Discover the most popular and inspiring quotes and sayings on the topic of Monks. Share them with your friends on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, or your personal blogs, and let the world be inspired by their powerful messages. Here are the Top 100 Monks Quotes And Sayings by 74 Authors including Mary Deturris Poust,Kylie Tennant,Kathleen Norris,Idries Shah,M. Basil Pennington for you to enjoy and share.
Prepare your food in keeping with monastic traditions - simple, basic, healthy, balanced.
The civilization of cities is breeding a new race of monks who have none of the original religious drive towards chastity, but are just incapable of facing the responsibilities of marriage.
Poets and monks ... We're both sort of peripheral to the world.
Saying of the Prophet
Monkishness
No monkery in Islam.
Monks realize well that when the consciousness of one person is raised, the whole of humanity is raised; when the quality of life of one improves, all improve. Or, to put it in another, more biblical, way, the increased health and vitality of any one cell vitalizes the whole Body of Christ. 38
A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity; but what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks.
Mortals liberate Buddhas and Buddhas liberate mortals.
The monks' response was to climb into their curraghs and row off toward Greenland. They were drawn across the storm-racked ocean, drawn west past the edge of the known world, by nothing more than a hunger of the spirit, a yearning of such queer intensity that it beggars the modern imagination.
Men would not be so hasty to abandon the world either as monks or as suicides, did they but see the jewels of wisdom and faith which are scattered so plentifully along its paths; and lacking which no soul can come again from beyond the grave to gather.
I was educated by monks - I thank them dearly for the education they gave me, but I am no longer a Catholic.
Monks will have three begging bowls for their food: one for water, one for liquid food, one for dry food.
Worshipped was that of Mammon. It is difficult to estimate the size of monastic occupation. At the time it was believed that the clergy owned one third of the land, but it may be safe to presume that the monks controlled one sixth of English territory.
To separate meditation from prayer, reading and contemplation is to falsify our picture of the monastic way of prayer. In proportion as meditation takes on a more contemplative character, we see that it is not only a means to an end, but also has something of the nature of an end.
Many wear the robes, but few walk the Way. The Lama in Kim
If monks and nuns do not cherish their time of practice, they will have nothing to offer the world.
We have been mentored from the very beginning by Catholic folks who are invigorating the best of the monastic spirit.
First and foremost, the monk should own nothing in this world, but he should have as his possessions solitude of the body, modesty of bearing, a modulated tone of voice, and a well-ordered manner of speech. He should be without anxiety as to his food and drink, and should eat in silence.
pilgrimages or crusades. Even a monk must
"Some would call you a saint, some a chandala; some a lunatic, others a demon. Go on then straight to thy work without heeding either" - thus saith one of our great Sannyasins, an old emperor of India, King Bhartrihari, who joined the order in old times.
If a monk can overcome two things, he can become free from the world. Bodily ease and vain-glory.
Being Benedictine--a monastic or an oblate--means trying a little harder to show the courtesy of love for one another, to see Christ in the people with whom, we live, work and pray--and to look for Him even in the people with whom we disagree.
The remains of five thousand monks were used to build the Chapel of Bones. It serves as a reminder that life is short and death is eternal.
If for just the time of a finger-snap a monk produces a thought of loving-kindness, develops it, gives attention to it, such a one is rightly called a monk. Not in vain does he meditate. He acts in accordance with the master's teaching, he follows his advice. How much more so if he cultivates it.
Strange, don't you think, that nuns and monks make the most sensual food and drink?
Guides were Franciscan monks, sole custodians of the holy places after 1230, who recited the history and traditions associated with each town or monument or site of Biblical events to parties of visitors as they arrived. More
Monasticism is really based on the idea that if you leave people, you leave the spirit of the world. But you do not. You can leave the world in a physical sense, you can leave the crowd and the people; but there in your lonely cell the spirit of the world may still be with you.
You are holding in your hands not only a book of readings and instruction for the journey, but one monastic's heart of love held out to a searching world.
These are pious, clean-living men, worshipping at the temple of their own bodies."
"Hmm. Sounds distinctly erotic.
I hope that Beyond the Robe helps you to feel closer to the monks and nuns and to better understand their immense potential to provide leadership in their world and further insight into ours. Instead of simply admiring them from afar, let's all get close enough to really listen.
O cowardly amd tyrannous race of monks, persecutors of the bard, and the gleemen, haters of life and joy! O race that does not draw the sword and tell the truth! O race that melts the bones of the people with cowardice and with deceit! ("The Crucifixion Of The Outcast")
For hundreds of years the monks have held the pen, and what they have written is what we take to be our history, but I do not believe it really is. I believe they have suppressed the history they don't like, and written one that is favourable to Rome.' Henry
As a monk you have a responsibility to meditate many hours a day. Not just to sit there but to think of the ten thousand radiances.
To ... to ... What the heck to call a duke who 'comes a monk?"
"Brother?" Colin ventured.
Will shook his head. "A bit too familiar. How 'bout BrotherYourGrace?"
"Got it," Colin exclaimed. "Your Celibacy. Get it? Your Celibacy.
Many people, including Buddhist monks, spend thousands of hours sitting in what they call meditation. In reality, what they're doing is thinking and ruminating upon their problems.
There is one big misunderstanding of the monastics leaving society.
No house was so poor as not to have its 'family altar,' its shelf of wooden gods, and table of offerings. A religious atmosphere pervades Tibet and gives it a singular sense of novelty.
I consider those persons to be my students who come and meditate with me on a regular basis, who, in spite of the hardships and difficulties on the path of knowledge, still continue to try, and who respect me as I respect them.
Despair makes priests and friars.
I describe myself as a simple Buddhist monk. No more, no less.
Monastic communities are to the great social community what the mistletoe is to the oak, what the wart is to the human body.
Working with Monk is like falling down a dark elevator shaft
There is, Oh Monks, a not-born, a not-become, a not-made, a not-compounded. Monks, if that unborn, not-become, not-made, not-compounded were not, there would be no escape from this here that is born, become, made and compounded.
Disciples and devotees ... what are most of them doing? Worshipping the teapot instead of drinking the tea!
I grew with it, and I used to go to see the monks, who had no possessions, even more extreme than my mother.
Two monks sit facing, playing chess on the mountain, The bamboo shadow on the board is dark and clear. Not a person sees the bamboo's shadow, One sometimes hears the pieces being moved.
Smiting enemies has always been so admired that, unlike medicine or archaeology, it entitled its successful practitioners to become kings, emperors, and presidents ...
Monastic incarceration is castration.
[All] the manly virtues were oppressed by the servile and pusillanimous reign of the monks.
A monk's extraordinary patience can be a hindrance to desperate decision-making.
Servants, when their lords no longer sway, Their minds no more to righteous courses bend.
To keep a faith pure, man had better retire to a monastery.
When I became a novice monk, I lived in a temple where the atmosphere was quite like in a family. The abbot is like a father and other monks are like your big brothers, your small, younger brothers. It is a kind of family.
In the Far East, it is taken for granted that the training of a monk is physically rigorous and academically challenging.
Being a Buddhist monk means never losing one's optimism in spite of all difficulties. It also means being harder on yourself than any of your teachers ever were.
The Buddha also counseled the monks and nuns to avoid wasting any precious time by engaging in idle conversation, oversleeping, pursuing fame and recognition, chasing after desires, spending time with people of poor character, and being satisfied with only a shallow understanding of the teaching.
Women were the reason I became a monk - and, ah, the reason I switched back.
Mankind have such a deep stake in inward illumination, that there is much to be said by the hermit or monk in defence of his life of thought and prayer.
The bears, over the years, have developed a primitive but heartfelt Buddhist discipline. Beneath the cinnamon trees they practice the repetition of the Growling Sutra. The
Monk... not monk but Andrian Monk makes mistakes if he makes then and we can.
Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.
The tall monk who came striding down the shadowed monastery corridor was surprisingly young, barely thirty. As he swept past the novices, his dark robe flapping wildly around his legs, they bobbed their heads in fearful deference.
Living in a monastery, even as a guest rather than a monk, you have more opportunities than you might have elsewhere to see the world as it is, instead of through the shadow that you cast upon it.
The monk in hiding himself from the world becomes not less than himself, not less of a person, but more of a person, more truly and perfectly himself: for his personality and individuality are perfected in their true order, the spiritual, interior order.
Monastery you can't retire it's forever, there isn't music, films, parties and other crazy stuff. It's about spiritual life... It becomes harder and harder!
Who is secure in all his basic needs? Who has work, spiritual care, medical care, housing, food, occasional entertainment, free clothing, free burial, free everything? The answer might be nuns and monks, but the standard reply is 'prisoners'.
THE MONASTERY IS A SCHOOL - A SCHOOL IN WHICH WE learn from God how to be happy.
Pleasure and guilt are synonymous terms in the language of the monks, and they discovered, by experience, that rigid fasts, and abstemious diet, are the most effectual preservatives against the impure desires of the flesh.
Soldiers fear the frontier post, monks fear the Surangama Dharani!
Do what you are doing. Monastic motto
Dharma companions filling mountains, a sangha forms of itself: chanting, sitting ch'an stillness. Looking out from distant city walls, people see only white clouds.
From my own personal encounters and studies with both Tantric and Zen Buddhist monks, I have found them to be humorous, warm, charming, and compassionate.
I cannot be a monk, nor a crusader, nor a tumbler. I must stay here and hem sheets until I die. My humors are greatly out of balance. I prescribe for myself wormwood and spiced wine and some of the custard left from supper, and I will let all of the dogs sleep in my bed.
Benedictine spirituality, after all,
is life lived to the hilt.
It is a life of concentration
on life's ordinary dimensions.
It is an attempt to do
the ordinary things of life
extraordinarily well.
If the world is crazy, maybe it needs a few sane people in the middle of it. Why do monks lock themselves up in monasteries? What's the good of solving your personal suffering if the solution keeps you isolated from everyone else's suffering?
I remember there was this one lady shaman who said that having children puts a hole in your soul. And the only way to get it back is for your children to die. And, you know, monks don't have families.
(They) were responsible for spreading the Buddhist religion throughout India and East Asia.
[A Buddhist monk on a pilgrimage speaks to a museum curator.]
And I come here alone. For five
seven
eighteen
forty years it was in my mind that the old Law was not well followed; being overlaid, as thou knowest, with devildom, charms, and idolatry ... '
So it comes with all faiths.
Habit maketh no monk, ne wearing of gilt spurs maketh no knight.
In everyone lives the person called "Monk" (From the Series), the families which are shown by Stephen King and many other people. But when people will understand this?
Once we got closer to the origins of these Eastern practices, we found that the monks and swamis were just as dogmatic and paternalistic, just as literal and conservative in their approach to spirituality as the Christian priests and ministers we were trying to get away from.
Monks, there are two kinds of immature people: those who do not see their own mistakes as mistakes, and those who do not forgive mistakes committed by someone else. The
There are, O monks, these four lights. What four? The light of the moon, the light of the sun, the light of fire, and the light of wisdom. Of these four lights, the light of wisdom is supreme.
The monks had murdered Danes and Ragnar had punished them, though these days the story is always told that the monks were innocently at prayer and died as spotless martyrs. In truth they were malevolent killers of women and children, but what chance does truth have when priests tell tales?
If ever a monk got to heaven by his monkery, it was I." "Christ was given, not for picayune and imaginary transgressions, but for mountainous sins; not for one or two, but for all; not for sins that can be discarded, but for sins that are stubbornly ingrained.
But you're a monk!Monk-- Van Helsing
Through their teachings they dignify even the most mundane professions. According to them any profession or work that adds to the common good of man must be respected and it is dignified
They serve God well, who serve his creatures.
A habit does not a monk make.
Thinking about monastic ideals is not the same as living up to them, but at any rate such thinking has an important place in a monk's life, because you cannot begin to do anything unless you have some idea what you are trying to do.
The problem with monasteries, ashrams, convents is these institutions become extremely political. In other words, they're really small societies, and much of what you hope to avoid in societies you find there.
They are Nietzsche's over-men, these primitive Albanians - something between kings and tigers.
The private devotions and secret offices of religion are like the refreshing of a garden with the distilling and petty drops of a waterpot; but addressed from the temple, they are like ram from heaven.
I used to live in Buddhist monasteries and I finally had to leave them because they were just too cluttered for me. They were cluttered up with many thoughts about Buddhism.
Some parents live more like reclusive monks than like first-century Christians who were famous for their love for and service within their cities, cities that in many cases were more overtly wicked than cities found in modern-day America.
Benedictine spirituality is a consistent one: live life normally, live life thouhtfully, live life profouncly, live life well. Never neglect and never exaggerate. It is a lesson that a world full of cults and fads and workaholics and short courses in difficult subjects needs dearly to learn.
You can't live like a monk if you have two five-year-old twins. That ain't happening. Just the opposite, actually.
My imagination is a monastery, and I am its monk
Put the mind in alignment with the ten thousand radiances of enlightenment and experience them in various gradations forever. That's the total purpose of a monk.
Self-denial is a monkish virtue.
In reality the monk abandons the world only in order to listen more intently to the deepest and most neglected voices that proceed from its inner depth.