Monasticism Quotes

...for you know that soft is stronger than hard, water stronger than rock, love stronger than force." Vesadeva to Siddartha

The renewal of the Church will come from a new type of monasticism which only has in common with the old an uncompromising allegiance to the Sermon on the Mount. It is high time people banded together to do this.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

You were contemplating the mountain, Mr. Conway?" Came the inquiry."Yes, it's a fine sight. It has a name, I suppose?""It is called Karakal""I don't think I've ever heard of it. Is is very high?""Over twenty-eight thousand feet.""Indeed? I didn't realize there would be anything on that scale outside the Himalayas. Has it been properly surveyed? Whose are the measurements?""Whose would you expect, my dear sir? Is there anything incompatible between monasticism and trigonometry?

Darkness is a kind of visual silence, and monks love it.

To leave town, and the struggle and the swim of life, and go and hide yourself in a farmhouse is not life -- it is egoism, laziness; it is a kind of monasticism, but monasticism without action. A man needs, not six feet of land, not a farm, but the whole earth, all Nature, where in full liberty he can display all the properties and qualities of the free spirit.

My nation, as all nations, is becoming a land without peace, without thought, without mind, Madam Abbess. We are suffocating our spirits in commercial and material things. This is not envy," said Mr. Konishi earnestly. "I am a rich man, with much business, so I have succeeded in all these things, but I know that they are empty.

The human heartIs unknowable.But in my birthplaceThe flowers still smellThe same as always.

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

The Lord does not require us to wear a [cassock] — He wants us to be good and kind.

Thaddeus of Vitovnica

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.