Browsing Topic Best Monk Quotes

Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can’t help them, at least don’t hurt them.

The more you know the less you understand.

Choose to be optimistic, it feels better.

Try to remain truthful. The power of truth never declines. Force and violence may be effective in the short term, but in the long run it’s truth that prevails.

Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.

There cannot be self-restraint in the absence of desire: when there is no adversary, what avails thy courage? Hark, do not castrate thyself, do not become a monk: chastity depends on the existence of lust.

Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.

Men in excess of happiness or misery are equally inclined to severity. Witness conquerors and monks! It is mediocrity alone, and a mixture of prosperous and adverse fortune that inspire us with lenity and pity.

I desire to go to Hell and not to Heaven. In the former I shall enjoy the company of popes, kings and princes, while in the latter are only beggars, monks and apostles

This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.

Buddhism is in your heart. Even if you don’t have any temple or any monks, you can still be a Buddhist in your heart and life.

The mind is a wonderful servant, but a terrible master.

What! Have you no monks to teach, to dispute, to govern, to intrigue and to burn people who do not agree with them?

As you know, the Inquisition is an admirable and wholly Christian invention to make the pope and the monks more powerful and turn a whole kingdom into hypocrites.

What frustrated me was the thought that with three thousand years of history someone in China, some monk in a monastery halfway up a mountain, must have developed a magic kata, a physical expression of formae. Or at least have got close enough to explain all those legendary swordsmen and their inexplicable desire to roost on the tops of bamboo trees.

We don’t want our players to be monks. We want them to be better football players because a monk doesn’t play football at this level.

The prayer of the monk is not perfect until he no longer recognizes himself or the fact that he is praying.

A monk asks:Is there anything more miraculous than the wonders of nature?The master answers:Yes, your awareness of the wonders of nature.

We have wasted our spirit in the regions of the abstract and general just as the monks let it wither in the world of prayer and contemplation.

There yet remains but one concluding tale, And then this chronicle of mine is ended – Fulfilled, the duty God ordained to me, A sinner. Not without purpose did the Lord, Put me to witness much for many years, And educate me in the love of books. One day some indefatigable monk, Will find my conscientious, unsigned work; Like me, he will light up his ikon-lamp, And, shaking from the scroll the age-old dust, He will transcribe these tales in all their truth.

The monk that invented gunpowder did as much to stop war as did all the sermons of his brethren.

I am not a liberal, not a conservative, not a believer in gradual progress, not a monk. I should like to be a free artist and nothing more.

I hope that Beyond the Robe helps you to feel closer to the monks and nuns and to better understand their immense potential to provide leadership in their world and further insight into ours. Instead of simply admiring them from afar, let’s all get close enough to really listen.

The Rolling Stones were an inkling towards an appreciation of the unity of music, dance and words. Any of the black R&B people who had a stage show that involved dancing, music and words did the same thing, except that I thought Jagger’s words were good, his music was good and his dancing was good. I spoke to him about Blake and tried to get him to sing [William] Blake’s The Grey Monk, to use his words as lyrics. He didn’t do it. In the end, I did it myself.

Then are they truly monks when they live by the labor of their hands.

I never really got around to discussing that specific topic which I think it crucially important to understand. If you were a monk in Buddhist time and you had sex, there was a good chance a child would be conceived.

Two monks sit facing, playing chess on the mountain, The bamboo shadow on the board is dark and clear. Not a person sees the bamboo’s shadow, One sometimes hears the pieces being moved.

Prison life taught him how little one can get along with, and what extraordinary spiritual freedom and peace such simplification can bring. I remember again, ironically, that today more of us in the world have the luxury of choice between simplicity and complication of life. And for the most part, we, who could choose simplicity, choose complication. War, prison, survival periods, enforce a form of simplicity on us. The monk and the nun choose it of their own free will. But if one accidentally finds it, as I have for a few days, one finds also the serenity it brings.

I felt tears sting into my eyes, and took a deep swallow of the first champagne I had ever tasted, remembering that I had read somewhere that the monk who invented it said, on first tasting it, ‘It is like drinking stars’.

If you cry ”Forward” you must be sure to make clear the direction in which to go. Don’t you see that if you fail to do that and simply call out the word to a monk and a revolutionary, they will go in precisely opposite directions?

During a Chess competition a Chessmaster should be a combination of a beast of prey and a monk

During a chess tournament a master must envisage himself as a cross between an ascetic monk and a beast of prey.

Buddha was a responsible guy and believed in his monks being responsible, their responsibility would no longer be to their practice or to the sangha, but to their child because that’s the only honest way to do it. You can’t have it both ways. So anytime a monk would have sex, there was always that possibility and it was a very big deal.

The people I am afraid of are the ones who look for tendentiousness between the lines and are determined to see me as either liberal or conservative. I am neither liberal, nor conservative, nor gradualist, nor monk, nor indifferentist. I would like to be a free artist and nothing else, and I regret God has not given me the strength to be one.

Do you want to do this thing? Sit down and do it. Are you not writing? Keep sitting there. Does it not feel right? Keep sitting there. Think of yourself as a monk walking the path to enlightenment. Think of yourself as a high school senior wanting to be a neurosurgeon. Is it possible? Yes. Is there some shortcut? Not one I’ve found. Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world.