Top 100 Quotes About Monks
#2. Soldiers fear the frontier post, monks fear the Surangama Dharani!
Thich Nhat Hanh
#3. If monks and nuns do not cherish their time of practice, they will have nothing to offer the world.
Thich Nhat Hanh
#4. 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.
Gudjon Bergmann
#5. What did Dom Perignon say to fellow monks after he invented champagne? ... Come quickly, I am tasting the stars.
John Green
#6. 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.
Jon Krakauer
#7. One of the monks was doing something incomprehensible at the altar, and the others would occasionally chant a few phrases of mumbo jumbo.
Ken Follett
#8. There are a lot of people who had past lives where they were monks and nuns and all their needs were provided for them. I feel like most people in the new age had this as their most recent lifetime experience, that kind of communal living.
Doreen Virtue
#9. Now this, monks, is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; seperation from what is pleasing is suffering ... in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering.
Gautama Buddha
#10. If monks are crazy to live the way they do, maybe the world needs more such craziness, what Matthew Kelty has termed 'the madness of great love.' My narrow world had just opened wide, and I had glimpsed such a love.
Kathleen Norris
#11. I've always thought a good whodunnit needed vampires, monks, and gods. P.G. Holyfield has created an engaging world that both fantasy and mystery fans will enjoy.
Mur Lafferty
#12. Indeed. But I was not thinking of his immortal soul, Matilda. I was thinking that history is chronicled by monks.
Sharon Kay Penman
#13. How anyone could endure three or four hours of chanting monks and ranting priests was beyond my understanding, just as it was beyond my understanding to know why bishops needed thrones. They would be demanding crowns next.
Bernard Cornwell
#14. Darkness is a kind of visual silence, and monks love it.
Matthew Kelty
#15. Everything in excess! To enjoy the flavor of life, take big bites. Moderation is for monks.
Robert A. Heinlein
#16. When you visit the Zen Monasteries, one of the first things required is that you bring a donation. They have to pay for those monasteries. The upkeep is fantastic. The monks have to be fed, and so on.
Frederick Lenz
#17. Take the example of people who are being most unrealistic - people who are beating monks to death and torturing them. Why shouldn't you be angry or hate that person? Well, the person who is doing that is very unhappy. They are being ordered by a higher-up.
Robert Thurman
#18. My house was a guest house of many Jaina saints, Hindu monks, Sufi mystics, because my grandfather was interested in all of these people.
Rajneesh
#19. 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.
Frederick Lenz
#20. She loved everything around, turquoise blue sky and calm sea, and the holy mountain, and fragrant woods on it, and monasteries and hermitages, and herbs, and flowers, and monks and pilgrims, and children. And him? She asked herself and almost said "yes" inwardly...
Osyp Nazaruk
#21. As you know, the Inquisition is an admirable and wholly Christian invention to make the pope and the monks more powerful and turn a whole kingdom into hypocrites.
Voltaire
#22. All is lost! Monks, Monks, Monks! So, now all is gone - Empire, Body, and Soul!.
Henry VIII Of England
#23. One of the the loveliest lines I have ever read comes from Brother Roger, the Prior of the Protestant monks of Taize, France: 'Assured of your salvation by the unique grace of our Lord Jesus Christ.' It is still difficult for me to read these words without tears filling my eyes. It is wonderful.
Brennan Manning
#24. The thing with darts players is they have always appeared available. They don't have to live like monks. I've only ever met one dry player in 35 years.
Sid Waddell
#25. Monks committed all the same sins that ordinary people did. He had just been shocked by the woman's shamelessness. The sight of her nakedness remained with him, the way the hot heart of a candle flame, stared at for a few moments, would burn on behind closed eyelids.
Ken Follett
#26. somber-looking monks. They sipped a watery soup from wooden spoons. No one spoke. The abbot pointed to a lone table against the far
Eliza Knight
#27. 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")
W.B.Yeats
#28. We know what the birth of a revolution looks like: A student stands before a tank. A fruit seller sets himself on fire. A line of monks link arms in a human chain. Crowds surge, soldiers fire, gusts of rage pull down the monuments of tyrants, and maybe, sometimes, justice rises from the flames.
Nancy Gibbs
#29. [The monks'] credulity debased and vitiated the faculties of the mind: they corrupted the evidence of history; and superstition gradually extinguished the hostile light of philosophy and science.
Edward Gibbon
#30. Maybe I am just your priest - or a churl - perhaps you mistrust me the way the medievals mistrusted monks ...
John Geddes
#31. [ ... ] The monks sped up the process up for us laowai who have less time, less patience for basics, and a greater need for external markers of our accomplishments.
Matthew Polly
#32. Some of the best love poems have been written by monks and nuns ...
John Geddes
#33. What do you think spies are: priests, saints, and martyrs? They're a squalid procession of vain fools, traitors too, yes; pansies, sadists, and drunkards, people who play cowboys and Indians to brighten their rotten lives. Do you think they sit like monks in London balancing the rights and wrongs?
John Le Carre
#34. CHAPTER XLIX MONKS AND MR. BROWNLOW AT LENGTH MEET. THEIR CONVERSATION, AND THE INTELLIGENCE THAT INTERRUPTS IT
Charles Dickens
#35. They wrapped themselves in animal skins and furs which Ford Prefect acquired by a technique he once learned from a couple of ex-Pralite monks running a mind-surfing resort in the Hills of Hunian.
Douglas Adams
#36. I grew with it, and I used to go to see the monks, who had no possessions, even more extreme than my mother.
Satish Kumar
#38. 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?
Tim Ward
#39. A lot of the powerful religious leaders, from Jesus to Buddha to Tibetan monks, they're really talking about the same things: love and acceptable, and the value of friendship, and respecting yourself so you can respect others.
Jena Malone
#40. [The monks'] minds were inaccessible to reason or mercy ...
Edward Gibbon
#41. 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
#42. Monks, nuns, long-term spinsters and bachelors and permanent homosexuals are all, in a reproductive sense, aberrant. Society has bred them, but they have failed to return the compliment.
Desmond Morris
#43. A bit self-conscious. "I used to wear mine long as well. It's short now because the monks had to shave the back of my head and it's had but a few months to grow again." He bent forward at the waist, inviting me
Diana Gabaldon
#44. Cut yourself some slack. Remember, one hundred years from now, all new people. - Message tacked to a tree by monks at Wat Umong, a 700-year-old temple in Thailand
Jenny Blake
#45. In both Surfing the Himalayas and Snowboarding to Nirvana, I have tried to transmit as best I could the spirit of humor, and the sense of humor of the monks I have encountered.
Frederick Lenz
#46. Of course, three classes is full time, so they'd have to give me the benefits package which would kill them. Screw the adjuncts, right? We're the monks of higher education. How much do you make?
Wally Lamb
#47. What! Have you no monks to teach, to dispute, to govern, to intrigue and to burn people who do not agree with them?
Voltaire
#48. 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.
Frederick Lenz
#49. 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.
Bai Juyi
#50. When I go visit my brother monks in Japan and sit down with other Zen Masters, they look at my crazy clothes and my strange expression, but they feel the power that emanates from my dedication to the practice. So they are comfortable with me, yet they're very uncomfortable.
Frederick Lenz
#51. 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
M. Basil Pennington
#52. 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
#53. I was 17, and all I wanted to do was to get away from England and the awful, boring boarding schools I'd been going to there. The last one was taught by monks, and I couldn't wait to get out.
Jared Harris
#54. I was educated by monks - I thank them dearly for the education they gave me, but I am no longer a Catholic.
Antony Gormley
#55. I bet when you hold hands with a girl that cool you wonder if it's possible you're going to levitate like that one of them monks I saw on a TV commercial once, which don't you wish that was real?
- Mack
Paul Griffin
#56. The Vikings certainly didn't write anything about themselves; it was not a literate, but rather a pagan, culture. So what we get was written later by Christian monks. But there were occasional reportings and recordings of people who had traded usually with the Vikings.
Michael Hirst
#57. Shall we be destined to the days of eternity, on holy-days, as well as working-days, to be showing the relics of learning, as monks do the relics of their saints - without working one - one single miracle with them?
Laurence Sterne
#58. 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.
Nhat Hanh
#59. Three things refuse to obey my will: the waters of the Kamo River, the fall of the backgammon dice, and the monks of the Enryakuji Temple.
Shirakawa
#60. Technological change is discontinuous. The monks in their scriptoria did not invent the printing press, horse breeders did not invent the motorcar, and the music industry did not invent the iPod or launch iTunes.
Jason Epstein
#61. Most of the methods for measuring the lapse of time have, I believe, been the contrivance of monks and religious recluses, who, finding time hang heavy on their hands, were at some pains to see how they got rid of it.
William Hazlitt
#62. The very sort of smile that makes decent folk want to slap Buddhist monks in the face,
Fredrik Backman
#63. He became a poet the way other men become monks: as a devotional practice, as an act of love, and as a lifelong commitment to the search for grace and transcendence.
Elizabeth Gilbert
#65. 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.
Larkin Grimm
#66. There is, monks, an unborn, unbecome, unmade, unconditioned. If, monks, there were no unborn ... no escape would be discerned from what is born, become, made, conditioned. But because there is an unborn ... , therefore an escape is discerned from what is born, become, made, conditioned.
Gautama Buddha
#67. 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
#68. Monks will have three begging bowls for their food: one for water, one for liquid food, one for dry food.
Satish Kumar
#69. 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
#70. Children, we must cultivate reverence towards all great masters, monks and gurus.
Mata Amritanandamayi
#71. The least among the sadhus, saints and monks and other people of God is worthier than you. Never speak ill of them
Radhe Maa
#72. Monks are not expected to speak about themselves; the message is important, not the person.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi
#73. The road to Hell is paved with the bones of priests and monks, and the skulls of bishops are the lamp posts that light the path.
Saint John Chrysostom
#74. 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
#75. I'm indebted to the teachers who shaped me - from the Sisters of St. Joseph at St. Croix Catholic elementary to the monks of St. John's in Minnesota to my professors at Georgetown.
Denis McDonough
#76. I climbed the ditch, walked out into the middle of the prayer stones and stared across to the monks' island. If you stood there and thought you heard mass when it wasn't being sung, how would it be different to standing there when it was being sung? Would the mass in your head be any less real?
Jane Rogers
#77. None of us became monks to be nursemaids." To which the child Lazlo replied, with fire in his soul, "And none of us became children to be orphans." But
Laini Taylor
#78. No-one can own our Lord Buddha. That would be a foolish claim, but the roads that lead to him, the Way... That is a different matter. They are all filled with toll-gates, like the roads of Japan, and the monks collect the fees.
Erik Christian Haugaard
#79. Perhaps the old monks were right when they tried to root love out; perhaps the poets are right when they try to water it. It is a blood-red flower, with the color of sin; but there is always the scent of a god about it.
Olive Schreiner
#80. He felt God the same way arthritic monks felt rain coming in their joints. He felt only a hint of him.
Sue Monk Kidd
#81. We don't want our players to be monks. We want them to be better football players because a monk doesn't play football at this level.
Bobby Robson
#82. It was reassuring to know that far away, whales swam untroubled in Baltic waters and monks in arcane time zones chanted ceaselessly for the salvation of the world.
Donna Tartt
#83. This is not a dress. This is a sacred robe of the ancient psychedelic monks.
Noel Fielding
#84. It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic Saints over the manuscripts on which the classical works of ancient heathendom had been written.
Karl Marx
#85. The Mullahs and monks, they must worship you instead of empty rooms.
M.F. Moonzajer
#86. Kung fu was made so the monks could train their bodies and move their bodies with strength, so they could be physical enough to gain mental enlightenment. Before that, they kept falling asleep when [masters] were trying to teach them.
RZA
#87. CHAPTER XXXVIII CONTAINING AN ACCOUNT OF WHAT PASSED BETWEEN MR. AND MRS. BUMBLE, AND MONKS, AT THEIR NOCTURNAL INTERVIEW
Charles Dickens
#88. Men in excess of happiness or misery are equally inclined to severity. Witness conquerors and monks! It is mediocrity alone, and a mixture of prosperous and adverse fortune that inspire us with lenity and pity.
Baron De Montesquieu
#89. I like prostitution. My heart has never failed to pound at the sight of one of those provocatively dressed women walking in the rain under the gaslamps, just as the sight of monks in their robes and girdles touches some ascetic, hidden corner of my soul.
Gustave Flaubert
#90. I do not perceive even one other thing, O monks, that when undeveloped and uncultivated entails such great suffering as the mind. The mind when undeveloped and uncultivated entails great suffering.
Gautama Buddha
#91. 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.
Gautama Buddha
#92. Brothers, why are you here?" He looked
astonished, even perturbed.
"We come to help."
"I thought the monks and priests were to be in the church, praying."
"We pray with our feet," answered Anseau.
"Tell us how we can help.
D.W. Koons
#93. Because monks come from the midst of purity, they consider as good and pure what does not arouse desire among other people.
Dogen
#94. Just studying Buddhism, then meditating and going to Buddhist monasteries, talking to Buddhist monks, combined with the Thai people themselves, changed the way I look at the world.
John Burdett
#95. Certainly," quoth Athelstane, "women are the least to be trusted of all animals, monks and abbots excepted.
Walter Scott
#96. No. It is impossible to maintain a smile in my brother's presence. Monks haven't the sort of patience required.
Libba Bray
#97. Well, there are the letter I deliver to the monks, and other things, too: tea and dishwashing soap, paraffin candles, tins of powered Ovaltine ...
Christine Brodien-Jones
#98. 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.
Kylie Tennant
#99. The peace of the Eastern church was invaded by a swarm of fanatics [monks], incapable of fear, or reason, or humanity; and the Imperial troops acknowledged, without shame, that they were much less apprehensive of an encounter with the fiercest Barbarians.
Edward Gibbon
#100. Mature as he was, she might yet be able to help him to the building of the rainbow bridge that should connect the prose in us with the passion. Without it we are meaningless fragments, half monks, half beasts, unconnected arches that have never joined into a man.
E. M. Forster
