Quotes About Celibacy

“Loyalty is like the Doctrine of Celibacy-easy to proclaim but damned difficult to live by.”

— Michael Dobbs

“There once was a man who was sore
'Cuz his wife wouldn't open the door.
Celibacy
is just not for me
Let me in, you cock-teasing whore.”

— Jake Wizner

“What kinda vows? Celibacy? I thought, though I didn't say it. Nobody keeps a celibacy vow anyway.”

— Cassandra Rose Clarke

“Are you unmarried? Do not bewail yourself, as if your life must be incomplete. Yours is not a higher state, as celibacy has falsely taught, but it is neither a failure nor a shame. Cease to measure yourself by human standards. Find rest in being just what your heavenly Father wills you to be. It may be that you have been kept free from the limited circle of a home, in order to pour your love on those who have no one else to love them.”

— F.B. Meyer

“Hell, at this rate she'd end up in the mental institution by the end of the year. Cause: Celibacy.”

— Jennifer Probst

“I felt condemned to obscurity and to celibacy. But when one is driven by passion, one can live on almost nothing, and I was driven by passion for writing. One does not starve in modern, Western societies, and one can do without such amenities as the telephone, a car, entertainment.”

— Alain Robbe-Grillet

“(The tree bend over. Suddenly, a hiss and a meow sounded an instant before two cats darted off across the backyard.)
Look, Lanie, it's Mr. Tomcat come to save me from my celibacy. Oh, help me, Moon Mistress. Whatever am I to do with the attentions of such an unwanted suitor! Help me quick, before he kills me with my allergies. (Grace)”

— Sherrilyn Kenyon

“Yes, but I've already made my fortune in other things. (Solin)
Such as? (Geary)
Viagra. My brother learned to take a personal problem and profit by it. (Arik)
It's true. It pained me to see a man as young as Arik stricken with impotency. Therefore I had to do something to help the poor soul. But alas, there's nothing to be done for it. He's as flaccid as a wet noodle. (Solin)
How creative of you to project your problem onto me. But then, they say celibacy is enough to make a man lose all reason. Guess you're living proof, huh? (Arik)”

— Sherrilyn Kenyon

“Like being able to see how I got from Deep Purple to Howlin' Wolf in twenty-five moves; I am no longer pained by the memory of listening to "Sexual Healing" all the way through a period of enforced celibacy, or embarrassed by the reminder of forming a rock club at school, so that I and my fellow fifth-formers could get together and talk about Ziggy Stardust and Tommy.”

— Nick Hornby

“Celibacy,fasting, penance, mortification, self-denial, humility, silence, solitude and the whole train of monkish virtues ... Stupify the understanding and harden the heart, obscure the fancy and sour the temper ... A gloomy hair-brained enthusiast, after his death, may have a place in the calendar, but will scarcely ever be admitted, when alive, into intimacy and society, except by those who are as delerious and dismal as himself.”

— David Hume

“He'd tried celibacy. The only problem was the lack of sex.”

— Mark Haddon

“In a world where positive expressions of sexual longing connect us we will all be free to choose those sexual practices which affirm and nurture our growth. Those practices may range from choosing promiscuity or celibacy, from embracing one specific sexual identity and preference or choosing a roaming uncharted desire that is kindled only by interaction and engagement with specific individuals with whom we feel the spark of erotic recognition no matter their sex, race, class, or even their sexual preference. Radical feminist dialogues about sexuality must surface so that the movement towards sexual freedom can begin again.”

— Bell Hooks

“Professor Khupe rubbed his hand along the sand dunes of her windswept form. The static charge made her skin feel like the surface of a cactus. He recoiled. How he wished he had gone into the priesthood when he had had the chance. Embracing celibacy was far easier than battling the consequences of shunning it.”

— Taona Dumisani Chiveneko

“Okay, that's intensely interesting," Duvall said. "So you're a priest of the Forshan religion? Which schism?"
"The leftward schism, and no, not a priest."
"Couldn't handle the celibacy?"
"Leftward priests aren't required to be celibate," Dahl said, "but considering I was the only human at the seminary, I had celibacy thrust upon me, if you will."
"Some people wouldn't let that stop them," Duvall said.
"You haven't seen a Forshan seminary student up close," Dahl said. "Also, I don't swing xeno.”

— John Scalzi

“There are times, Kruppe murmurs, when celibacy born of sad deprivation becomes a boon, nay, a source of great relief.”

— Steven Erikson

“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

“Celibacy goes deeper than the flesh.”

— F. Scott Fitzgerald

“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

“You know, I'm not even sure how we ended up living together."
"I am," Jake said, turning back to the lake. "Sex. It's a powerful force, my boy, and women use it."
"Is that why you gave them up?" Will asked, sympathetically. "Did paranoia drive you to celibacy?”

— Jennifer Crusie

“To some extent a life of celibacy is a picture of how all of us are to live, containing our passions for God's purposes.”

— Eric Metaxas

“A vow of celibacy was easy to hold when there was no temptation.”

— Nalini Singh

“Curiously, Chris didn't hold everyone to the same exacting standards. One of the individuals he professed to admire greatly over the last two years of his life was a heavy drinker and incorrigible philanderer who regularly beat up his girlfriends. Chris was well aware of this man's faults yet managed to forgive them. He was also able to forgive, or overlook, the shortcomings of his literary heroes: Jack London was a notorious drunk; Tolstoy, despite his famous advocacy of celibacy, had been an enthusiastic sexual adventurer as young man and went on to father at least thirteen children, some of whom were conceived at the same time the censorious count was thundering in print against the evils of sex.”

— Jon Krakauer

“Marriage may often be a stormy lake, but celibacy is almost always a muddy horse pond.”

— Thomas Love Peacock

“Margaret Fuller Slack I WOULD have been as great as George Eliot But for an untoward fate. For look at the photograph of me made by Penniwit, Chin resting on hand, and deep-set eyes- Gray, too, and far-searching. But there was the old, old problem: Should it be celibacy, matrimony or unchastity? Then John Slack, the rich druggist, wooed me, Luring me with the promise of leisure for my novel, And I married him, giving birth to eight children, And had no time to write. It was all over with me, anyway, When I ran the needle in my hand While washing the baby's things, And died from lock-jaw, an ironical death. Hear me, ambitious souls, Sex is the curse of life.”

— Edgar Lee Masters

“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

“Celibacy is like poetry keeping the idea ever in mind like a dream; but marriage uses chisel and brush, concentrating more on marble and canvas. Celibacy jumps to a conclusion like an intuition; marriage, like reason, labors through ebb and flow, step by step.”

— Fulton J. Sheen

“A love without satiety an ecstasy without an end, a surrender to the beloved- God-without ever falling back on egotistic loneliness. Marriage and celibacy are not contraries”

— Fulton J. Sheen

“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

“LOOK, DO YOU really want a detailed description of two sex robots going at it like a pair of bonobos on day release from celibacy camp in front of an audience of jaded aristocrats?”

— Charles Stross

“When the parish priest rebuked him for his celibacy, saying it would lead him into debaucheryand sin, hesaid that a man who had to be muzzled bya wife as a protection against debauchery was not worthy of the joy of innocence. After that people began to treat him with priestly respect.”

— Liam O'Flaherty

“The most grievous wrong of that day ... was to be found in the establishment of the celibacy of the clergy ... This hideous doctrine of a celibate priesthood was maintained only by a constant struggle against the better and truer instincts of the heart.”

— Lillie Devereux Blake

“By all means let an observant Jewish adult male have his raw-cut penis placed in the mouth of a rabbi. (That would be legal, at least in New York.) By all means let grown women who distrust their clitoris or their labia have them sawn away by some other wretched adult female. By all means let Abraham offer to commit filicide to prove his devotion to the Lord or his belief in the voices he was hearing in his head. By all means let devout parents deny themselves the succor of medicine when in acute pain and distress. By all means-for all I care-let a priest sworn to celibacy be a promiscuous homosexual. By all means let a congregation that believes in whipping out the devil choose a new grown-up sinner each week and lash him until he or she bleeds. By all means let anyone who believes in creationism instruct his fellows during lunch breaks. But the conscription of the unprotected child for these purposes is something that even the most dedicated secularist can safely describe as a sin.”

— Christopher Hitchens

“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

“It would not have suprised Emilio Sandoz that his sex life was discussed with such candor and affectionate concern by his friends. The single craziest thing about being a priest, he'd found, was that celibacy was simultaneously the most private and most public aspect of his life.”

— Mary Doria Russell

“Celibacy bestows on a man the qualified freedom of a besieged city where one sometimes has to eat rats.”

— Sean O Faolain

“The practice of celibacy alone was opening me up to a deeper sense of the way the mind-body connection works. I saw over and over that my mind and body could be filled with desire and that no matter how intense the craving was it would always pass. I didn't have to satisfy every desire that arose in my mind. I began to understand impermanence through direct experience rather than just intellectual theory.”

— Noah Levine

“That this is possible may not be denied in a world where hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people voluntarily submit to celibacy, obligated and bound by nothing except the injunction of the Church. Should the same renunciation not be possible if this injunction is replaced by the admonition finally to put an end to the constant and continuous original sin of racial poisoning, and to give the Almighty Creator beings such as He Himself created?”

— Adolf Hitler

“I consider my greatest accomplishment to be lifelong celibacy.”

— Isaac Newton

“Asceticism and celibacy can conceal many incapacities.”

— Mason Cooley

“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

“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

“To those who say that they are Christian and gay, what we must keep in mind is that absent in that kind of lifestyle is a call to holiness, a call to celibacy and integrity. Obviously, it is a capitulation toward one's desires and the sexual sins that the Bible so strongly condemns.”

— Erwin W. Lutzer

“There is much to be said for post-menopausal celibacy. Sex is rough on loners because you have to have somebody else around, but now I don't. No more diets to stay slim and desirable: I've had sex and I've had food, and I'd rather eat.”

— Florence King

“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

“Christianity ... has produced the iniquities of the Inquisition, the egotism and celibacy of the monasteries, the fury of religious wars, the ferocity of the Hussite, of the Catholic, of the Puritan, of the Spaniard, of the Irish Orangeman and of the Irish Papist; it has divided families, alienated friends, lighted the torch of civil war, and borne the virgin and the greybeard to the burning pile, broken delicate limbs upon the wheel and wrung the souls and bodies of innocent creatures on the rack; all this it has done, and done in the name of God.”

— Ouida

“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

“It does not, however, seem impossible that by an attention to breed, a certain degree of improvement, similar to that among animals, might take place among men. Whether intellect could be communicated may be a matter of doubt: but size, strength, beauty, complexion, and perhaps even longevity are in a degree transmissible ... As the human race could not be improved in this way, without condemning all the bad specimens to celibacy, it is not probable, that an attention to breed should ever become general.”

— Thomas Malthus

“Priestly celibacy has been guarded by the Church for centuries as a brilliant jewel, and retains its value undiminished even in our time when the outlook of men and the state of the world have undergone such profound changes.”

— Pope Paul VI

“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