Monasteries Quotes - Page 2

I don't think there's any great mystery to writing female characters, so long as you talk to them. If you lived in a monastery and never met any women, maybe it would be difficult.

Ken Follett

Writing, Character, Thinking

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I think one can advance faster outside a monastery if you use the experiences of daily life to advance yourself.

Frederick Lenz

Buddhism, Thinking, Use

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The idea of the walls of monastery was to keep everybody else out because you wanted to develop a certain type of life. Most people in the world had different ideas on the subject.

Frederick Lenz

Wall, Ideas, People

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I AM what is called a Feminist. Thirty years ago I left a monastery and began a sane human existence. Within two or three years, I find, I was defending the rights of women.

Joseph McCabe

Rights, Years, Two

Joseph McCabe (1929). “The Story of Religious Controversy”

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In monasteries, seminaries, retreats and synagogues, they fear hell and seek paradise. Those who know the mysteries of God never let that seed be planted in their souls.

Omar Khayyam

Soul, Paradise, Retreat

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I recommend computer science to people who practice meditation. The mental structures that are used in computer science are very similar exercises done in Buddhist monasteries.

Frederick Lenz

Success, Buddhist, Buddhism

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Death is the only monastery; the tomb is the only cell, and the grave that adjoins the convent is the bitterest mock of its futility.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton

Death, Cells, Graves

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Satan stations more devils on monastery walls than in the dens of iniquity, for the latter offer no resistance.

Fulton J. Sheen

Wall, Devil, Resistance

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To eat in a monastery refectory is an exercise in humility; daily, one is reminded to put communal necessity before individual preference. While consumer culture speaks only to preferences, treating even whims as needs to be granted (and the sooner the better), monastics sense that this pandering to delusions of self-importance weakens the true self, and diminishes our ability to distinguish desires from needs. It's a price they're not willing to pay.

Kathleen Norris

Humility, Exercise, Self

Kathleen Norris (1997). “The Cloister Walk”, p.25, Penguin

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A split personality can never become non-greedy. It can try, but it can never become. A split personality can never go beyond anger. It can try, but it can never go beyond. A split personality can never go beyond sex. It can fight. So many monks in the monasteries are doing it. They don't go beyond sex; at the most their sexuality becomes perverted, their love becomes poisoned.

Rajneesh

Sex, Fighting, Love Is

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The period of Catholic ascendancy was on the whole one of the most deplorable in the history of the human mind. . . . The spirit that shrinks from enquiry as sinful and deems a state of doubt a state of guilt, is the most enduring disease that can afflict the mind of man. Not till the education of Europe passed from the monasteries to the universities, not till Mohammedan science, and classical free thought, and industrial independence broke the sceptre of the Church, did the intellectual revival of Europe begin.

William Edward Hartpole Lecky

Men, Europe, Catholic

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Mystics knew how to channel grace through prayer and they knew the power of that. They knew how to receive guidance through reflection and contemplation; they knew how to share the gift of illumination with each other. These are great gifts of life and profound grace that we are capable of providing for each other and the world. This is what it means to be a mystic without a monastery. You make a commitment to your own interior illumination and through that discover the "sacred" part of your "contract" and the true meaning of your highest potential.

Caroline Myss

Prayer, Mean, Commitment

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Secret Instructions for Reaching Xanadu: Go eastward from the Bewildered-Dragon Lake Until you see the Monastery of the West Tower straight and high above your head. Then take Those charms which, as I told you, in the breast Of your most inner robe you have hidden, and follow Their clear instruction.

Arthur Davison Ficke

Lakes, Dragons, Secret

Arthur Davison Ficke (1938). “Selected Poems: With a Preface on the Nature of Poetry”

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Sri Yukteswar used to poke gentle fun at the commonly inadequate conceptions of renunciation."A beggar cannot renounce wealth," Master would say. "If a man laments: 'My business has failed; my wife has left me; I will renounce all and enter a monastery,' to what worldly sacrifice is he referring? He did not renounce wealth and love; they renounced him!"Saints like Gandhi, on the other hand, have made not only tangible material sacrifices, but also the more difficult renunciation of selfish motive and private goal, merging their inmost being in the stream of humanity as a whole.

Paramahansa Yogananda

Fun, Selfish, Sacrifice

Sri Sri Paramahansa Yogananda (2008). “Autobiography of a Yogi”, p.425, Diamond Pocket Books (P) Ltd.

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Not only is the day waning, but the year. The low sun is fiery and yet cold behind the monastery ruin, and the Virginia creeper on the Cathedral wall has showered half its deep-red leaves down on the pavement. There has been rain this afternoon, and a wintry shudder goes among the little pools on the cracked, uneven flag-stones, and through the giant elm-trees as they shed a gust of tears.

Charles Dickens

Nature, Wall, Rain

Charles Dickens (2009). “The Complete Works of Charles Dickens: Edwin Drood and Miscellaneous”, p.5, Cosimo, Inc.

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Everybody was talking about the religious man who committed suicide. While no one in the monastery approved of the man's action, some say they admired his faith. Faith?" said the Master. He had the courage of his convictions, didn't he?" That was fanaticism, not faith. Faith demands a greater courage still: to reexamine one's convictions and reject them if they do not fit the facts.

Anthony de Mello

Suicide, Religious, Men

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What frustrated me was the thought that with three thousand years of history someone in China, some monk in a monastery halfway up a mountain, must have developed a magic kata, a physical expression of formae. Or at least have got close enough to explain all those legendary swordsmen and their inexplicable desire to roost on the tops of bamboo trees.

Ben Aaronovitch

Expression, Years, Tree

Ben Aaronovitch (2013). “Broken Homes”, p.167, Hachette UK

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In a few Zen monasteries, every monk has to start his morning with laughter, and has to end his night with laughter - the first thing and the last thing! You try it. . . For no reason! Because there is no reason. Simply, you are again there, still alive - it is a miracle!

Rajneesh

Morning, Laughter, Night

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My heart has become capable of every form: It is a pasture for gazelles And a monastery for Christian monks, And the pilgrim's Ka'ba, And the tablets of the Torah, And the book of the Koran. I follow the religion of Love: Whatever way love's camel takes, That is my religion, my faith.

Ibn Arabi

Christian, Spiritual, Book

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[Thich Nhat Hanh] the one that revolutionized Buddhism. Instead of being monks just engaged in meditation, it was active Buddhism. You went out and felt the ills of the community around you. Instead of retreating to a monastery, you were out in the streets working. And he's been a great help to me, just reading his book, so I don't feel helpless about what I can do about all the violence around me.

Sandra Cisneros

Book, Reading, Buddhism

Source: quod.lib.umich.edu

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Fatigue can make it hard to have faith. Too much busyness can make it hard to have faith. Too much of too little solitude can impact faith. For that matter, so can a bout of hunger or overwork, anything carried to an extreme. Faith thrives on routine. Look at any monastery and you will see that. Faith keeps on keeping on.

Julia Cameron

Impact, Solitude, Routine

Julia Cameron (2009). “Finding Water: The Art of Perseverance”, p.73, Penguin

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Village reform is not merely cleaning the roads, constructing schools and worshipping monasteries. It is not mere celebration of festivals.

Periyar E. V. Ramasamy

School, Reform, Village

Collected works of Periyar E.V.R., p. 513, 2005.

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And then I think we realized, like any young guys, that blues are not learned in a monastery. You've got to go out there and get your heart broke and then come back and then you can sing the blues.

Keith Richards

Heart, Thinking, Guy

Keith Richards (2010). “Life”, p.77, Hachette UK

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All the people in the Kuo-ch'ing monastery They say, "Han-shan is an idiot." "Am I really an idiot:" I reflect. But my reflections fail to solve the question: for I myself do not know who the self is, And how can others know who I am?

Hanshan

Reflection, Self, Who I Am

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I think to be in a monastery or an ashram is not always the answer because we don't fight, we kick back. We don't listen to Sri Krishna.

Frederick Lenz

Fighting, Buddhism, Thinking

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