Quotes About Monastic

Her uncle seems almost a child, monastic in the modesty of his needs and wholly independent of any sort of temporal obligations. And yet she can tell he is visited by fears so immense, so multiple, that she can almost feel the terror pulsing inside him. As though some beast breathes all the time at the windowpanes of his mind.

The word is Latin, from monastic ritual dating back to the sixteenth century: adsum. I am here.

Monastic life cuts off the distractions and emotional entanglements one becomes involved in, in the lay life.

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

some of the best love poems have been written by monks and nuns...

Christian Socialists are by no means a new sect, the Moravians representing the theory with as little offence and absurdity as may be. What is it, after all, but an out-of-door extension of the monastic system? The religious principle, more or less apprehended, may bind men together so, absorbing their individualities, and presenting an aim beyond the world; but upon merely human and earthly principles no such system can stand

Vive usted prácticamente como un monje, su casa es de una enorme austeridad, su dormitorio parece la celda de un trapense, realmente es de una sobriedad extraordinaria.

Hours of the day were named for the hours of prayer: matins around midnight; lauds around three A.M.; prime, the first hour of daylight, at sunrise or about six A.M.; vespers at six in the evening; and compline at bedtime.

of the monastic institutions on which it depended. Since celibate monks tended to

Monastic schools located in the countryside provided most of the education in Europe. With the urban boom of the eleventh century and the growing strictness of the monasteries brought about by church reform, cathedrals once again began opening schools (or, in a few cases, expanding existing schools) in the cities.

Sometimes the pagan spirit of Roman poetry arouses qualms. Guibert of Nogent confesses in his autobiography that early in his monastic life he took up verse making and even fell into "certain obscene words and composed brief writings, worthless and immodest, in fact bereft of all decency," before abandoning this shocking practice in favor of commentaries on the Scriptures.

A hundred years or more of Christ-centered monastic piety have affected also the image of rulership. In fact, the unique Reichenau miniature is the most powerful pictorial display of what may be called "liturgical kingship" — a kingship centered in the God-man rather than in God the Father. As a result, the Reichenau artist ventured to transfer the Ottonian emperor also the God-man's "two natures in one person.

If you have an ancestor who is a Benedictine monk, we would rather not know it.

I think they [ monastic folks ] were going to the desert to build a new society and in a sense to build a new world, a new culture together where it was easier to be good and holy.

You are holding in your hands not only a book of readings and instruction for the journey, but one monastic's heart of love held out to a searching world.

August 20, the feast day of Bernard of Clairvaux.

You know, I live a monastic lifestyle. No, I do. I do live in extremes, basically. I go back and forth. Once every six months, I'll have a day where I eat more chocolate than has ever been consumed by a human being.

...some of the best love poems have been written by monks and nuns...

Some of them moved to the desert or wilderness, seeking to create monastic communities where faith expressing itself in love could be experimented with as the norm. Others formed schools and missions or launched new congregations, orders, and movements, translating their spiritual breakthrough into compassionate organizing and action.

Master, what is the difference between a humanistic, monastic system of belief in which wisdom is sought by means of an apparently nonsensical system of questions and answers, and a lot of mystic gibberish made up on the spur of the moment? Wen considered this for some time, and at last said: A fish! And Clodpool went away, satisfied.

The monastic robe and eating bowl are as close to a monastic as wings are to a bird. Take them everywhere you go.

Abbesses then for several centuries were recognized as the ordinary ministers of penance for their own monastic community and sometimes even exercised that power outside that circle. This was one of the most important liturgical functions

I'd rather entrust my daughters to Casanova than my secrets to a novelist. Literary fires are hotter even than sexual ones. And literary oaths are even strawier than the matrimonial or monastic varieties.

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.