Thomas à Kempis wrote that he who follows Christ inwardly cares little for outward comforts of the flesh
Thomas à Kempis wrote for a devotional community focused on inward transformation rather than monastic rules, arguing that anyone chasing status or comfort outside themselves will always come up empty regardless of outer discipline.
The Imitation of Christ, composed by Thomas à Kempis around the early fifteenth century within the Devotio Moderna movement centered at the Brethren of the Common Life, opens Book One with a chapter on the imitation of Christ and contempt for the vanities of the world. Its famous line, echoing Ecclesiastes, sets the book's whole register: physical comfort, reputation, and worldly attachment are consistently described as distractions from a wholly inward relationship with God. Thomas is not writing a monastic rule with concrete regulations like Benedict's; his focus throughout Book One is psychological and interior, on where a person's actual attention and desire rest rather than on external conduct alone. In this frame, indifference to bodily comfort, including the discipline of celibacy practiced by his own religious community, follows naturally from where the heart has already been redirected, rather than functioning as a rule imposed from outside.
Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, save to love God, and serve Him only.
The Imitation of Christ