Renunciation Quotes

“It is a ridiculous thing for a man not to fly from his own badness, which is indeed possible, but to fly from other men's badness, which is impossible.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“Renunciation is not rejecting the family but accepting the whole world as family. Renunciation is not changing the name or dress. It is changing the attitude towards life. Renunciation is not removing the hairs form the head. It is eliminating the negative thoughts from the mind. Renunciation is not running away from responsibility, doership or fruits of action but it is focusing on the fruits and actions that will bring happiness to the whole world. Renunciation is the ultimate compassion and ultimate forgiveness.”
― Amit Ray, Walking the Path of Compassion

“Every choice is a renunciation. Indeed. Every choice is a thousand renunciations. To choose one thing is to turn one's back on many others.”
― Ronald Rolheiser, The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality

“One of the biggest dangers on the left-hand path, according to Zeena, is that the initiate often adheres to the need of ‘maintaining his personality’, even when consciousness expands beyond every known border. The left-hand path requires, [...] that certain aspects of the self dies, something which she believes to be elucidated in the tantric death symbolism.

--About Zeena Schreck by Malin Fitger 'Contemporary notions of Kundalini, its background and role within new Western religiosity,' University of Stockholm, 2004”
― Zeena Schreck, Demons of the Flesh: The Complete Guide to Left Hand Path Sex Magic

“Cultivate the art of renunciation.”
― Thomas Hardy, Desperate Remedies

“Vairâgya or renunciation is the turning point in all the various Yogas. The Karmi (worker) renounces the fruits of his work. The Bhakta (devotee) renounces all little loves for the almighty and omnipresent love. The Yogi renounces his experiences, because his philosophy is that the whole Nature, although it is for the experience of the soul, at last brings him to know that he is not in Nature, but eternally separate from Nature. The Jnâni (philosopher) renounces everything, because his philosophy is that Nature never existed, neither in the past, nor present, nor will It in the future.”
― Swami Vivekananda, The Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda, Volume 3

“Renunciation is not about pushing something away, it is about letting go. It's facing the fact that certain things cause us pain, and they cause other people pain. Renunciation is a commitment to let go of things that create suffering. It is the intention to stop hurting ourselves and others.”
― Noah Levine, Against the Stream: A Buddhist Manual for Spiritual Revolutionaries

“Perhaps it is meant to be hard. Perhaps there are some things so previous that one can only be tested when one is asked to give them up.”
― Sheri S. Tepper, Gibbon's Decline and Fall

“I wish to go down under the waters—
the cool, crystalline waters that I knew, where all
that is, here, existing, is
is only to be lost within the susurrations
and the rumours of water and the evening star
we wait for...”
― John Daniel Thieme, paulinskill hours and other poems

“. . .the sorrows of the heart yearn
to be erased, for one final atonement
finite and forgetting and whole—but time in its preserving
will not permit forgetting; destroying
only when we can no longer beg
or argue with time
to preserve the brief benisons
a few moments longer than our sins”
― John Daniel Thieme, paulinskill hours and other poems

“Renunciation isn't a moral imperative or a form of self-denial. It's simply cooperation with the way things are: for moments do pass away, one after the other. Resisting this natural unfolding doesn't change it; resistance only makes it painful. So we renounce our resistance, our noncooperation, our stubborn refusal to enter life as it is. We renounce our fantasy of a beautiful past and an exciting future we can cherish and hold on to. Life just isn't like this. Life, time, is letting go, moment after moment. Life and time redeem themselves constantly, heal themselves constantly, only we don't know this, and much as we long to be healed and redeemed, we refuse to recognize this truth. This is why the sirens' songs are so attractive and so deadly. They propose a world of indulgence and wishful thinking, an unreal world that is seductive and destructive. (142)”
― Norman Fischer, Sailing Home: Using the Wisdom of Homer's Odyssey to Navigate Life's Perils and Pitfalls

“Our music draws the listener away, beyond the limits of everyday human joys and sorrows, and takes us to that lonely region of renunciation which lies to the root of the universe, while European music leads us to a variegated dance through the endless rise and fall of human grief and joy.”
― Rabindranath Tagore

“2.27 THE ULTIMATE
With compassion and renunciation walking,
With wants and desires ever shedding,
With love within one’s heart flowing,
Peace and Divinity shall never be wanting.
[158] - 2”
― Munindra (Munnan) Misra, Eddies of Life

“RENUNCIATION is the rightful path of the soul to true freedom, & only then Peace can follow in the life.”
― Deepak Chandra

“The meaning of Sannyas is not well defined. Its meaning is not static; it is redefined after short periods of time in the life of a Sannyasi.”
― Harshit Walia

“When Peter renounced the world he grew up in and the people he grew up with, I believe it was exactly as heroic as that of a person who, finding himself prone to violent seasickness, renounces yachting. Hell, Pete was hardly ‘in the world’ in the first place. That was just the problem. He knew more about 13th century Sufi Orders and the Ptolemaic Universe than the rivers and hills and sewers and mills in southwestern Washington.”
― David James Duncan, The Brothers K

“In the real journey of life, it is not what you do; it is what you don't do that matters the most.”
― Harshit Walia