Quotes about Monk

If ever a monk got to heaven by monkery," says Luther, "I ought to have gotten there.

Perhaps I should have been one [some sort of a professional religious]; I like to think a monk notable for his austerities, the voice of one crying in the wilderness; but more probably a tiresome Unitarian in Walsall who writes incessantly to the local paper.

At night a hooded monk passed by where there were no lamps. I could not see his face. I only heard these words he kept repeating: "Teach me, dear Lord, all that you know." I knew instantly a great treasure had entered my soul.

For the monk searches not only his own heart: he plunges deep into the heart of that world of which he remains a part although he seems to have left it. In reality the monk abandons the world only in order to listen more intently to the deepest and most neglected voices that proceed from its inner depth.

Whenever I feel discouraged in my own progress, I remember what one Trappist monk said to me as he reflected on his sixty years of life dedicated to prayer, "I am only a beginner.

Monasticism had transformed the humble work of discipleship into the meritorious activity of the saints, and the self-renunciation of discipleship into the flagrant spiritual self-assertion of the "religious." The world had crept into the very heart of the monastic life, and was once more making havoc. The monk's attempt to flee from the world turned out to be a subtle form of love for the world.

For formerly, under the papacy, when I was a monk, it was by no means customary to speak of a promise. And I give thanks to God that I may live at this time, when this word "promise" resounds in my ears and in the ears of all the godly. For he who hears the Word easily understands the divine promise, which was obscure and unknown to all the theologians throughout the papacy.

No one can find God without having first been found by Him. A monk is a man who seeks God because he has been found by God.

In reality the monk abandons the world only in order to listen more intently to the deepest and most neglected voices that proceed from its inner depth.

The devil was sick, the devil a monk would be; The devil was well, the devil a monk was he.

In the years 1889 and 1890, at the Ratsschul Library in Zwickau, about seventy-five miles east of Erfurt, someone came upon what turned out to be early fifteenth-century volumes that Luther had held and studied as a young monk. It was a spectacular find. Several of these books were works by Augustine. The marginal notes and other writing were confirmed as Luther's own handwriting, so suddenly historians could know what he had underlined as he was reading.

Reading from St. John Chrysostom that the life of a bishop should be more perfect than the life of a hermit. The reason he gave was that the holiness which the monk preserves in the desert must be preserved by the bishop into the midst of the evil of the world.