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“You know, I preferred you as an evil monk. Would have made killing you a whole lot easier.”
― Chris D' Lacey

“Mystics are all a bit funny in the head anyway," the priest added cynically, "which is why the church locks them all up in mental hospitals and euphemistically calls these institutions monasteries.”
― Robert Anton Wilson, The Eye in the Pyramid

“It is well known how the monks wrote silly lives of Catholic Saints over the manuscripts on which the classical works of ancient heathendom had been written.”
― Karl Marx

“You can be a bad experiencer and still be an overly mature person.”
― Abhaidev, The Influencer: Speed Must Have a Limit

“What about inner productivity? Don’t you consider it worthy or relevant at all? We are all too focused on the outer world. But what about our mind? What about the world that exists inside us?”
― Abhaidev, The Influencer: Speed Must Have a Limit

“Six Buddhist monks in orange robes poured black coffee into small white cups from a large geyser coffee machine”
― Steph Osfor, Evening Fiction: Volume of short stories

“As far as monks are concerned, I believe that they are bad experiencers. They know nothing about the struggles of a normal human being. The struggle to stay alive. The struggle to survive in this capitalist world. The trauma of being in a bad relationship. Juggling between the myriads of emotions and sentiments. These monks are oblivious to such battles which a normal human being fights every day.”
― Abhaidev, The Influencer: Speed Must Have a Limit

“Normally I would have been the first to go in search of cannibal monks, particularly as I had heard of a similar tradition at a nunnery in the Philippines. It's the sort of quest I can't resist.”
― Tahir Shah, House of the Tiger King : The Quest for a Lost City

“O cowardly amd tyrannous race of monks, persecutors of the bard, and the gleemen, haters of life and joy! O race that does not draw the sword and tell the truth! O race that melts the bones of the people with cowardice and with deceit! ("The Crucifixion Of The Outcast")”
― William Butler Yeats

“The monkish vows keep us far from that sink of vice that is the female body, but often they bring us close to other errors. Can I finally hide from myself the fact that even today my old age is still stirred by the noonday demon when my eyes, in choir, happen to linger on the beardless face of a novice, pure and fresh as a maiden's?”
― Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose

“I suppose we all have our little hiding-hole if the truth was known, but as small as it is, the whole world is in it, and bit by bit grows on us again till the day You find us out.”
― Frank O'Connor, Collected Stories

“I had no idea what they sang. I guessed it was all in Latin, but some words could have been French. I didn't need to understand the words to have them touch me. I don't know whether it was the acoustics, the song, the beauty of the singing or the conviction behind it, but there was grandeur and hope in every note.

The frescos flickered in candlelight and stained-glass men looked down upon me benevolently as the monks' singing brought pieces of me apart. Maybe this was why I had come, why I was meant to be here. I saw tears running down Fabiana's cheeks.

Brother Rocher asked in French and English for those wishing to be blessed to come forward. I sat and watched the three Brazilians and half a dozen others move forward in turn. There was a final chant and everyone filed out. Except me.

Centuries of singing, service to others and dedication to something bigger than twenty-first-century materialism had created a peace that permeated the walls. Whatever issues I had with religion were not relevant here. The stillness and austerity gave me a strange sense of comfort, and I seemed to be moving toward some sort of clarity.”
― Graeme Simsion, Two Steps Forward

“What burned in these men that didn't burn in me? A difference of focus or something outside of me? A lack or too much of something? ... I'm not an authority, God knows, but if there is a way to talk into the Great Primal Ears - if Ears there be - music and silence must be the best way.”
― William Least Heat-Moon, Blue Highways

“The rulers of the world were Monks, when they could not be Martyrs.”
― John Henry Newman

“He grew enthusiastic in thinking of the convents. Ah! to be earthed up among them, sheltered from the herd, not to know what books appear, what newspapers are printed, never to know what goes on outside one's cell, among men—to complete the beneficent silence of this cloistered life, nourishing ourselves with good actions, refreshing ourselves with plain song, saturating ourselves with the inexhaustible joys of the liturgies.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans

“Swarms of bees, beetles, soft music of the world, a gentle humming; brent geese, barnacle geese, shortly before All Hallows, music of the dark wild torrent.
(Medieval poem by a monk of Ynys Enlli, an island off the coast of Wales)”
― Robert Macfarlane, The Wild Places

“It doesn't matter that a temple is built in a high place! The important thing is that the minds of the monks in the temple are in a high place!”
― Mehmet Murat ildan

“Asceticism.

"(from Greek askeō: “to exercise,�� or “to train��), the practice of the denial of physical or psychological desires in order to attain a spiritual ideal or goal. Hardly any religion has been without at least traces or some delphic features of asceticism.

Enlightenment, meditation, yoga, natural, free, sanctuary, homelessness, technology, spirituality, depth, mindfulness, function, society, benefit.”
― Monaristw

“Neither monasticism nor materialism will do. To move forward we must stand whole and true.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Handcrafted Humanity: 100 Sonnets For A Blunderful World

“The Benedictine is the spiritual reverse of the Puritan.”
― August Adam, The Primacy of Love

“Many people do not understand the art of winning and this has been the case for many centuries.
There was once a Shaolin monk who was constantly being challenged to fight. He always won, even against the angriest and strongest fighters, because they could not understand that technique is always superior to personal will and expectations. Some of the men noticed his skill and asked to be trained with him, and once their technique was good enough, they would try to defeat him. But the monk would defeat them instead because they could not understand that experience is always superior to technique.
As the monk grew older, he did not desire to fight anymore, and so many men would insult him. But the monk was still winning,  because they could not understand that they were wasting an opportunity to learn and the monk did not desire to waste the little time he had left on earth. Before he died, the monk wrote a few manuscripts with his wisdom, but few were capable of understanding his words because their spirit was not ready. They were still thinking about winning. And so they lost everything, they lost the opportunity to develop a new technique, gain experience, study and understand how to win.”
― Dan Desmarques

“As I read deeper in the Zen poets, I soon stumbled upon Ikkyū, the fifteenth-century sword-wielding monk of Daitokuji, who had entered a temple at the age of six and gone on to express his contempt for the corrupt monasteries of his time in famously controversial poems. Like the Sixth Dalai Lama, in his way, Ikkyū had been a patron - and a laureate - of the local taverns, and of the pretty girls he had found therein; and like his Tibetan counterpart, or John Donne in our own tradition, he had deliberately conflated the terms of earthly love with those of devotion to the Absolute. The very name he gave himself, "Crazy Cloud", had played subversively on the fact that "cloud water" was a traditional term for monks, who wandered without trace, yet "cloud rain" was a conventional idiom for the act of love. His image of the "red thread" ran through the austere surroundings of his poems as shockingly as the scarlet peonies of Akiko. And in his refusal to kowtow to convention, the maverick monk had turned every certainty on its head: whores, he said, could be like ideal monks - since they inhabited the ideal Zen state of "no min" - while monks, in selling themselves for gold brocade, were scarcely different from whores. Many of his verses trembled with this ambiguity. One couplet, taken one way, was translated as "Making distinctions between good and evil, the monk's skill lies in knowing the essential condition of the Buddha and the Devil"; taken another way, it meant: "That girl is no good, this one will do; the monk's skill is in having the appetite of a devilish Buddha.”
― Pico Iyer, The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto

“Reformers can learn from monks, who spend countless hours cooking or cleaning the grounds or raking the garden, and can view each and every task, no matter how menial or seemingly trivial, not simply as a means to an end, which is frustrating if the final goal seems remote or unattainable. Rather, the tasks are seen as ends in themselves to be celebrated as eminently worthwhile, which paradoxically enhances their possible benefit for the future.”
― Steven Heine, Zen Skin, Zen Marrow: Will the Real Zen Buddhism Please Stand Up?

“You become a monk because you think there's no better choice for you. No other reason could make any sense.”
― Brad Warner, Don't Be a Jerk: And Other Practical Advice from Dogen, Japan's Greatest Zen Master

“The monks are not idling away their precious time in the monastery. They are trained here in a peculiar way to develop their moral and spiritual energies and also to see into the mysteries of their being. When all this is appraised in the proper light, we can appreciate the real significance of the Zendo life, which goes on in a.way so contrary to modern trends of thought and actual living.”
― Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki, The Training Of The Zen Buddhist Monk

“Monks are, in short, perfectly ordinary people. If they are extraordinary at all, it is only because of the way of life they have chosen to pursue.”
― Robert E. Buswell Jr., The Zen Monastic Experience

“The rapport that prevails among the monks, and the close filial bonds that tie all members of the monastic family to one another, can give new postulants the reassurance and sense of place that they knew before in their home villages or in the military. Rather as in a fraternity, once they are initiated into the monastery, their place in the organization is assured, bringing some permanent meaning to their lives.”
― Robert E. Buswell Jr., The Zen Monastic Experience

“It is through the close interaction of the laity and the monks that the essence of Zen penetrates social life.”
― Thich Nhat Hanh, Zen Keys: A Guide to Zen Practice

“Suzuki-roshi's students in America were laypeople who practiced like monks. This seemed so innovative, so unprecedented, that scholars and theologians told the students at Zen Center that they were the vanguard of a Buddhist reformation. And Suzuki-roshi apparently believed this was true. He had asked Richard to reform Buddhism in Japan. But seen from Japan, the Zen Center model might have looked like backwards Buddhism. For almost two hundred years, the monks in Japan had been practicing as laypeople. When Suzuki-roshi arrived in America, he inverted the model by necessity; he had to begin with laypeople because there were no American monks. It was a long road from Sokoji to Tassajara. But they got there. They escaped from the world and holed up in a monastery. And then they transformed Tassajara. And it began to look a lot like Eiheiji. During services, the Americans even managed to chant in Japanese.

What was the big difference? The distinction was really a matter of degree. What distinguished the Americans from the Japanese was their determination to sustain the intensity of monastic practice after they left the monastery.”
― Michael Downing, Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center

“In Theravāda Buddhist traditions, monks represent ideal behavior to the laity. This is partly due to their unworldly aspirations (laukika), but it also has much to do with the fact that the standardized discourse on ethics, known as the Vinaya Piṭaka, is located within the monastic guidelines. This source provides rules of conduct for monks and simultaneously serves as a moral compass for the laity.”
― Michael Jerryson, If You Meet the Buddha on the Road: Buddhism, Politics, and Violence