Quotes by Monks - Page 8

It is the will of God that we live not only as rational beings, but as 'new men' regenerated by the Holy Spirit in Christ. It is His will that we reach out for our inheritance, that we answer His call to be His sons. We are born men without our consent, but the consent to be sons of God has to be elicited by our own free will.
Thomas Merton
. . .fasting gives me singularly happy afternoons.
Adalbert de Vogüé
Where there is prayer, the fallen spirits have no power.
Thaddeus of Vitovnica
Righteousness acts never in its own interest, but in the interest of fellow men.
Thaddeus of Vitovnica
One should preach not from one's rational mind but rather from the heart. Only that which is from the heart can touch another heart. One must never attack or oppose anyone. If he who preaches must tell people to keep away from a certain kind of evil, he must do so meekly and humbly, with fear of God.
Thaddeus of Vitovnica
Our life depends on the kind of thoughts we nurture. If our thoughts are peaceful, calm, meek, and kind, then that is what our life is like. If our attention is turned to the circumstances in which we live, we are drawn into a whirlpool of thoughts and can have neither peace nor tranquility.
Thaddeus of Vitovnica
The mind can go in a thousand directions, but on this beautiful path, I walk in peace. With each step, the wind blows. With each step, a flower blooms.
Thich Nhat Hanh
The cause of liberty becomes a mockery if the price to be paid is the wholesale destruction of those who are to enjoy liberty. Ghandi, quoted in Merton, p. 68
Thomas Merton
Sometimes, Anselm – and especially with the most important parts of our lives – we cannot share who we are. We can give the facts, as information, to a stranger; but with a friend we want to give that little bit more, something that changes the facts into flesh and spirit . . . and at certain times we can’t do it. Because ultimately we can’t give away our depths: they lie beyond our grasp. It is when we most want to do so that we realize how immense we are . . . more vast and mysterious than the night sky; and alone.
William Brodrick
Neither fear nor self-interest can convert the soul. They may change the appearance, perhaps even the conduct, but never the object of supreme desire... Fear is the motive which constrains the slave; greed binds the selfish man, by which he is tempted when he is drawn away by his own lust and enticed (James 1:14). But neither fear nor self-interest is undefiled, nor can they convert the soul. Only charity can convert the soul, freeing it from unworthy motives.
Bernard of Clairvaux
Now is the time to recall the enthusiasm of our first fervor, the determination to offer ourselves unreservedly, and at the same time to let go of the craving for emotional consolation,
Monks of New Skete
Cynicism leads to despair, while fixating on the efforts that seemed to work in the past makes an idol out of spiritual states.
Monks of New Skete
...spiritual dryness is not a problem. It only seems a problem because it's such a contrast with the good feelings of the honeymoon stage. ...this night will continue to go on, often getting worse, throughout our life. But if we persevere in our spiritual journey, we will be able to perceive in it positive meaning and learn to understand it. Then we can move beyond it to the freedom that places our feelings in proper perspective.
Monks of New Skete
{God's] presence is not contingent upon our feeling it. It simply is. We must learn to remember this and calm ourselves. By His apparent 'absence', He is leading us to a more mature level of consciousness, self-offering, and love. He is leading us from the love of God for the sake of His gifts to love of God for His own sake.
Monks of New Skete
Life never seems to prepare us sufficiently for epiphanies. ... they are not magical intrusions from another world, but reality, naked, and without shame.
Monks of New Skete
When I understood that neither parents, nor family, nor friends, nor anyone in the world could offer me anything but pain, insults and wounds, I resolved to stop living for the world.
Thaddeus of Vitovnica
The fact that our being necessarily demands to be expressed in action should not lead us to believe that as soon as we stop acting we cease to exist.We do not live merely to “do something” – no matter what. We do not live more fully merely by doing something more, seeing more, tasting more and experiencing more than we ever have before.Everything depends on the quality of our acts and experiences. A multitude of badly performed actions and experiences only half-lived exhausts and depletes our being.By doing things badly we make ourselves less real. This growing unreality cannot help but make us unhappy and fill us with a sense of guilt.There are times then when in order to keep ourselves in existence at all, we simply have to sit back awhile and do nothing. And for a man who has let himself be drawn completely out of himself by his activity, nothing is more difficult than to sit still and rest, doing nothing at all.We must first recover the possession of our own being before we can act or taste or experience reality.
Thomas Merton
If you can be aware that you have a living body, and notice when there's tension in your body, that's already an important insight.
Thich Nhat Hanh
The Lord does not require us to wear a [cassock] — He wants us to be good and kind.
Thaddeus of Vitovnica
The geographical pilgrimage is the symbolic acting out an inner journey. The inner journey is the interpolation of the meanings and signs of the outer pilgrimage. One can have one without the other. It is best to have both.
Thomas Merton
One of my confreres sketched an explanation that attracted me: since the process of digestion is under the control of the brain, its cessation gave repose to the brain, allowed it a vacation.
Adalbert de Vogüé
Everything in modern city life is calculated to keep man from entering into himself and thinking about spiritual things. Even with the best of intentions a spiritual man finds himself exhausted and deadened and debased by the constant noise of machines and loudspeakers, the dead air and the glaring lights of offices and shops, the everlasting suggestion of advertising and propaganda.The whole mechanism of modern life is geared for a flight from God and from the spirit into the wilderness of neurosis.
Thomas Merton
I have my own way to walk and for some reason or other Zen is right in the middle of it wherever I go. So there it is, with all its beautiful purposelessness, and it has become very familiar to me though I do not know "what it is." Or even if it is an "it." Not to be foolish and multiply words, I'll say simply that it seems to me that Zen is the very atmosphere of the Gospels, and the Gospels are bursting with it. It is the proper climate for any monk, no matter what kind of monk he may be. If I could not breathe Zen I would probably die of spiritual asphyxiation.
Thomas Merton
When we talk to our fellow men and they tell us about their troubles, we will listen to them carefully if we have love for them. We will have compassion for their suffering and pain, for we are God's creatures; we are a manifestation of the love of God.
Thaddeus of Vitovnica
But people of the deepest understanding look within, distracted by nothing. Since a clear mind is the Buddha, they attain the understanding of a Buddha without using the mind.
Bodhidharma
We need repentance. You see, repentance is not only going to a priest and confessing. We must free ourselves from the obsession of thoughts. We fall many times during our life, and it is absolutely necessary to reveal everything [in Confession] to a priest who is a witness to our repentance.Repentance is the renewal of life. This means we must free ourselves from all our negative traits and turn toward absolute good. No sin is unforgivable except the sin of unrepentance.
Thaddeus of Vitovnica
Everything is defeated before love.
Thaddeus of Vitovnica
Love is sacrifice. Love sacrifices itself for its neighbor.
Thaddeus of Vitovnica
A culture that does not teach prayer soon runs mad with desire.
Laurence Freeman
Death is someone you see very clearly with eyes in the center of your heart: eyes that see not by reacting to light, but by reacting to a kind of a chill from within the marrow of your own life.
Thomas Merton
Joy is thankfulness, and when we are joyful, that is the best expression of thanks we can offer the Lord, Who delivers us from sorrow and sin.
Thaddeus of Vitovnica
a room without boooks like a body without soul
Roger of Taizé
It is true that neither the ancient wisdoms nor the modern sciences are complete in themselves. They do not stand alone. They call for one another. Wisdom without science is unable to penetrate the full sapiential meaning of the created and the material cosmos. Science without wisdom leaves man enslaved to a world of unrelated objects in which there is no way of discovering (or creating) order and deep significance in man's own pointless existence. (p. 4)
Thomas Merton
a room without boooks like a body without soul
Roger of Taizé
It is true that neither the ancient wisdoms nor the modern sciences are complete in themselves. They do not stand alone. They call for one another. Wisdom without science is unable to penetrate the full sapiential meaning of the created and the material cosmos. Science without wisdom leaves man enslaved to a world of unrelated objects in which there is no way of discovering (or creating) order and deep significance in man's own pointless existence. (p. 4)
Thomas Merton
Art enables us to find ourselves and loose ourselves at the same time.
Thomas Merton
A man who fails well is greater than one who succeeds badly.
Thomas Merton
The logic of worldly success rests on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men!
Thomas Merton
Who is willing to be satisfied with a job that expresses all his limitations? He will accept such work only as a 'means of livelihood' while he waits to discover his 'true vocation'. The world is full of unsuccessful businessmen who still secretly believe they were meant to be artists or writers or actors in the movies.
Thomas Merton
Guarding knowledge is not a good way to understand. Understanding means to throw away your knowledge.
Thich Nhat Hanh
We who are given the fullness of true Christianity are obliged to be working on ourselves, to be watching the signs of the times, and to be extremely joyful, as St. Paul is constantly saying: 'Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say: Rejoice!' (Phil. 4:4). We rejoice because we have something which all the death and corruption of this world cannot take away, that is, the eternal Kingdom of Jesus Christ.
Seraphim Rose
Without suffering, there's no happiness. So we shouldn't discriminate against the mud. We have to learn how to embrace and cradle our own suffering and the suffering of the world, with a lot of tenderness.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Peace cannot be built on exclusivism, absolutism, and intolerance. But neither can it be built on vague liberal slogans and pious programs gestated in the smoke of confabulation. There can be no peace on earth without the kind of inner change that brings man back to his "right mind." p. 31
Thomas Merton
Atheism, true 'existential' atheism burning with hatred of a seemingly unjust or unmerciful God, is a spiritual state; it is a real attempt to grapple with the true God.… Nietzsche, in calling himself Antichrist, proved thereby his intense hunger for Christ.
Seraphim Rose
Everything in this life passes away — only God remains, only He is worth struggling towards. We have a choice: to follow the way of this world, of the society that surrounds us, and thereby find ourselves outside of God; or to choose the way of life, to choose God Who calls us and for Whom our heart is searching.
Seraphim Rose
Just as it is knownThat an image of one's face is seenDepending on a mirrorBut does not really exist as a face,So the conception of "I" existsDependent on mind and body,But like the image of a faceThe "I" does not at all exist as its own reality.
Nāgārjuna
Music is pleasing not only because of the sound but because of the silence that is in it: without the alternation of sound and silence there would be no rhythm.
Thomas Merton
My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone.
Thomas Merton
We have very little faith in the Lord, very little trust. If we trusted the Lord as much as we trust a friend when we ask him to do something for us, neither we as individuals nor our whole country would suffer so much.
Thaddeus of Vitovnica
Faith is the door to the full inner life of the Church, a life which includes not only access to an authoritative teaching but above all to a deep personal experience which is at once unique and yet shared by the whole Body of Christ, in the Spirit of Christ.
Thomas Merton
More profoundly, Nihilist "simplification" may be seen in the universal prestige today accorded the lowest order of knowledge, the scientific, as well as the simplistic ideas of men like Marx, Freud, and Darwin, which underlie virtually the whole of contemporary thought and life.We say "life," for it is important to see that the Nihilist history of our century has not been something imposed from without or above, or at least has not been predominantly this; it has rather presupposed, and drawn its nourishment from, a Nihilist soil that has long been preparing in the hearts of the people. It is precisely from the Nihilism of the commonplace, from the everyday Nihilism revealed in the life and thought and aspiration of the people, that all the terrible events of our century have sprung. The world-view of Hitler is very instructive in this regard, for in him the most extreme and monstrous Nihilism rested upon the foundation of a quite unexceptional and even typical Realism. He shared the common faith in "science," "progress," and "enlightenment" (though not, of course, in "democracy"), together with a practical materialism that scorned all theology, metaphysics, and any thought or action concerned with any other world than the "here and now," priding himself on the fact that he had "the gift of reducing all problems to their simplest foundations." He had a crude worship of efficiency and utility that freely tolerated "birth control", laughed at the institution of marriage as a mere legalization of a sexual impulse that should be "free", welcomed sterilization of the unfit, despised "unproductive elements" such as monks, saw nothing in the cremation of the dead but a "practical" question and did not even hesitate to put the ashes, or the skin and fat, of the dead to "productive use." He possessed the quasi-anarchist distrust of sacred and venerable institutions, in particular the Church with its "superstitions" and all its "outmoded" laws and ceremonies. He had a naive trust in the "natural mom, the "healthy animal" who scorns the Christian virtues--virginity in particular--that impede the "natural functioning" of the body. He took a simple-minded delight in modern conveniences and machines, and especially in the automobile and the sense of speed and "freedom" it affords.There is very little of this crude Weltanschauung that is not shared, to some degree, by the multitudes today, especially among the young, who feel themselves "enlightened" and "liberated," very little that is not typically "modern.
Seraphim Rose
Reason is in fact the path to faith, and faith takes over when reason can say no more.
Thomas Merton
The subtleties of the mind cannot be transmitted in words, but can be seen in words.
Juefan Huihong
Awareness of mortality exerts a unique power to focus the mind and heart on essentials.
Columba Stewart
To enter into the realm of contemplation, one must in a certain sense die: but this death is in fact the entrance into a higher life. It is a death for the sake of life, which leaves behind all that we can know or treasure as life, as thought, as experience as joy, as being. [Every form of intuition and experience] die to be born again on a higher level of life.
Thomas Merton
You do not need to know precisely what is happening, or exactly where it is all going. What you need is to recognize the possibilities and challenges offered by the present moment, and to embrace them with courage, faith and hope.
Thomas Merton
Without suffering there cannot be happiness. Without mud there cannot be any lotus flowers.
Thich Nhat Hanh
There is no distinction between means and ends. There is no way to happiness, happiness is the way. There is no way to enlightenment, enlightenment is the way.
Thich Nhat Hanh
There is no greater misery than false joys.
Bernard of Clairvaux
The present moment is filled with joy and happiness. If you are attentive, you will see it. (21)
Thich Nhat Hanh