Words matter. These are the best Monks Quotes from famous people such as Hans-Ulrich Obrist, Michael Hirst, Paul Theroux, Denis McDonough, Satish Kumar, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I would go from one city to the next, inspired by the monks in the Middle Ages, who would carry knowledge from one monastery to the next monastery.
I got interested in the Vikings, and then you realize that there isn’t much to be read about them because they did not write their history. It was written by hostile witnesses, by Christian monks and so on. From what I could see and understand, I was really excited about it. I loved their culture and loved their gods.
Movable type seemed magical to the monks who were illuminating manuscripts and copying texts. Certainly e-books seem magical to me.
I’m indebted to the teachers who shaped me – from the Sisters of St. Joseph at St. Croix Catholic elementary to the monks of St. John’s in Minnesota to my professors at Georgetown.
Monks will have three begging bowls for their food: one for water, one for liquid food, one for dry food.
The Vikings certainly didn’t write anything about themselves; it was not a literate, but rather a pagan, culture. So what we get was written later by Christian monks. But there were occasional reportings and recordings of people who had traded usually with the Vikings.
I don’t believe footballers have to live like monks.
Just studying Buddhism, then meditating and going to Buddhist monasteries, talking to Buddhist monks, combined with the Thai people themselves, changed the way I look at the world.
The great irony was that, while I was being portrayed as a monster, I was in Khatmandu with my children, doing soup kitchens for Tibetan refugees, using all the money from my records to feed three hundred people a day, and working with monks connected to the Sammye Ling Buddhist centre in Scotland.
Gonpo Tso was born a princess. As a young woman, she dressed in fur-trimmed robes with fat ropes of coral beads strung around her neck. She lived in an adobe castle on the edge of the Tibetan plateau with a reception room large enough to accommodate the thousand Buddhist monks who once paid tribute to her father.
Artists are the monks of the bourgeois state.
Perhaps the old monks were right when they tried to root love out; perhaps the poets are right when they try to water it. It is a blood-red flower, with the color of sin; but there is always the scent of a god about it.
We know what the birth of a revolution looks like: A student stands before a tank. A fruit seller sets himself on fire. A line of monks link arms in a human chain. Crowds surge, soldiers fire, gusts of rage pull down the monuments of tyrants, and maybe, sometimes, justice rises from the flames.
A lot of the powerful religious leaders, from Jesus to Buddha to Tibetan monks, they’re really talking about the same things: love and acceptable, and the value of friendship, and respecting yourself so you can respect others.
Luther was guilty of two great crimes – he struck the Pope in his crown, and the monks in their belly.
You haven’t partied until you’ve partied at dawn in complete silence with Buddhist monks.
I was 17, and all I wanted to do was to get away from England and the awful, boring boarding schools I’d been going to there. The last one was taught by monks, and I couldn’t wait to get out.
Most of the great books on prayer are written by ‘experts’ – monks, missionaries, mystics, saints. I’ve read scores of them, and mainly they make me feel guilty.
That was my childhood. I grew up with the monks, studying Sanskrit and meditating for hours in the morning and hours in the evening, and going once a day to beg for food.
There are techniques of Buddhism, such as meditation, that anyone can adopt. And, of course, there are Christian monks and nuns who already use Buddhist methods in order to develop their devotion, compassion, and ability to forgive.
When learning was monopolized by the monks in the Middle Ages, people specialized only in warfare and statecraft. And even these were not altogether free from the scholastic influence.
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.
At the age of eighty, the Dalai Lama has begun to discuss a range of prospects for the future disposition of his soul. Traditionally, after he dies, a search party of senior monks would set out to locate his new incarnation, who is most often a boy toddler, who goes on to be trained as a monk and a leader.
My house was a guest house of many Jaina saints, Hindu monks, Sufi mystics, because my grandfather was interested in all of these people.
Most of the early monks were not ordained. It was the pastoral work they undertook with the faithful that, over the centuries, gradually led to the present situation in which most monks are ordained priests.
The thing with darts players is they have always appeared available. They don’t have to live like monks. I’ve only ever met one dry player in 35 years.
Laos is a deeply Buddhist country, and my visit included a traditional Tak Bat ceremony, in which you get up at sunrise and make offerings to Buddhist monks.
My mother is an immigrant from China, and she filled my head with stories about ghosts and fighting monks in China, so the world of ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’ was a very familiar one.
I was filming in Roscrea in Co Tipperary. I had great fun watching monks in the monastery there making bread. They even offered me a job as their main baker. One of them said I would make a good monk, but I told him there was a slight problem because I was married.
I grew with it, and I used to go to see the monks, who had no possessions, even more extreme than my mother.
