quotations about chastity
I'm gonna seek this thing like a buried treasure
Like Columbus sailing over the sea
Until I discover, baby, the land beyond expertise and chastity
JOHN CALE
"Satisfied", Black Acetate
Give me chastity and continence, but not just yet!
AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO
Confessions
A nun of winter's sisterhood kisses not more religiously; the very ice of chastity is in them.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
As You Like It
Chastity with the reins of reason bridleth the rage of lust.
ANONYMOUS
Antiquity: or, The Wise Instructor
Chastity is a difficult, long term matter; one must wait patiently for it to bear fruit, for the happiness of loving kindness which it must bring. But at the same time, chastity is the sure way to happiness.
POPE JOHN PAUL II
Love and Responsibility
Chastity is oftener owing to diffidence and shame, than to fortitude of reason or virtue.
NORMAN MACDONALD
Maxims and Moral Reflections
How profitable to the spiritual interests of man is this virtue of chastity! Chastity delivers him from a shameful passion which agitates and tyrannises over him unceasingly, which devours and consumes him by that thirst for impure and criminal pleasures and enjoyments which he can neither quench nor satisfy, even by giving it everything it asks of him.
MARIE LATASTE
Letters and Writings
Chastity is a virtue with some, but with many almost a vice. These people abstain, to be sure: but the bitch Sensuality leers enviously out of all that they do. This restless beast follows them even into the heights of their virtue and into the depths of their cold spirit.
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE
Thus Spoke Zarathustra
In the early days of Christianity the exercise of chastity was frequently combined with a close and romantic intimacy of affection between the sexes which shocked austere moralists.
HAVELOCK ELLIS
Little Essays of Love and Virtue
So dear to Heaven is saintly chastity,
That, when a soul is found sincerely so,
A thousand liveried angels lacky her,
Driving far off each thing of sin and guilt,
And in clear dream, and solemn vision,
Tell her of things that no gross ear can hear,
Till oft converse with heav'nly habitants
Begin to cast a beam on th' outward shape,
The unpolluted temple of the mind,
And turns it by degrees to the soul's essence,
Till all be made immortal: but when lust,
By unchaste looks, loose gestures, and foul talk,
But most by lewd and lavish act of sin,
Lets in defilement to the inward parts,
The soul grows clotted by contagion,
Imbodies, and imbrutes, till she quite lose
The divine property of her first being.
JOHN MILTON
Poems on Several Occasions
Much of the modern resistance to chastity comes from men's belief that they "own" their bodies -- those vast and perilous estates, pulsating with the energy that made the worlds, in which they find themselves without their consent and from which they are ejected at the pleasure of Another!
C. S. LEWIS
The Screwtape Letters
Pure chastity is beauty to our souls, grace to our bodies, and peace to our desires.
SOLON
attributed, Day's Collacon
A beautiful and chaste woman is the perfect workmanship of God, and the true glory of angels, the rare miracle of earth, and the sole wonder of the world.
GEORGE HERMES
attributed, Living Like Benjamin
It must be hard sometimes
To stand behind your chastity
And I wish that I could be the one
But it's not me, I'll never set you free
GOOD RIDDANCE
"Holding On"
So long as chastity is preserved, it is respected; it is despised only after having been lost.
JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU
Emile
Beauty without chastity is like a mandrake apple, comely in show, but poisonous in taste.
THOMAS BLOUNT
The Academy of Eloquence
Chastity is the cement of civilization and progress. Without it there is no stability in society, and without it one cannot attain the Science of Life.
MARY BAKER EDDY
Science and Health
'Tis Chastity, my brother, Chastity: She that has that, is clad in complete steel.
JOHN MILTON
Poems on Several Occasions
Chastity--you can carry it too far.
MARK TWAIN
speech at the dedication of the New York Engineers' Club, Dec. 9, 1907
Of all the sexual aberrations, chastity is the strangest.
ANATOLE FRANCE
Heretic's Handbook of Quotations