This collection of fasting motivation quotes provides the spark you might need to continue with conviction on your chosen path. This applies whether that’s an intermittent fasting journey or simply testing out a monk fast for a week or two to see how it goes for you.
Why am I writing to you about fasting on a food blog?
First, after feasting on good food, and perhaps indulging in a few too many baked goods, a fast can feel wholesome and bring us back to equilibrium. It balances out some of the excesses of a modern diet. (And it makes you appreciate great food even more when you eat next!)
In addition, if you’re anything like me, you may have become interested in cooking as a means to better health.
Fasting can also support good health, without all the dirty dishes, so it is also a great tool to have at our disposal. Mark Mattson, a lead investigator for the NIH, found that, “Fasting has been shown to improve biomarkers of disease, reduce oxidative stress and preserve learning and memory functioning.”
People have been fasting throughout human history. Sometimes scarcity and food availability patterns drove fasting. Other times people deliberately chose to fast for health or religious purposes.
Whether you are taking up fasting for health or weight loss reasons, or as part of your spiritual practices such as Ramadan or Ash Wednesday, you are not alone.
Many people find clarity of mind and increased energy through fasting, even if they originally were only seeking to lose a few pounds. Here are some words of wisdom from others who have walked this path before us.
Read on for some of the best quotes I could round up on the topic of fasting. Enjoy!
Fasting motivation quotes about building anticipation for great food
“A fast is better than a bad meal.” – Irish proverb
“Fasting today makes the food good tomorrow.” – German proverb
Put yourself on a single meal a day, now – dinner – for a few days, till you secure a good, sound, regular, trustworthy appetite, then take to your one and a half permanently, and don’t listen to the family any more.
– Mark Twain
“One cannot think well, love well, sleep well, if one has not dined well.” – Virginia Woolf
Fasting motivation quotes about fasting as medicine
“Our food should be our medicine. Our medicine should be our food. But to eat when you are sick, is to feed your illness.” – Hippocrates
“Fasting is the greatest remedy—the physician within.” – Paracelsus
“The best of all medicines is resting and fasting.” – Benjamin Franklin
“Instead of using medicine, better fast today.” – Plutarch (also sometimes translated as “Instead of medicine, fast for a day.”)
“To lengthen thy life, lessen thy meals.” – Benjamin Franklin
“She who eats until she is sick must fast until she is well.” – English proverb
“Therapeutic fasting accelerates the healing process and allows the body to recover from serious disease in a relatively short period of time.” – Joel Fuhrman, M.D.
“Fasting for 24 hours every other day or twice weekly extends lifespan up to 30%.” – Dr. Mindy Peltz
Fasting is, without any doubt, the most effective biological method of treatment. It is the operation without surgery.
– Otto Buchinger, Das Heilfasten
“Fasting is the first principle of medicine; fast and see the strength of the spirit reveal itself.” – Rumi
“A little starvation can really do more for the average sick man than can the best medicines and the best doctors. I do not mean a restricted diet; I mean total abstention from food for one or two days. I speak from experience; starvation has been my cold and fever doctor for fifteen years, and has accomplished a cure in all instances.” – Mark Twain
“When you have any ordinary ailment, particularly of a feverish sort, eat nothing at all during twenty-four hours. That will cure it. It will cure the stubbornest cold in the head too. No cold in the head can survive twenty-four hours’ unmodified starvation.” – Mark Twain
Fasting motivation quotes about cultivating discipline
“Periodic fasting can help clear up the mind and strengthen the body and the spirit.” – Ezra Taft Benson
“The philosophy of fasting calls upon us to know ourselves, to master ourselves, and to discipline ourselves the better to free ourselves. To fast is to identify our dependencies, and free ourselves from them.” – Tariq Ramadan
Christian fasting is a test to see what desires control us. Fasting reveals the measure of food’s mastery over us – or television or computers or whatever we submit to again and again to conceal the weakness of our hunger for God. A real lived-out human act of preference for God over His gifts is the actual lived-out glorification of God’s excellence for which He created the world. Fasting is not the only way, or the main way, that we glorify God in preferring Him above His gifts. But it is one way.
– John Piper
“More than any other Discipline, fasting reveals the things that control us. This is a wonderful benefit to the true disciple who longs to be transformed into the image of Jesus Christ. We cover up what is inside us with food and other good things, but in fasting these things surface. If pride controls us, it will be revealed almost immediately. Anger, jealousy, strife, fear—if they are within us, they will surface during fasting. At first we will rationalize that our anger is due to our hunger; then we will realize that we are angry because the spirit of anger is within us. We can rejoice in this knowledge because we know that healing is available through the power of Christ.” – Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline
Fasting motivation quotes about health benefits
“I have not only found good health, but perfect health; I have found a new state of being, a potentiality of life; a sense of lightness and cleanness and joyfulness, such as I did not know could exist in the human body.” Upton Sinclair, The Fasting Cure
Fasting is the key which unlocks Mother Nature’s storehouse of Energy. Fasting rewards you with increased Energy. Each time you fast, you will make your mind stronger, and more positive. You will eliminate fear and worry… Fasting helps you to a higher life. Fasting elevates the soul, the mind, and body… By fasting you can create the person you have always longed to be. That is, if you demand only the best life can offer… When your body is cleansed by fasting and you are living a natural healthy life, you will discover that you feel wonderful all the time. This is because Nature intended man to be a happy, well-balanced person, free of fears, of frustrations, stresses and strains.
– Paul C. Bragg, The Miracle of Fasting
“If thou wouldst preserve a sound body, use fasting and walking; if a healthful soul, fasting and praying; walking exercises the body, praying exercises the soul, fasting cleanses both.” – Francis Quarles
Fasting motivation quotes (plus an article) about saving time and money
While the Wall Street Journal‘s article, “To Save Money, Maybe You Should Skip Breakfast” came across as pretty tone-deaf to people who aren’t in the habit of fasting, it makes a good point. That is, as long as you’re willing to concede that breakfast is optional, or at least can come later. (I’m not sure that alone can make up for grocery price inflation, but that’s another story.)
One way to begin to see how vastly indulgent we usually are is to fast. It is a long day that is not broken by the usual three meals. One finds out what an astonishing amount of time is spent in the planning, purchasing, preparing, eating, and cleaning up of meals.
– Elisabeth Elliot
“For if I fasted chiefly in order to save money, rather than from obedience to the Church; if to study well rather than to please God;—who does not see that I pervert right and order, preferring my own interest before obedience to the Church and the pleasure of my God? To fast in order to save is good, to fast in order to obey the Church is better, to fast in order to please God is best: but though it may seem that with three goods one cannot make a bad; yet he who should place them out of order, preferring the less to the better, would without doubt commit an irregularity deserving of blame.” – St. Francis de Sales
Thoughts on how not eating sharpens our senses
“What the eyes are for the outer world, fasts are for the inner.” – Mahatma Gandhi
When I began to think about the work you commanded
– Thomas Merton The Wood Carver, in The Way of Chuang Tzu, (1965)
I guarded my spirit, did not expend it
On trifles, that were not to the point.
I fasted in order to set
My heart at rest.
After three days fasting,
I had forgotten gain and success.
After five days
I had forgotten praise or criticism.
After seven days
I had forgotten my body
With all its limbs.
“You must fast!” said Confucius. “Do you know what I mean by fasting? It is not easy. But easy ways do not come from God.”
– Thomas Merton The Wood Carver, in The Way of Chuang Tzu, (1965)
“Oh,” said Yen Hui, “I am used to fasting! At home we were poor. We went for months without wine or meat. That is fasting, is it not?”
“Well, you can call it ‘observing a fast’ if you like,” said Confucius, “but it is not the fasting of the heart.”
“Tell me, said Yen Hui, “what is fasting of the heart?”
Confucius replied: “The goal of fasting is inner unity. This means hearing, but not with the ear; hearing, but not with the understanding; hearing with the spirit, with your whole being. The hearing that is only in the ears is one thing. The hearing of the understanding is another. But the hearing of the spirit is not limited to any one faculty, to the ear, or to the mind. Hence it demands the emptiness of all the faculties. And when the faculties are empty, then the whole being listens… Fasting of the heart begets unity and freedom.”
Fasting Motivation Quotes about Enhancing Spirituality
“Fasting can bring breakthroughs in the spiritual realm that will never happen in any other way.” – Richard Foster
Although these abstinences give some pain to the body, yet they so lessen the power of bodily appetites and passions, and so increase our taste of spiritual joys, that even these severities of religion, when practiced with discretion, add much to the comfortable enjoyment of our lives.
– William Law
“[The purpose of fasting is] to loosen to some degree the ties which bind us to the world or material surroundings as a whole in order that we may concentrate all our spiritual powers upon the unseen and eternal things.” – Ole Hallesby
“To live in right relationship with Creation means honoring the creation of the body itself, recognizing its inherent sacred nature, and developing a deep, trustworthy relationship with it. For there is only one place in all the Universe that has been made especially for you, and that is inside your own body.”
– Stephen Harrod Buhner, The Transformational Power of Fasting: The Way to Spiritual, Physical, and Emotional Rejuvenation
Religious Fasting Motivation Quotes
“My soul was drawn out very much for the world, for multitudes of souls. I think I had more enlargement for sinners than for the children of God, though I felt as if I could spend my life in cries for both. I enjoyed great sweetness in communion with my dear Saviour. I think I never in my life felt such an entire weanedness from this world and so much resigned to God in everything.” – David Brainerd
Spiritual hunger and fasting have a reciprocal power. Each deepens and strengthens the other. Each makes the other more effective. When your spiritual hunger becomes very deep, you may even lose the desire for food. All of the most intense forms of prevailing prayer . . . can be deepened, clarified, and greatly empowered by fasting . . .
– Wesley Duewel
“Fasting in the biblical sense is choosing not to partake of food because your spiritual hunger is so deep, your determination in intercession so intense, or your spiritual warfare so demanding that you have temporarily set aside even fleshly needs to give yourself to prayer and meditation.” – Dr. Wesley L. Duewel
If you are not fasting, it is perhaps because you do not feel any fervent longings for God’s power in your life.
– John Piper
“The abstinence is not to be an end in itself but rather for the purpose of being separated to the Lord and to concentrate on godliness. This kind of fasting reduces the influence of our self-will and invites the Holy Spirit to do a more intense work in us.” – Bill Thrasher
Faith-based fasting motivation quotes
“Of fasting I say this: It is right to fast frequently in order to subdue and control the body. For when the stomach is full, the body does not serve for preaching, for praying, or studying, or for doing anything else that is good. Under such circumstances God’s Word cannot remain. But one should not fast with a view to meriting something by it as by a good work.” – Martin Luther
Fasting reduces the power of self so that the Holy Spirit can do a more intense work within us.
– Bill Bright
“This Man (Jesus) suddenly remarks one day, ‘No one needs fast while I am here.’ Who is this Man who remarks that His mere presence suspends all normal rules?” – Clive Staples Lewis, a British writer better known as C. S. Lewis
Fasting cleanses the soul, raises the mind, subjects one’s flesh to the spirit, renders the heart contrite and humble, scatters the clouds of concupiscence, quenches the fire of lust, and kindles the true light of chastity. Enter again into yourself.
– Saint Augustine of Hippo
“Fasting possesses great power. If practiced with the right intention, it makes one a friend of God.” – Tertullian, Works by Tertullian, On Fasting
Further reflections on the purpose of fasts
“Self-indulgence is the enemy of gratitude, and self-discipline usually its friend and generator. That is why gluttony is a deadly sin. The early desert fathers believed that a person’s appetites are linked: full stomachs and jaded palates take the edge from our hunger and thirst for righteousness. They spoil the appetite for God.” ~ Cornelius Plantinga Jr. (Quoted in Spiritual Disciplines for the Christian Life by Donald S. Whitney, p. 151)
“Fasting helps express, deepens, confirms the resolution that we are ready to sacrifice anything, even ourselves, to attain what we seek for the kingdom of God.” – Andrew Murray
Fasting kills the desire of the self and the appetite of greed, and from it comes purity of the heart, purification of the limbs, cultivation of the inner and the outer being, thankfulness for blessings, charity to the poor, increase of humble supplication, humility, weeping and most of the ways of seeking refuge in Allah.
– Ja’far al-Sadiq, The Lantern of the Path, Fasting, Translated by: Fadhlallah Haeri. Ansariyan Publications.
“Fasting increases our sense of humility and dependence on the Lord (for our hunger and physical weakness continually remind us how we are not really strong in ourselves but need the Lord).” – Wayne Grudem
“Fasting confirms our utter dependence upon God by finding in Him a source of sustenance beyond food.” – Dallas Willard, American philosopher
“We were with the Prophet while we were young and had no wealth whatever. So Allah’s Apostle said, “O young people! Whoever among you can marry, should marry…and whoever is not able to marry, should fast, as fasting diminishes his sexual power.” – Sahih Bukhari 7:62:4
Additional remarks on how fasting benefits people
“Fasting is an external expression of an internal reality. When we fast for a meal or a day or a week, we remind ourselves that more than our stomachs long for the pleasure of food, our souls long for the presence of God.” – David Platt
Let us say something about fasting, because many, for want of knowing its usefulness, undervalue its necessity, and some reject it as almost superfluous; while, on the other hand where the use of it is not well understood, it easily degenerates into superstition. Holy and legitimate fasting is directed to three ends; for we practice it either as a restraint on the flesh, to preserve it from licentiousness, or as a preparation for prayers and pious meditations, or as a testimony of our humiliation in the presence of God when we are desirous of confessing our guilt before him.
– John Calvin
“Prescribed for you is the Fast, as it was prescribed for those before you, so that you may deserve God’s protection (against the temptations of your carnal soul) and attain piety.” – Qur’an, Al-Baqara 2:183, Ali Ünal
Prayer quotes related to fasting
“The man who never fasts is no more in the way to heaven than the man who never prays.” – John Wesley
“One day, all of our praying and all of our fasting in pursuit of God will culminate in the goal of our salvation: everlasting, uninterrupted, uninhibited, unimaginable, indescribable, all-satisfying communion with God.” – David Platt
And fasting is chiefly an aid to prayer, so much so, that it has frequently been found a means, in the hand of God, of confirming and increasing, not one virtue, but also seriousness of spirit, sincerity, sensitivity and tenderness of conscience, deadness to the world, and consequently a love of God, and of every holy and heavenly feeling.
– John Wesley
“A fast is not a hunger strike. Fasting submits to God’s commands. A hunger strike makes God submit to our demands.” – Edwin Louis Cole
“Fasting is calculated to bring a note of urgency and importance into our praying, and to give force to our pleading in the court of heaven. The man who prays with fasting is giving heaven notice that he is truly in earnest.” – Arthur Wallis
Fasting expresses earnestness and urgency in our prayers: if we continued to fast, eventually we would die. Therefore, in a symbolic way, fasting says to God that we are prepared to lay down our lives that the situation be changed rather than that it continue.
– Wayne Grudem
“If the solemnities of our fasting, though frequent, long, and severe, do not serve to put an edge upon devout affections, to quicken prayer, to increase Godly sorrow, and to alter the temper of our minds, and the course of our lives, for the better, they do not at all answer the intention, and God will not accept them as performed to Him.” – Matthew Henry
Bible verses to support your journey
“Jesus lived by His own rules. He fasted.” – Matthew 6:16
“Therefore do not worry, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ …your Heavenly Father knows what you need.” – Matthew 6:31-32
Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, left the Jordan and was led by the Spirit into the wilderness, where for forty days he was tempted by the devil. He ate nothing during those days, and at the end of them he was hungry. The devil said to him, “If you are the Son of God, tell this stone to become bread.” Jesus answered, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone.’
– Luke 4:1-4
“And when you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites, for they disfigure their faces that their fasting may be seen by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you fast, anoint your head and wash your face, that your fasting may not be seen by others but by your Father who is in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.” – Matthew 6:16-18
Additional fasting motivation quotes from scripture
“We put no stumbling block in anyone’s path, so that our ministry will not be discredited. Rather, as servants of God we commend ourselves in every way: in great endurance; in troubles, hardships and distresses; in beatings, imprisonments and riots; in hard work, sleepless nights and hunger; in purity, understanding, patience and kindness; in the Holy Spirit and in sincere love; in truthful speech and in the power of God; with weapons of righteousness in the right hand and in the left; through glory and dishonor, bad report and good report; genuine, yet regarded as impostors; known, yet regarded as unknown; dying, and yet we live on; beaten, and yet not killed; sorrowful, yet always rejoicing; poor, yet making many rich; having nothing, and yet possessing everything.” 2 Corinthians 6:3-10 (NIV)
Is not this the kind of fasting I have chosen: to loose the chains of injustice and untie the cords of the yoke, to set the oppressed free and break every yoke?
– Isaiah 58:6
“As a deer pants for water brooks, so my soul longs for Thee, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God… Amen.” – Psalm 42:1-2
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