Top 93 Monastery Quotes & Sayings

We Americans have always considered Hollywood, at best, a sinkhole of depraved venality. And, of course, it is. It is not a protective monastery of aesthetic truth. It is a place where everything is incredibly expensive.

You utter a vow or forge a signature and you may find yourself bound for life to a monastery, a woman or prison.

I brought all the instincts of a writer with me into the monastery.

I always thought if I was born 2000 years earlier, I would be a monk, probably carving a monastery or some giant pantheon buildings.

Noise pollution is a relative thing. In a city, it's a jet plane taking off. In a monastery, it's a pen that scratches.

You might say living in a monastery cuts down the commutation time. That alone gives you a couple extra hours a day to meditate. In a monastery you lead a relatively simply life. You don't need a lot of possessions.

Society doesn't need that everybody is behaving in the full normal way... like people in a Buddhist monastery... But eccentricity may also connect with the irrational.

I believe there is also a Tim Roth Monastery.

In the old days, Zen was not really practiced so much in a monastery. The Zen Master usually lived up on a top of the mountain or the hill or in the forest or sometimes in the village.

Nothing more rapidly inclines a person to go into a monastery than reading a book on etiquette. There are so many trivial ways in which it is possible to commit some social sin.

Religion does not mean just precepts, a temple, monastery, or other external signs, for these as well as hearing and thinking are subsidiary factors in taming the mind.

I still have the same beliefs as when I was in the monastery.

Let love lead your soul. Make it a place to retire to, a kind of monastery cave, a retreat for the deepest core of your being.

The only people who had authority within the Church to stop Brendan Smyth from having contact with children were his Abbot in the Monastery in Kilnacrott and his Religious Superiors in the Norbertine Order.

There were rules in the monastery, but the Master always warned against the tyranny of the law. 'Obedience keeps the rules,' he would say. 'Love knows when to break them.'

I've never been with women, because I'm celibate, as ordered by God, as if I were in a monastery. For me, the church is my wife.

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.

Japan was this wonderful unexplainable sensual explosion - everything about it I found fascinating. There's a real dichotomy between the 'Blade Runner'-esque Tokyo to visiting a Buddhist monastery in the countryside.

He was somebody who made me think, I suppose, about the contemplative life. I've always been a city fellow, but I've often had vague thoughts about 'checking out' and perhaps going into a monastery and just seeing what it was like.

To keep a faith pure, man had better retire to a monastery.

I think one can advance faster outside a monastery if you use the experiences of daily life to advance yourself.

Damned mating heat. Lawe is threatening to join a monastery and Rule's threatening to quit. Why don't you two try to show the younger guys it can be fun instead of taking a note out of everyone else's books and letting it drive you insane? -Jonas

Turn your car into a monastery.

Combine meditation with career as a yoga. You will find that your practice will not be any less powerful than a person who lives in a monastery. You might even excel because practice in a monastery can get very one-sided.

My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.

It is not bad living in a monastery. I've done it many times in many lives. But I think you can do a better job outside the monastery, if you have the necessary component parts.

The early masters also introduced walking meditation and hard work to the monastery, for too much sitting could reach the point of diminishing returns.

I first had a version of this at a Japanese monastery during a silent retreat-don't ask, it's a long story.

To retire to the monastery, or the woods, or the sea, is to escape from the sharp suggestions that spur on ambition.

I was filming in Roscrea in Co Tipperary. I had great fun watching monks in the monastery there making bread. They even offered me a job as their main baker. One of them said I would make a good monk, but I told him there was a slight problem because I was married.

Most of the utopian community ideas actually are religious. They're based more on the idea of the monastery than the commune.

I remember going to a monastery library when I was very young and being surrounded by ancient books. I fell in love.

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

One learns more of Christ in being married and rearing children than in several lifetimes spent in study in a monastery.

Satan stations more devils on monastery walls than in the dens of iniquity, for the latter offer no resistance.

Science is turning into a monastery for the Order of Capitulant Friars. Logical calculus is supposed to supersede man as moralist. We submit to the blackmail of the 'superior knowledge' that has the temerity to assert that nuclear war can be, by derivation, a good thing, because this follows from simple arithmetic.

I turned into a monk when my mother went to learn Buddhism in Burma. While she learnt at the monastery, I used to roam around with a begging bowl and ask for food.

Running is just such a monastery- a retreat, a place to commune with God and yourself, a place for psychological and spiritual renewal.

I AM what is called a Feminist. Thirty years ago I left a monastery and began a sane human existence. Within two or three years, I find, I was defending the rights of women.

Death is the only monastery; the tomb is the only cell, and the grave that adjoins the convent is the bitterest mock of its futility.

The monastery of Christ in the Desert had its resident hermit, Brother Xavier, chosen after years of devotion and service, a monk so trusted and experienced that he qualified by Benedictine standards to be sent to the front lines in the fight against the devil.

And then I think we realized, like any young guys, that blues are not learned in a monastery. You've got to go out there and get your heart broke and then come back and then you can sing the blues.

The spirit of the West, of America, is different than the East. The cultural conditioning is very different. It seems to be harder for people to work in teams, more difficult for people here to live in harmony, in a monastery.

I would go from one city to the next, inspired by the monks in the Middle Ages, who would carry knowledge from one monastery to the next monastery.

If you resort to violent methods because the other side has destroyed your monastery, for example, you then have lost not only your monastery, but also your special Buddhist practices of detachment, love, and compassion.

I was an altar boy in an incredible monastery that was attached to a rectory. The theater of the church is the most incredible theater, and in this church, it was beyond. It was this huge monastery. It was landmarked. It's a beautiful building, and I kind of had the run of it.

Martin Luther dreamed up Protestantism while sitting on the toilet at Wittenburg monastery, and we know what a big movement that became.

The idea of the walls of monastery was to keep everybody else out because you wanted to develop a certain type of life. Most people in the world had different ideas on the subject.

Even in a remote monastery, you may still be remote from the truth! To find the truth, all you need is a sound way of thinking.

You have to put yourself in a situation, a lifestyle, that makes you do the work. Even if it's a monastery.

I love the idea of a university as away from capitalist values, where people can do things that don't immediately have to pay their way. It's like a monastery in a way, and that beautiful refuge has been destroyed by dogma about what this stuff is for.

The Garden of Gethsemane is halfway up the Mount of Olives, where Christ grappled with his courage during those last dark hours of life. Today it is a Franciscan monastery.

If you're sitting in a monastery, where your schedule is set and you have very few uncontrolled variables, that's fantastic that you can do loving/kindness meditation, but that's not the world I live in.

The Church is not a monastery for the isolation of perfect people. It is more like a hospital provided for those who wish to get well.

When we take the one seat on our meditation cushion we become our own monastery. We create the compassionate space that allows for the arising of all things: sorrows, loneliness, shame, desire, regret, frustration, happiness.

In our own case, we don't consider the loss of a monastery or a monument the end of our entire way of life. If one monastery is destroyed, sometimes it happens.

In the monastery of your heart, you have a temple where all Buddhas unite.

The person who's in the Zen monastery, who's doing a kind of poor job at meditating and a half-ass job cleaning the gardens is not doing very good yoga.

I think to be in a monastery or an ashram is not always the answer because we don't fight, we kick back. We don't listen to Sri Krishna.

I don't think there's any great mystery to writing female characters, so long as you talk to them. If you lived in a monastery and never met any women, maybe it would be difficult.