Top 55 Monastic Quotes
#1. Working conditions for me have always been those of the monastic life: solitude and frugality. Except for frugality, they are contrary to my nature, so much so that work is a violence I do to myself.
Albert Camus
#2. 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.
Paula D'Arcy
#4. If you have an idea of what you want to do in your future, you must go at it with almost monastic obsession, be it music, the ballet or just a basic degree. You have to go at it single-mindedly and let nothing get in your way
Henry Rollins
#5. Nietzsche's ideas and plans: for example, the idea of giving up the whole wretched academic world to form a secular monastic community.
Karl Jaspers
#7. I've had moments in my life when I've thought if I wasn't acting, if I wasn't doing what I do and I had a career in the private sector and I didn't have a family, that I do have some tendencies where I could really kind of have a monastic existence and be okay with it.
Will Ferrell
#8. When he has thus gone forth, he lives restrained by the rules of the monastic code, seeing danger in the slightest faults. Consummate in his virtue, he guards the doors of his senses, is possessed of mindfulness and alertness, and is content.
Tushar Gundev
#10. I have devoted my energies to the study of the scriptures, observing monastic discipline, and singing the daily services in church; study, teaching, and writing have always been my delight.
Venerable Bede
#11. Sounds rose from the earth. New sounds: cobwebs of exhalations, pauses of the heart, the monastic work of the worms translating flesh to soil, the slow crawl of rock. There was another kind of industry, somewhere beneath her. Another kind of machine.
Nathan Ballingrud
#12. Of the monastic institutions on which it depended. Since celibate monks tended to
Stephen Batchelor
#13. I like the monastic life ... in the prayer and the praising ... this has charged me with new energy, spiritual energy. This is very important for my ministry outside the monastery.
Pope Theodoros II
#14. The only way of living acceptably to God was not to surpass worldly morality in monastic asceticism, but solely through the fulfillment of the obligations imposed upon the individual by his position in the world. That was his calling.
Max Weber
#15. I practice yoga and breathing daily along with all the exercises on the instrument. I'm getting more and more monastic about it, especially when I'm on tour, because I'm making songs that are harder to perform all the time. So I no longer smoke and I drink a lot less on tour.
Colin Stetson
#16. I've gone to Yaddo many times, I've worked at the Rockefeller Foundation's Center for Scholars and Artists in Bellagio. That these are places of beauty and of changed landscape is helpful - but far more important for me is that they offer what I feel as a monastic luxury: undisturbed time.
Jane Hirshfield
#17. All nuns, by the very fact of their monastic profession, are exceptional people. No ordinary woman could live such a life. There must inevitably be something, or many things, that are outstanding about a nun.
Jennifer Worth
#18. Abbesses then for several centuries were recognized as the ordinary ministers of penance for their own monastic community and sometimes even exercised that power outside that circle. This was one of the most important liturgical functions
Gary Macy
#19. Short of taking monastic vows or trekking into the Kalahari, a freighter passage might just offer what our relentlessly connected age has made difficult, if not impossible: splendid isolation.
Christopher Buckley
#20. Hence monastic prayer, especially meditation and contemplative prayer, is not so much a way to find God as a way of resting in him whom we have found, who loves us, who is near to us, who comes to us to draw us to himself.
Thomas Merton
#21. The happiest moments are when we sit down and we feel the presence of our brothers and sisters, lay and monastic, who are practicing walking and sitting mediation.
Nhat Hanh
#22. Monastic prayer begins not so much with "considerations" as with a "return to the heart," finding one's deepest center, awakening the profound depths of our being
Thomas Merton
#23. It probably takes many years of monastic practice to equal the spiritual growth generated by one sleepless night with a sick child.
Douglas Abrams
#24. The monastic studies have tended, for the most part, to darken, rather than to dispel, the cloud of superstition.
Edward Gibbon
#25. 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.
Benet Tvedten
#26. Kind of prayer we here speak of as properly "monastic" (though it may also fit into the life of any lay person who is attracted to it) is a prayer of silence, simplicity, contemplative and meditative unity, a deep personal integration in an attentive, watchful listening of "the heart.
Thomas Merton
#27. Prepare your food in keeping with monastic traditions - simple, basic, healthy, balanced.
Mary DeTurris Poust
#28. The curse should no longer rest upon the world itself, but upon that which is sinful in it, and instead of monastic flight from the world the duty is now emphasized of serving God in the world, in every position in life.
Abraham Kuyper
#29. It is all very well for 2% of the population to live in a monastic state of meatlessness while everyone else gorges their way towards environmental meltdown or the nearest heart clinic. Vegetarianism is good for the willing minority, but not much use as a campaign tool.
Tristram Stuart
#30. Benedict and Bernard and the other true monastic peacemakers of history have been effective because they have acted from a deep source of peace within themselves, dating a context for peace. This is the contribution a Christian man or woman of peace can make.
M. Basil Pennington
#31. Monastic communities are to the great social community what the mistletoe is to the oak, what the wart is to the human body.
Victor Hugo
#32. One of the best characteristics of the Tibetan people is their complete tolerance of other creeds. Their monastic theocracy has never sought the conversion of infidels.
Heinrich Harrer
#33. He was simply an early lover of humanity, and that he adopted the monastic life was simply because at that time it struck him, so to say, as the ideal escape for his soul struggling from the darkness of worldly wickedness to the light of love.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
#34. I used to be monastic, almost. Now I'm like a Tibetan that has discovered hamburgers and television. I'm catching up on Americana.
Joni Mitchell
#35. 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.
Thomas Merton
#36. 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.
Peter Ackroyd
#38. 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.
Thomas Merton
#39. Because someone is a lama or is part of a monastic order or claims to be part of a succession, doesn't really mean they know anything. Always examine the individual's consciousness, their ability to transmit light.
Frederick Lenz
#40. A true military officer is in one particular like a true monk. Not with more self-abnegation will the latter keep his vows of monastic obedience than the former his vows of allegiance to martial duty.
Herman Melville
#41. Verily if with mine own eyes I had seen a priest of God, or any of those who wear the monastic garb, sinning, I would spread my cloak and hide him, that he might not be seen of any.
John Of Salisbury
#42. You know, I live a monastic lifestyle. No, I do. I do live in extremes, basically. I go back and forth. Once every six months, I'll have a day where I eat more chocolate than has ever been consumed by a human being.
Jim Carrey
#43. I like the church, I like a cowl,
I love a prophet of the soul;
And on my heart monastic aisles
Fall like sweet strains or pensive smiles;
Yet not for all his faith can see,
Would I that cowled churchman be.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#44. Monastic people have long known--and I've experienced it in a small way myself--that the communal reciting, chanting, and singing of the psalms brings a unique sense of wholeness and order to their day, and even establishes the rhythm of their lives.
Kathleen Norris
#45. Monastic contemplatives have staked out a clearly limited area to be transformed by contemplation: the monastery. Lay contemplatives face the challenge of transforming the whole world.
David Steindl-Rast
#46. We have been mentored from the very beginning by Catholic folks who are invigorating the best of the monastic spirit.
Shane Claiborne
#47. I think they [ monastic folks ] were going to the desert to build a new society and in a sense to build a new world, a new culture together where it was easier to be good and holy.
Shane Claiborne
#48. The monastic folks have the spirit of being in the world but not of the world, sort of peculiar people who have gone to the desert to live on the margins of the empire.
Shane Claiborne
#49. Text talk? How can the art of writing, once performed by monastic scribes, have degenerated into little more than creative candyfloss?
Fennel Hudson
#50. Monastic life thus became a living protest against the secularization of Christianity, against the cheapening of grace.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
#51. Art is a vocation, as much as anything in this world. For the real artist, it is the most natural thing in the world, not as necessary as air and water, perhaps, but as food and water. But we really do lead almost a monastic life, you know; to follow it you very often have to give up something.
Katherine Anne Porter
#52. The Celtic Church as we know it, till gradually brought under Roman discipline, was purely monastic. The monasteries were the centres whence the ministry of souls was exercised.
Sabine Baring-Gould
#54. Stagnation and inactivity bring spiritual death.
Thomas Merton
#55. By reading the scriptures I am so renewed that all nature seems renewed around me and with me. The sky seems to be a pure, a cooler blue, the trees a deeper green. The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet.
Thomas Merton
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
