Fasted Quotes

During his four-day vision quest, the Indian built a sweat lodge of willow and hides, fasted, cleansed himself with sage and cedar, and endured the heat of the fire until his spirit was released to soar over a field of snakes. His ordeal ended when a vision of his mother appeared and told him to go back home because he had forgotten his pipe. ~ Wade Davis

Muslim Girlhood

I never found myself in a pink aisle.
There was no box for me
with glossy cellophane like heat
and a neat packet of instructions in six languages.

Evenings, I watched TV like a religion I moderately believed.
I watched to see how the others lived, not knowing I was the other - no laugh track in my living room, no tidy and punctual resolution waiting.

I took tests in which Jane & William had so many apples.

I fasted through birthday parties
and Christmas parties
and ate leftover tajine at plastic lunch tables,
picked at pepperoni from slices like blemishes and tried not to complain.

I prayed at the wrong times in the wrong tongue.
I hungered for Jell-O & Starburts & margarine;
could read mono- and diglycerides by five,
knew what gelatin meant, and
where it came from. ~ Leila Chatti

Over the past month, Muslims have fasted, taking no food or water during daylight hours, in order to refocus their minds on faith and redirect their hearts to charity. Muslims worldwide have stretched out a hand of mercy to those in need. Charity tables at which the poor can break their fast line the streets of cities and towns. And gifts of food and clothing and money are distributed to ensure that all share in God's abundance. Muslims often invite members of other families to their evening iftar meals, demonstrating a spirit of tolerance. ~ George W. Bush

The fastest way to success is stewardship. ~ Sunday Adelaja

I just had ... my Farmer's Insurance Chevrolet was the fasted car here. In the first run. We were going forward, just taking our time. Regan Smith was pretty slow. I was under him for a couple of laps. When my spotter cleared me in the center, I just took off, and he was there on exit. It is disappointing to have that good of a car and be out this early. Everybody at Hendrick Motorsports is doing such an awesome job. I've had awesome race cars, and I have nothing to show for it. ~ Kasey Kahne

You will gain more by receiving scorn peacefully than if you fasted for a week on bread and water. It is good to humble ourselves; but it is much more worthwhile to accept the humiliations that come to us from others. ~ Alphonsus Liguori

LXXXVII IT WAS said of one of the elders that he persevered in a fast of seventy weeks, eating only once a week. This elder asked God to reveal to him the meaning of a certain Scripture text, and God would not reveal it to him. So he said to himself: Look at all the work I have done without getting anywhere! I will go to one of the brothers and ask him. When he had gone out and closed the door and was starting on his way an angel of the Lord was sent to him, saying: The seventy weeks you fasted did not bring you any closer to God, but now that you have humbled yourself and set out to ask your brother, I am sent to reveal the meaning of that text. And opening to him the meaning which he sought, he went away. ~ Thomas Merton

Adam became so proud that he wished to become God and died for his pride; the Son of God humbled Himself unto death, and gave life to the fallen. O abyss of humility! Adam and Eve lost themselves through gluttony, the Lord fasted and died for them, in order to give them life. They were disobedient, Christ fulfilled obedience. ~ John Of Kronstadt

But the pigs--seventy pounds of porcine weight that did not take kindly to weekly endoscopies--did not sprout any ulcers. And testing the theory on humans was ethically impossible: how could one justify infecting a human with a new, uncharacterized species of bacteria to prove that it caused gastritis and predisposed to cancer?
In July 1984, with his experiments stalled and his grant applications in jeopardy, Marshall performed the ultimate experiment: "On the morning of the experiment, I omitted my breakfast….Two hours later, Neil Noakes scraped a heavily inoculated 4 day culture plate of Helicobacter and dispersed the bacteria in alkaline peptone water (a kind of meat broth used to keep bacteria alive). I fasted until 10 am when Neil handed me a 200 ml beaker about one quarter full of the cloudy brown liquid. I drank it down in one gulp then fasted for the rest of the day. A few stomach gurgles occurred. Was it the bacteria or was I just hungry? ~ Siddhartha Mukherjee

I rarely went to the mosque, I never fasted, and I only prayed namaaz on the holy nights because my mom bugged me about it. ~ Aasif Mandvi

Every time I have fasted I have found my worship experience sweeter, the illumination of God's Spirit brighter and the hunger for God's Word stronger. ~ Gary Rohrmayer

I prayed and fasted. I read the mystics. I studied the martyrs. I began to think I was someone thirsting for God. ~ Anne Carson

The main thing is to write
for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust
that imagines its haven like your hands at night
dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.
You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.
Take off from here. ~ Seamus Heaney

The attitudes of receptivity are various, and Will had sincerely tried many of them. He was not excessively fond of wine, but he had several times taken too much, simply as an experiment in that form of ecstasy; he had fasted till he was faint, and then supped on lobster; he had made himself ill with doses of opium. Nothing greatly original had resulted from these measures; and ~ George Eliot

The pain of regret is far worse than the pain of discipline.

We will never have the anointing, the ministry or the revivals of our heroes if we don't become as disciplined as they were. They went to bed early to get up early to pray, and they fasted for days on end.

We shouldn't just pray to mark it off of our lists or read a few chapters of our Bible each day to keep up with the church Bible reading chart. We must have a deeper purpose for doing these tasks.

Discipline without direction is drudgery. In other words, discipline has to have a purpose to drive it each and every day.

The price for spiritual change is expensive, but the rewards are far greater.

The world's ways, ideologies, and influence cannot be present in a life dedicated to Jesus because consecration's purpose is for us to be different from the world. And, for that matter, if we are separate from the world, then sin must not be a part of our lives either. Sin ruins a life of consecration.

It would be a shame to believe that holiness is nothing more than rules or guidelines we are to live by. Holiness and consecration flow from a life given to the spiritual disciplines, a life we can only maintain by continuing to seek for Him daily.

Your pursuit will never be greater than your disciplines.

No man is greater than his prayer life.

Even though Jesus requires us to pray, praying is not to be done out of duty, but it ~ Nathan Whitley

I have 17 nieces and nephews, who are a pure delight. We have hiked and biked and fasted and prayed together. ~ Sheri L. Dew

Solemn three-day fasts, which were instituted by Adhemar of Le Puy, were decreed after an earthquake which took place on 30 December 1097, before the battle of Antioch on 28 June 1098, before an ordeal undergone by Peter Bartholomew on 8 April 1099 and before the procession round Jerusalem on 8 July 1099. These fasts certainly made an impression on the crusaders; they could hardly have failed to have done so, since they can only have made their hunger worse. It was reported that during their fast at Antioch Turks came up to walls with loaves of white bread, with which they tempted and mocked the starving men within. The achievement of the crusaders becomes even more remarkable - in fact it is quite incredible - when one considers that soldiers already weakened by starvation, who certainly appreciated die importance of taking food before battle since they took care to give their horses extra rations, deliberately fasted before their more important engagements. One wonders how they managed to fight at all. ~ Jonathan Riley-Smith

When Sadik lost his own lease, we moved in together. And after a few months of closer scrutiny, he began to realize that the city had indeed had an effect on me, although not the one he'd expected. I stopped getting high. I ran three miles a day and fasted on Sundays. For the first time in years, I applied myself to my studies and started keeping a journal of daily reflections and very bad poetry. ~ Barack Obama

Too soon the two weeks were over and we were back in Lugano, and there we learned about Disaster.
We weren't completely ignorant. We knew about disaster from our previous schools and previous lives. We'd had access to televisions and newspapers. But the return to Lugano marked the beginning of Global Awareness Month, and in each of our classes, we talked about disaster: disaster man-made and natural. We talked about ozone depletion and the extinction of species and depleted rain forests and war and poverty and AIDS. We talked about refugees and slaughter and famine.
We were in the middle school and were getting, according to Uncle Max, a diluted version of what the upper-schoolers were facing. An Iraqi boy from the upper school came to our history class and talked about what it felt like when the Americans bombed his country. Keisuke talked about how he felt responsible for World War II, and a German student said she felt the same.
We got into heated discussions over the neglect of infant females in some cultures, and horrific cases of child abuse worldwide. We fasted one day each week to raise our consciousness about hunger, and we sent money and canned goods and clothing to charities.
In one class, after we watched a movie about traumas in Rwanda, and a Rwandan student told us about seeing his mother killed, Mari threw up. We were all having nightmares.
At home, Aunt Sandy pleaded with Uncle Max. "This is too much!" she said. "You can't dump all the ~ Sharon Creech

I have fought and kicked and fasted and prayed and cursed and cried myself to the point of existing. ~ Alice Walker

You must find a place on a woman's body and live there.
In the dark, the noise far away, Sam ran his hands over Calliope's body and the world of work and worry seemed to move away. He found two depressions at the bottom of her back where sunlight collected, and he lived there, out of the wind and noise. He grew old there, died and ascended to the Great Spirit, found heaven in her cheek on his chest, the warm wind of her breath across his stomach carried sweet grass and sage, and... In another lifetime he had lived on the soft skin under her right breast, his lips riding light over the ridge and valley of every rib, shuffling through downy, dew damp hairs like a child dancing through autumn leaves. In the mountain of her breast, he fasted at the medicine wheel of her aureole, received a vision that he and she were steam people, mingled wet with no skin seperating them. And there he lived, happy. She followed, traveled, lived with him and in him as he was in her. They lived lifetimes and slept and dreamed together. It was swell. ~ Christopher Moore

In all outward aspects he remained patient and mild now, not caring even to speak against heretics; he knew that he was likely to die soon enough, but the prospect of death was not an unwelcome one ( ... ). More retained his hair shirt as he dwelled in his chamber, and is reported to have whipped himself for penitence; he fasted on the appointed days, sang hymns and prayed both day and night. ~ Peter Ackroyd