Monk Quotes - Page 6

• Sometimes it's to your advantage for people to think you're crazy

  Thelonious Monk

  Crazy, Thinking, People

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• At this time the fashion is to bring something to jazz that I reject. They speak of freedom. But one has no right, under pretext of freeing yourself, to be illogical and incoherent by getting rid of structure and simply piling a lot of notes one on top of the other. There's no beat anymore. You can't keep time with your foot. I believe that what is happening to jazz with people like Ornette Coleman, for instance, is bad. There's a new idea that consists in destroying everything and find what's shocking and unexpected; whereas jazz must first of all tell a story that anyone can understand.

  Thelonious Monk

  Music, Fashion, Believe

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• As belief shrinks from the world, it is more necessary than ever that someone believe. Wild-eyed men in caves. Nuns in black. Monks who do not speak. We are left to believe. Fools, children. Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They are sure they are right not to believe but they know belief must not fade completely. Hell is when no one believes.

  Don DeLillo

  Children, Believe, Men

  Don DeLillo (1985). “White noise”, Viking Pr

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• "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'"

  Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn

  Spiritual, Food, Jail

  Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn (1990). “Leftism Revisited: From de Sade and Marx to Hitler and Pol Pot”, Gateway Books

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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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• In a quiet Franciscan monastery kind and silent monks looked after me. After many weeks I was discharged. Unfit for further service.

  Ernst Toller

  Quiet, Kind, Silent

  Ernst Toller (1934). “I was a German: the autobiography of Ernst Toller”

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• When a monk is an arahant, with his fermentations ended - one who has reached fulfillment, done the task, laid down the burden, attained the true goal, totally destroyed the fetter of becoming, and is released through right gnosis - the thought doesn't occur to him that 'There is someone better than me,' or 'There is someone equal to me,' or 'There is someone worse than me.'

  Gautama Buddha

  Buddhist, Gnosis, Goal

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• One may desire a spurious respect and precedence among one's fellow monks, and the veneration of outsiders. "Both monks and laity should think it was my doing. They should accept my authority in all matters great or small." This is a fool's way of thinking. His self-seeking and conceit just increase.

  Gautama Buddha

  Buddhist, Humility, Pride

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• Monks, when ignorance is abandoned, and knowledge arises in the monk, with the ending of ignorance and the arising of knowledge he clings neither to sense-pleasures, nor does he cling to views, nor to precepts and vows, nor to a Self-doctrine. Not clinking, he is not disturbed; not disturbed, he attains individually nibbana.

  Gautama Buddha

  Buddhist, Ignorance, Attachment

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• How does one stay mindful? Where feelings are known as they arise, known as they persist, known as they pass away. Thoughts are known as they arise, known as they persist, known as they pass away. Perceptions are known they arise, known as they persist, known as they pass away. This is how a monk stays awake.

  Gautama Buddha

  Buddhist, Feelings, Perception

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• 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.

  Gautama Buddha

  Buddhist, Would Be, Born

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• When a man makes utensils out of a metal which has been thoroughly cleansed of dross, the utensils will be excellent. You monks, who wish to follow the Way, make your own hearts clean from the dirt of evil passion, and your conduct will be unimpeachable.

  Gautama Buddha

  Passion, Heart, Men

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• Whatever a monk keeps pursuing with his thinking and pondering, that becomes the inclination of his awareness.

  Gautama Buddha

  Thinking, Awareness, Pondering

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• We have wasted our spirit in the regions of the abstract and general just as the monks let it wither in the world of prayer and contemplation.

  Alexander Herzen

  Prayer, World, Spirit

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• This is the path of prayer-contemplative prayer, that is, as distinct from simple prayers of supplication and thanksgiving-which is a specific discipline of thought, desire, and action, one that frees the mind from habitual prejudices and appetites, and allows it to dwell in the gratuity and glory of all things. As an old monk on Mount Athos once told me, contemplative prayer is the art of seeing reality as it truly is; and, if one has not yet acquired the ability to see God in all things, one should not imagine that one will be able to see God in himself.

  David Bentley

  Art, Prayer, Simple

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• He [Thelonious Monk] played each note as though astonished by the previous one, as though every touch of his fingers on the keyboard was correcting an error and this touch in turn became an error to be corrected and so the tune never quite ended up the way it was meant to.

  Geoff Dyer

  Errors, Tunes, Never Quit

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• Thelonius Monk was not exactly 'the guy next door'.

  Dexter Gordon

  Doors, Guy, Next

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• Trane was the perfect saxophonist for Monk's music because of the space that Monk always used. Trane could fill up all that space with all them chords and sounds he was playing then.

  Miles Davis

  Music, Space, Perfect

  Miles Davis, Quincy Troupe (1990). “Miles”, p.216, Simon and Schuster

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• At the museum a troubled woman destroys a sand painting meticulously created over days by Tibetan monks. The monks are not disturbed. The work is a meditation. They simply begin again.

  Susan Griffin

  Museums, Meditation, Painting

  Susan Griffin (2015). “A Chorus of Stones: The Private Life of War”, p.246, Open Road Media

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• Buddhist monks have known for centuries that meditation can change the mind. Now we are inspired by His Holiness to examine with our technology the precise brain changes that occur with practice... The unique collaboration on meditation is just beginning.

  Richard Davidson

  Buddhist, Unique, Technology

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• Use gentle methods to get whatever good you can from priests and monks who are slaves, as well as from merchants and captives. Resort to severe measures only in extreme cases, for fear lest the hardship they are already enduring in their state of captivity, joined to the strictness you might want to exercise in virtue of your authority, drive them to despair. . . . It is not light they need, but strength, and strength permeates through the external balm of words and good example.

  Vincent de Paul

  Wisdom, Exercise, Light

  Saint Vincent de Paul, Pierre Coste (1985). “Correspondence, Conferences, Documents: Apr. 1650-July 1653”

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• You become a monk and you practice and the teacher tells you what to do. If you find that you have a resistance to that, and the resistance is strong, it just means you're not interested. Why put yourself through some sort of torture. It means you weren't that interested.

  Frederick Lenz

  Teacher, Strong, Mean

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• Im a Tibetan monk, not a vegetarian.

  Dalai Lama

  Vegetarian, Tibetan

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• A monk is holy and great until he starts teaching you the real Dharma

  Tsem Tulku

  Real, Teaching, Holy

  FaceBook post by H.E. Tsem Tulku Rinpoche from Jun 11, 2013

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• Numquam enim audiendi quod aliquis monachus super puerum incubuisset, quin statim post ipsum surrexisset puer. I have heard before of a monk throwing himself on a boy, but the boyalways rose again afterwards.

  Walter Map

  Boys, Rose, Throwing

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