Monk Quotes - Page 17

• Your tale is of the longest," observed Monks, moving restlessly in his chair. It is a true tale of grief and trial, and sorrow, young man," returned Mr. Brownlow, "and such tales usually are; if it were one of unmixed joy and happiness, it would be very brief.

  Charles Dickens

  Grief, Moving, Men

  Charles Dickens (1985). “Oliver Twist”, p.259, Dimitrios Spyridon Chytiris

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• If in our daily life we can smile, if we can be peaceful and happy, not only we, but everyone will profit from it. This is the most basic kind of peace work.

  Nhat Hanh

  Life, Happiness, Success

  Thich Nhat Hanh (2008). “Being Peace”, p.4, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• Nothing makes me feel better - calmer, clearer and happier - than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. It's actually something deeper than mere happiness: it's joy, which the monk David Steindl-Rast describes as 'that kind of happiness that doesn't depend on what happens.

  Pico Iyer

  Motivational, Book, Feel Better

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• There's a difference between solitude and loneliness. I can understand the concept of being a monk for a while.

  Tom Hanks

  Loneliness, Differences, Solitude

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• My imagination is a monastery and I am its monk.

  John Keats

  Imagination, Atheism, Literature

  John Keats (2015). “John Keats - The Man Behind The Lyrics: Life, letters, and literary remains: Complete Letters and Two Extensive Biographies of one of the most beloved English Romantic poets”, p.883, e-artnow

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• I loved the quiet places in Kyoto, the places that held the world within a windless moment. Inside the temples, Nature held her breath. All longing was put to sleep in the stillness, and all was distilled into a clean simplicity.
  The smell of woodsmoke, the drift of incense; a procession of monks in black-and-gold robes, one of them giggling in a voice yet unbroken; a touch of autumn in the air, a sense of gathering rain.

  Pico Iyer

  Rain, Sleep, Autumn

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• Hakomi is a path taken by those who work to go beyond the half remembered hurts and failed beliefs that linger unexamined in the mind and body, hurts that act through barely conscious habits and reactions. This work is a part of that heroic labor, a cousin to sitting meditation, to singing bowls and chanting monks.

  Ron Kurtz

  Hurt, Cousin, Taken

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• Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious men are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves. They never get around to being the particular poet or the particular monk they are intended to be by God. They never become the man or the artist who is called for by all the circumstances of their individual lives. They waste their years in vain efforts to be some other poet, some other saint...They wear out their minds and bodies in a hopeless endeavor to have somebody else's experiences or write somebody else's poems.

  Thomas Merton

  Religious, Writing, Artist

  Thomas Merton (2007). “New Seeds of Contemplation”, p.98, New Directions Publishing

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

  Alexander Alekhine

  Chess, Beast, Strategy

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