Vitovnica Monastery Quotes

#1. To eat in a monastery refectory is an exercise in humility; daily, one is reminded to put communal necessity before individual preference. While consumer culture speaks only to preferences, treating even whims as needs to be granted (and the sooner the better), monastics sense that this pandering to delusions of self-importance weakens the true self, and diminishes our ability to distinguish desires from needs. It's a price they're not willing to pay. #Quote by Kathleen Norris

#2. Humility is a Divine property and the perfection of the Christian life. It is attained through obedience. He who is not obedient cannot gain humility. There are very few in the world today who have obedience. Our humility is in proportion to our obedience. #Quote by Thaddeus Of Vitovnica

#3. Question: How can we consider created matter to be better than us if God has endowed us with a rational mind and has called us His sons?

Answer: If you place your hand over your heart and are entirely sincere with yourself, you will realize that you are indeed less than many created things. Look at the bee, how diligently it labors! It gives of itself without reserve, sparingly. The lifespan of a bee is a month and a half at the most. It often dies working, without going back to its home, the hive. And we? How we pity ourselves and spare ourselves! Or, look at the ant who is never tired of dragging a heavy burden. Even when its burden falls down, the ant patiently picks it up and goes on with its work. As for us, we give up immediately if things do not go the way we want them to! #Quote by Elder Thaddeus Of Vitovnica

#4. Mindful living is an art. You do not have to be a monk or living in a monastery to practice mindfulness. You can practice it anytime, while driving your car or doing housework. Driving in mindfulness will make the time in your car joyful, and it will also help you avoid accidents. You can use the red traffic light as a signal of mindfulness, reminding you to stop and enjoy your breathing. Similarly, when you do the dishes after dinner you can practice mindful breathing, so the time dish washing is pleasant and meaningful. You do not feel you have to rush. If you hurry, you waste the time of dish washing. The time you spend washing dishes and doing all your other everyday tasks is precious. It is a time for being alive. When you practice mindful living, peace will bloom during your daily activities. #Quote by Thich Nhat Hanh

#5. Satan stations more devils on monastery walls than in the dens of iniquity, for the latter offer no resistance. #Quote by Fulton J. Sheen

#6. Declared that he had been directed to make a pilgrimage. His father scoffed - "Gregory has turned pilgrim out of laziness," said Efim - but Gregory set out and walked two thousand miles to the monastery at Mount Athos in Greece. At the end of two years, when Gregory returned, he carried an aura of mystery and holiness. He began to pray at length, to bless other peasants, to kneel at their beds in supplication when they were sick. He gave up his drinking and curbed his public lunges at women. It began to be said that Gregory Rasputin, the profligate, was a man who was close to God. The village priest, alarmed at this sudden blossoming of a vigorous young Holy Man within his sphere, suggested heresy and threatened an investigation. Unwilling to argue and bored by life in Pokrovskoe, Rasputin left the village and began once again to wander. #Quote by Robert K. Massie

#7. Father monks, why do you fast! Why do you expect reward in heaven for that? ... No, saintly monk, you try being virtuous in the world, do good to society, without shutting yourself up in a monastery at other people's expense, and without expecting a reward up aloft for it
you'll find that a bit harder. #Quote by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#8. Then I used to lock myself in my room, or go to the end of the garden, climb on to the ruin of a high stone greenhouse and, dangling my legs from the wall which looked out on the road, would sit for hours, staring and staring, seeing nothing. Near me, over the dusty nettles, white butterflies fluttered lazily. A pert little sparrow would fly down on to a half-broken red brick nearby, and would irritate me with its chirping, ceaselessly turning its whole body with its outspread tail; the crows, still wary, occasionally cawed, sitting high, high on the bare top of a birch -- while the sun and wind played gently in its spreading branches; the bells of the Donskoy monastery would sometimes float across -- tranquil and sad -- and I would sit and gaze and listen, and would be filled with a nameless sensation which had everything in it; sorrow and joy, a premonition of the future, and desire, and fear of life. At the time, I understood none of this, and could not have given a name to any of the feelings which seethed within me; or else I would have called it all by one name – the name of Zinaida. #Quote by Ivan Turgenev

#9. Not only is the day waning, but the year. The low sun is fiery and yet cold behind the monastery ruin, and the Virginia creeper on the Cathedral wall has showered half its deep-red leaves down on the pavement. There has been rain this afternoon, and a wintry shudder goes among the little pools on the cracked, uneven flag-stones, and through the giant elm-trees as they shed a gust of tears. #Quote by Charles Dickens

#10. The early masters also introduced walking meditation and hard work to the monastery, for too much sitting could reach the point of diminishing returns. #Quote by James H. Austin

#11. I'm sitting her thinking, -God, I swear I will take a vow of silence and move to a monastery and worship you for all my days if you just this once provide me with an invisibility cloak, come on, come on, please please invisibility cloak now now now-. It's very possible that Jane is thinking the same thing, I have no idea, because she's not talking either, and I can't look at her on account of how I'm blinded by embarrassment. #Quote by John Green

#12. Alyosha, was not at all a fanatic, and, in my view at least, even not at all a mystic. I will give my full opinion beforehand: he was simply an early lover of mankind,1 and if he threw himself into the monastery path, it was only because it alone struck him at the time and presented him, so to speak, with an ideal way out for his soul struggling from the darkness of worldly wickedness towards the light of love. And this path struck him only because on it at that time he met a remarkable being, in his opinion, our famous monastery elder Zosima, to whom he became attached with all the ardent first love of his unquenchable heart. #Quote by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#13. You'll pray for us sinners; we have sinned too much here. I've always been thinking who would pray for me, and whether there's any one in the world to do it. My dear boy, I'm awfully stupid about that. You wouldn't believe it. Awfully. You see, however stupid I am about it, I keep thinking, I keep thinking--from time to time, of course, not all the while. It's impossible, I think, for the devils to forget to drag me down to hell with their hooks when I die. Then I wonder--hooks? Where would they get them? What of? Iron hooks? Where do they forge them? Have they a foundry there of some sort? The monks in the monastery probably believe that there's a ceiling in hell, for instance. Now I'm ready to believe in hell, but without a ceiling. It makes it more refined, more enlightened, more Lutheran that is. And, after all, what does it matter whether it has a ceiling or hasn't? But, do you know, there's a damnable question involved in it? If there's no ceiling there can be no hooks, and if there are no hooks it all breaks down, which is unlikely again, for then there would be none to drag me down to hell, and if they don't drag me down what justice is there in the world? Il faudrait les inventer, those hooks, on purpose for me alone, for if you only knew, Alyosha, what a blackguard I am. #Quote by Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#14. That peril is that the human intellect is free to destroy itself. Just as one generation could prevent the very existence of the next generation, by all entering a monastery or jumping into the sea, so one set of thinkers can in some degree prevent further thinking by teaching the next generation that there is no validity in any human thought. It is idle to talk always of the alternative of reason and faith. Reason is itself a matter of faith. It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all. If you are merely a sceptic, you must sooner or later ask yourself the question, "Why should anything go right; even observation and deduction? Why should not good logic be as misleading as bad logic? They are both movements in the brain of a bewildered ape?" The young sceptic says, "I have a right to think for myself." But the old sceptic, the complete sceptic, says, "I have no right to think for myself. I have no right to think at all." There #Quote by G.K. Chesterton

#15. He was somebody who made me think, I suppose, about the contemplative life. I've always been a city fellow, but I've often had vague thoughts about 'checking out' and perhaps going into a monastery and just seeing what it was like. #Quote by Derek Jacobi

#16. 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! #Quote by Deyth Banger

#17. Sri Yukteswar used to poke gentle fun at the commonly inadequate conceptions of renunciation."A beggar cannot renounce wealth," Master would say. "If a man laments: 'My business has failed; my wife has left me; I will renounce all and enter a monastery,' to what worldly sacrifice is he referring? He did not renounce wealth and love; they renounced him!"Saints like Gandhi, on the other hand, have made not only tangible material sacrifices, but also the more difficult renunciation of selfish motive and private goal, merging their inmost being in the stream of humanity as a whole. #Quote by Paramahansa Yogananda

#18. Ah! I wish I had the courage to work for the debasement of my contemporaries. What good work it would be to defile their daughters: to insinuate something obscene into the infantile hands which caress each paternal beard and cheek; to poison them, even at the risk of perishing ourselves; to do as those Spanish monks did, who drank death in order that they might persuade the French rabble which had violated their monastery to do likewise. #Quote by Remy De Gourmont

#19. A need to wander was in most Russians' blood, particularly the less well-off classes, and without positions, property, and status to fetter them, they would often pack a bundle of a few clothes and minimum food and set off on a week's, a a few clothes and minimum food and set off on a week's, a month's, a year's pilgrimage from monastery to town, or just traversing the vast empty spaces of their country, stopping as they chose, going where they willed. #Quote by Jane Oakley

#20. I think to be in a monastery or an ashram is not always the answer because we don't fight, we kick back. We don't listen to Sri Krishna. #Quote by Frederick Lenz

#21. I don't grudge them some bodily comforts. It cannot always be Lent. What I cannot stomach is hypocrisy, fraud, idleness - their worn-out relics, their threadbare worship, and their lack of invention. When did anything good last come from a monastery? They do not invent, they only repeat, and what they repeat is corrupt. For hundreds of years the monks have held the pen, and what they have written is what we take to be our history, but I do not believe it really is. I believe they have suppressed the history they don't like, and written one that is favorable to Rome. Henry appears to look straight through him, #Quote by Hilary Mantel

#22. She also asked him his views on marrige and monogamy given the imminent arrival of his second child with Suzanne. "I think marrying is for very very high minded people" he said. "It is a discipline of extreme severity. To really turn your back on all the other possibilities and all the other experiences of love,of passion,of ecstasy,and to determine to find it within one embrace is a high and righteous notion. Marriage today is the monastery,the monastery today is freedom. " he told Marion he had arrived "at a more realistic vision" of himself. There was no "high purpose" in his activities. "I'm just going" he said "so I don't have to stay still #Quote by Sylvie Simmons

#23. A witch, a Rider, a dragon, and a god walk into a monastery… There's got to be a good joke in there somewhere. #Quote by Deborah Blake

#24. And then I think we realized, like any young guys, that blues are not learned in a monastery. You've got to go out there and get your heart broke and then come back and then you can sing the blues. #Quote by Keith Richards

#25. The initial revelation of any monastery: everything is nothing. Thus begin all mysticisms. It is less than one step from nothing to God, for God is the positive expression of nothingness. #Quote by Emil Cioran

#26. When Abbess Ebba received tidings of the near approach of the pagan hordes, who had already wrecked vengeance upon ecclesiastics, monks, and consecrated virgins, she summoned her nuns to Chapter, and in a moving discourse exhorted them to preserve at any cost the treasure of their chastity. Then seizing a razor, and calling upon her daughters to follow her heroic example, she mutilated her face in order to inspire the barbarian invaders with horror at the sight. The nuns without exception courageously followed the example of their abbess. When the Danes broke into the cloister and saw the nuns with faces thus disfigured, they fled in panic. Their leaders, burning with rage, sent back some of their number to set fire to the monastery, and thus the heroic martyrs perished in the common ruin of their house. #Quote by Michael Barrett

#27. 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. #Quote by Dean Koontz

#28. In our own case, we don't consider the loss of a monastery or a monument the end of our entire way of life. If one monastery is destroyed, sometimes it happens. #Quote by Dalai Lama

#29. Love is sacrifice. Love sacrifices itself for its neighbor. #Quote by Thaddeus Of Vitovnica

#30. I shall always remember the next day for one of the most beautiful experiences I have ever had. As we marched forward we caught sight, after a while, of the gleaming golden towers of a monastery in the far distance. Above them, shining superbly in the morning sun, were tremendous walls of ice, and we gradually realised that we were looking at the giant trio Dhaulagiri, Annapurna and Manaslu. #Quote by Heinrich Harrer

#31. A clever Zen teacher might say that standing back and letting the monastery burn belies a kind of attachment to the idea of nonattachment, that trying to save it when it could all burn anyway is true nonattachment. In trying to save Tassajara from the fire - or your own life from disaster - you can't be sure you will. In fact, you can lose everything you love in a moment. And that's not a reason to give up. If anything, it's a reason to turn toward the fire, recognizing it as a force of both creation and destruction, and to take care of what's right in front of you, because that's all you actually have. #Quote by Colleen Morton Busch

#32. Joy is thankfulness, and when we are joyful, that is the best expression of thanks we can offer the Lord, Who delivers us from sorrow and sin. #Quote by Thaddeus Of Vitovnica

#33. When we take the one seat on our meditation cushion we become our own monastery. We create the compassionate space that allows for the arising of all things: sorrows, loneliness, shame, desire, regret, frustration, happiness. #Quote by Jack Kornfield

#34. Fatigue can make it hard to have faith. Too much busyness can make it hard to have faith. Too much of too little solitude can impact faith. For that matter, so can a bout of hunger or overwork, anything carried to an extreme. Faith thrives on routine. Look at any monastery and you will see that. Faith keeps on keeping on. #Quote by Julia Cameron

#35. He was a polite, thoughtful boy, who could spend hours in one spot, staring at the purple mountains against the clear blue sky, lost in his own thoughts and emotions. It was said of him that he had a monk's vocation, and that in Japan he would have been a novice in a Zen monastery. Although the Oomoto faith discouraged proselytizing, Takao surreptitiously preached his religion to Heideko and his children, but Ichimei was the only one who practiced it with fervor, because it fit in with his character and with the concept of life that he had had since childhood. #Quote by Isabel Allende

#36. Hadrian walked over to where the boys were fighting and sat on the grass near Denek to watch. Denek, who was only twelve years old, glanced at him curiously. "Who are you?"

"My name is Hadrian," he replied as he extended his hand. The boy shook it, squeezing harder than was necessary. "You're Denek, right? The Pickerings' third son? Perhaps you should speak with my friend Myron, seeing as how I hear you are monastery-bound."

"Am not!" he shouted. "Going to the monastery, I mean. I can fight as well as Fanen."

"I wouldn't be surprised," Hadrian said. "Fanen is flat-footed, and his balance is off. He's not going to improve much either, because Mauvin is teaching him, and Mauvin is favoring his right and rocks back on his left too much."

Denek grinned at Hadrian and then turned to his brothers. "Hadrian says you both fight like girls!"

"What's that?" Mauvin said, whacking aside Fanen's loose attack once more.

"Oh, ah, nothing," Hadrian said, trying to recant, and glared at Denek, who just kept grinning. "Thanks a lot," he told the boy. #Quote by Michael J. Sullivan

#37. Our life depends on the kind of thoughts we nurture. If our thoughts are peaceful, calm, meek, and kind, then that is what our life is like. If our attention is turned to the circumstances in which we live, we are drawn into a whirlpool of thoughts and can have neither peace nor tranquility. #Quote by Thaddeus Of Vitovnica

#38. Seeing that I would never manage to fall asleep, I arose, lit a candle, and after dressing went outside.

Beneath the dull glow of the winter moon the snow glowed like pale blue china. The sidewalks sparkled weakly beneath the rays of the flickering street lamps; the benumbed streets slumbered forlornly. I walked, passing one corner after the other, and suddenly found myself on the edge of town. Further, beyond the square, an endless expanse began to glisten with a somber silverness.

I stopped just before the gates. My intent gaze could distinguish nothing in the distant white expanse. Before me rose the imposing bank of the Volga like a gigantic snowdrift. So barren and uninviting was this deserted view resembling eternity that my heart contracted.

I turned to the right and approached quite close to the monastery enclosure. From behind the bronze gates, glimmered a dense net of crosses and gravestones. The ancient eyes of the church gazed forbiddingly down on me, and with an eerie feeling I thought of the monks sleeping at this moment in tomb-like cells together with corpses. Were any of them thinking of the hour of death on this night?

("Lamia") #Quote by Boris Sadovskoy

#39. AS IN THE REGIMENT HE HAD BEEN NOT MERELY AN IRREPROACHABLE OFFICER but had exceeded his duties, widened the borders of perfection, also as a monk he tried to be perfect, was always industrious, abstemious, submissive, meek, as well as pure both in deed and
in thought and obedient. If many of the demands of life in the monastery which was near the capital, much frequented, did not please him, and were temptations to him, they were all nullified by obedience #Quote by Leo Tolstoy

#40. Turn your car into a monastery. #Quote by Robert Barron

#41. Soon the Laughing Man has amassed the largest personal fortune in the world. Most of it he contributed anonymously to the monks of a local monastery- humble ascetics who had dedicated their lives to raising German police dogs. #Quote by J.D. Salinger