A Quote by Basil Hume

On the whole, monks do not become famous - and that is a good thing - but monasteries do - and that is an excellent thing. In other words, it is the community that matters. — © Basil Hume
On the whole, monks do not become famous - and that is a good thing - but monasteries do - and that is an excellent thing. In other words, it is the community that matters.
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.
Traditionally, women didn't have much a role in Buddhism. The books were all written by monks, for other monks. So the general view of the feminine was rather misogynistic, with women playing the role of the forbidden other, waiting to pounce on innocent little monks! In that society, it was hard for women to become educated and get the deeper teachings and really become accomplished.
......the interesting thing was that the Roman Catholic monks and the Buddhist monks had no trouble understanding each other. Each of them was seeking the same experience and knew that the experience was incommunicable. The communication is only an effort to bring the hearer to the edge of the abyss; it is a signpost, not the thing itself. But the secular clergy reads the communication and gets stuck with the letter, and that's where you have the conflict.
Celibacy is one of the most unnatural things. It has destroyed so many human beings - millions - Catholic monks, Hindu monks, Buddhist monks, Jaina monks, nuns. For centuries they have been teaching celibacy; and the most amazing thing is, even in the twentieth century, not a single medical expert, physiologist, has stood up and said that celibacy is impossible, that in the very nature of things, it cannot happen.
The problem with monasteries, ashrams, convents is these institutions become extremely political. In other words, they're really small societies, and much of what you hope to avoid in societies you find there.
A good community insures itself by trust, by good faith and good will, by mutual help. A good community, in other words, is a good local economy.
Anyway that other thing we almost did in Paris-that's probably off the table for a while.Unless you want that whole baby-I'm-on-fire-when-we kiss thing to become freakishly literal
Let excellence be your brand... When you are excellent, you become unforgettable. Doing the right thing, even when nobody knows you're doing the right thing will always bring the right thing to you.
Excellence Matters. Excellent people. Excellent vision. Excellent marketing. Excellent strategies.
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?
In more simple words, we might say everything in the universe is trying to become every other thing; and every condition of everything is trying to become every other condition. A hot iron, for example, will strive to become as cool as its environment, and the cool environment will strive to become as hot as the hot iron. They compromise and find an equilibrium between the two, which is neither the one thing nor the other. This conspicuous fact is one of the most characteristic traits of Nature.
The whole, 'Is the Internet a good thing or a bad thing'? We're done with that. It's just a thing. How to maximise its civic value, its public good - that's the really big challenge.
You can trade money for other good things and that's nice, but it's not the first thing that matters to me. I'm a martial artist and I have other priorities.
Actually I'm pretty adamant about, you know, the whole God thing and it seems that skeptics are by and large atheists or something approaching that, which I strongly identify with. So it turned out to be a good thing and I have become enthusiastically part of it.
some things don't matter much. Like the color of a house. How big is that in the overall scheme of life? But lifting a person's heart--now, that matters. The whole problem with people is...they know what matters, but they don't choose it...The hardest thing on earth is choosing what matters.
When one does a thing, it appears good, otherwise one would not write it. Only later comes reflection, and one discards or accepts the thing. Time is the best censor, and patience a most excellent teacher.
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