Quotes About Monastic Life

#1. Monastic life thus became a living protest against the secularization of Christianity, against the cheapening of grace.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#2. 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

#3. 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

#4. 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

#5. 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

#6. 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

#7. I miss riding those fast trains in Japan ... 'cause I'd never seen a train that fast in my life.

Ike Turner

#8. 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

#9. In a country authored and sustained by criminal irresponsibility.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#10. 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

#11. Sure, we thought the acres
That we tilled were sacred,
But how could we have known
That wheat can haunt like ghosts

Sherman Alexie

#12. WHAT'S SO GREAT ABOUT WOMEN, ANYWAY? And, lower: HEY, EVERY WOMAN, PAL, IS A VOLUME OF STORIES A CATALOGUE OF MOVEMENTS A SPECTACULAR ARRAY OF IMAGES Then: PLUS THERE'S THE MYSTERY OF LEARNING ABOUT HER CHILDHOOD A fourth man had concluded: AND OF EVERYTHING

Michael Chabon

#13. And the Clave wants to meet Clarissa. You know that, Jace."
"The Clave can screw itself."
"Jace," Maryse said, sounding genuinely parental for a change. "Language."
"The Clave wants a lot of things," Jace amended. "It shouldn't necessarily get them all.

Cassandra Clare

#14. I think that's something that people feel that I do really well; I don't mind it, because ultimately I think the characters I play move people, and who wouldn't want to move people?

Viola Davis

#15. Eternity is the now that does not pass away.

Saint Augustine

#16. Ah, I could lay me down in this long grass
And close my eyes, and let the quiet wind
Blow over me

Edna St. Vincent Millay

#17. I became the Dalai Lama not on a volunteer basis.

Dalai Lama

#18. 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

#19. 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