Quotes About Monastery

Screens in a Zen meditation place are pulled back at dusk, to let the mosquitoes in. · A monastery, for St. Benedict, was "a school for charity." A Zen temple might be called a school for clarity. The challenge in either tradition is to see how one leads to the other.

A large man, he cheerfully refers to the prison's maximum-security unit as "my monastery.

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.

Fatigue can make it hard to have faith. Too much busyness can make it hard to have faith. Too much of too little solitude can impact faith. For that matter, so can a bout of hunger or overwork, anything carried to an extreme. Faith thrives on routine. Look at any monastery and you will see that. Faith keeps on keeping on.

Instead of seeing the spiritual life as one that can exist only if it is enclosed by the walls of a monastery, Ignatius asks you to see the world as your monastery.

The monks who taught me," Hugh explained. "They lived in a monastery in that valley, built between two great trees, trees as eternal as the monks themselves. Under one bower the monks sat to meditate. That tree was called the Tree of Enlightenment. Under the other, the monks drank their wine. That tree was called the Tree of Eternal Life.

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.

My imagination is a monastery, and I am its monk

I asked him what it was like to live in a monastery and meditate for a year. He said it was a waste of time, that he never meditated, and that the older monks were interested only in feeling up boys, playing cards, and telling fortunes, that they were a dirty, lazy, superstitious lot.

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.

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.

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

A veces la Unión Soviética parecía más un monasterio medieval donde todo el mundo había hecho voto de pobreza y obediencia.

There was a monastery on the far side of the town. The monks had a way of measuring the hours of the night: they made big, graduated candles that told the time as they burned down. One hour before dawn they would ring the bell, then get up to chant their service of Matins.

In heaven above there is Zhulin Monastery; on earth below there is Shaolin Monastery.

Hey, what about you? That monastery didn't make you soft, I hope." "The Cistercians?" Chris laughed. "Make me soft? They're the toughest order in the Catholic Church." "They really don't talk?" "Not only that. They believe in brutal daily work. I might as well have spent another six years in Special Forces.

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.

A forced interlude with a Corsican bandit of great charm had ended with him vowing to give up his errant life of villainy and take holy orders. He still sent me regular missives from the monastery where he devoted himself to the making of pungent cheeses.)

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.

A witch, a Rider, a dragon, and a god walk into a monastery… There's got to be a good joke in there somewhere.

You should carry the monastery in yourself. The desert is within you. The desert calls you and draws you back. . . . Truly, I prepare you for solitude. —C.G. Jung , The Red Book

One Corpse Too Many

St. Galgano was a 12th-century saint who renounced his past as a knight to become a hermit. Lacking a cross to display, he created his own by miraculously burying his sword up to its hilt in a stone, à la King Arthur, but in reverse. After his death, a large Cistercian monastery complex grew. Today, all you'll see is the roofless, ruined abbey and, on a nearby hill, the Chapel of San Galgano with its fascinating dome and sword in the stone.

As we approached the forty-five-day mark, we heard that it was an ancient tradition at that monastery to spend one week in the middle of the ninety days without any sleep at all.