Monastery Quotes

“My imagination is a monastery, and I am its monk”

“Monastery you can't retire it's forever, there isn't music, films, parties and other crazy stuff. It's about spiritual life... It becomes harder and harder!”

“Living in a monastery, even as a guest rather than a monk, you have more opportunities than you might have elsewhere to see the world as it is, instead of through the shadow that you cast upon it.”

“You have two things of value: your monastery and your people. Translate the book for me, and I'll let you keep one. Which will it be?”

“Perhaps the itinerant monks called ‘Gyrovagues’ were especially responsible for promoting this view of our condition as eternal strangers. They journeyed ceaselessly from monastery to monastery, without fixed abode, and they haven’t quite disappeared, even today: it seems there are still a handful tramping Mount Athos. They walk for their entire lives on narrow mountain paths, back and forth on a long repeated round, sleeping at nightfall wherever their feet have taken them; they spend their lives murmuring prayers on foot, walk all day without destination or goal, this way or that, taking branching paths at random, turning, returning, without going anywhere, illustrating through endless wandering their condition as permanent strangers in this profane world.”

“The library was quiet. It was busy but it was quiet and I thought it must be like this in a monastery where you had company and sympathy but your thoughts were your own.”

“In the monastery, you are always in some kind of a situation where you are pressured so that your worst qualities come up. But you actually want that to happen so you can deal with them”

“I turned into a monk when my mother went to learn Buddhism in Burma. While she learnt at the monastery, I used to roam around with a begging bowl and ask for food.”

“As long as we practice with a vow to help others, we are the Bodhisattva of Great Compassion, and we become the leading figure in the Heart Sutra, whether we are a layperson or are ordained, whether celibate or married, living in the monastery or living in secular society.”