- John Steinbeck
Out of the doctrine of original sin grew the crimes and miseries of asceticism, celibacy and witchcraft; woman becoming the helpless victim of all these delusions. -- Elizabeth Cady Stanton
In the name of celibacy, sex has been repressed for centuries and you have become just full of sexuality. Rather than transcending it you are boiling within. -- Rajneesh
To gain victory over the flesh was the purpose of fasting and celibacy, which denied the pleasures of this world for the sake of reward in the next. -- Barbara Tuchman
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. -- Jack Kerouac
In this modern world, the celibacy of the medieval learned class has been replaced by a celibacy of the intellect which is divorced from the concrete contemplation of the complete facts. -- Alfred North Whitehead
I lived in a community where celibacy was the rule. My I saw many people asked to leave the ashram for so much as looking intensely at a member of the opposite sex. -- Frederick Lindemann, 1st Viscount Cherwell

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