"Monastic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... days of Meiji the precincts of the Shiba San-en-zan Zo[u]jo[u]ji, now known more particularly as the most accessible of the burial places of the Tokugawa Sho[u]gun, were an excellent example of the old monastic establishments. The main temple with its wide grounds was completely girdled by a succession of halls or monastic foundations, some of which were famed through the land for their theological teaching of the principles of the Jo[u]do[u] sect. Conspicuous among these were ...
— Bakemono Yashiki (The Haunted House) - Tales of the Tokugawa, Volume 2 (of 2) • James S. De Benneville
... thing to comfort her, in this manner was she continually persecuted; and tho' it is impossible for any one to have less inclination to a monastic life than she had, yet the depression of her spirits, the firm belief she now should never see du Plessis more, the misfortune of her circumstances, joined to the artifices they made use of, and the repeated offers of accepting her without the usual sum paid on such occasions, ...
— The Fortunate Foundlings • Eliza Fowler Haywood
... distrust, almost contempt. "Change and decay in all around I see," is their key- note, rather than "O all ye works of the Lord, bless Him, praise Him, and magnify Him for ever." There lingers about them a savour of the old monastic theory, that this earth is the devil's planet, fallen, accursed, goblin-haunted, needing to be exorcised at every turn before it is useful or even safe for man. An age which has adopted as its most popular hymn a paraphrase of ...
— Westminster Sermons - with a Preface • Charles Kingsley
... been called the Captain Don Such a one, or the Lawyer Don So and So, or the Count Marquis, or Duke of Such a Place; but all were brother Diego, brother Jacinto, or brother Raimundo: all monks and friars, proceeding, that is to say, from the monastic orders." "These," he added, "are the orange-trees of heaven, whose fruits are placed on the table of God." Of evil-speakers Rodaja said, that they were like the feathers of the eagle which gnaw, wear away, and reduce to nothing, whatever feathers of other birds are mingled with them ...
— The Exemplary Novels of Cervantes • Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
... Christ came new ideas which caused new departures, not only in religious and monastic architecture, but in civil architecture, as well. Christianity, in proclaiming a new virtue, love, created retreats for the unfortunate, asylums for their reception and hospitals for their care. Monkish orders, in their efforts to prevent the destruction of old manuscripts, spread knowledge around ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, No. 733, January 11, 1890 • Various
... have wearied of the valiant spires of this County Town, Of its wide white streets and glistening museums, and black monastic walls, Of its red motors and lumbering trains, and self-sufficient people, I will take you walking with me to a place you have not seen - Half town and half country—the land of the Canal. It is dearer to me than the antique town: I love it more than the rounded hills: ...
— Forty-Two Poems • James Elroy Flecker
... be these: Luther at various times in his life gave three different years as the year of his birth, three different years as the year when he made his journey to Rome, and advised somebody in 1512 to become a monk when he had already commenced to denounce the monastic life: It is true that Luther did all these things, but it is also true that Luther believed himself right in each of his statements. He was simply mistaken. Other people have misstated the year of their birth without ...
— Luther Examined and Reexamined - A Review of Catholic Criticism and a Plea for Revaluation • W. H. T. Dau
... King Alfred had a monastic art school at Athelney, in which he had collected "monks of all kinds from every quarter." This accounts for the Greek type of work turned out at this time, and very likely for Italian influences in early British art. The king was active in craft work himself, for Asser ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... cut short; and women who, with an edifying renunciation of vanity, go along the street without wigs and without patches on their faces, with their hair simply knotted up; I see countesses dressed in inexpensive costumes, in simple, dark, monastic dresses, almost like those of the poor. The carriages are dark, like funeral cars, and the servants wear mourning livery. Carnival no longer enlivens the streets. Every one goes about ...
— Spontaneous Activity in Education • Maria Montessori
... England, it is merely re-asserting what many critics of Gothic architecture have already decided to be true. The cloisters of Gloucester are far richer, the space they cover at Wells (like Salisbury, not a monastic establishment) is greater, and in other details these may not be the finest. But, as a whole, their beautiful proportion and the general symmetry of their design make them worthy adjuncts to a building which is pre-eminent for these ...
— Bell's Cathedrals: The Cathedral Church of Salisbury - A Description of its Fabric and a Brief History of the See of Sarum • Gleeson White
... ago, to visit a celebrated monastic college in South Italy, where they educated, not ordinary mortals, but only young men of noble birth; and here I took particular care in inspecting the library, judging that, though the scholars need not learn all that was there, yet that no department of knowledge would be taught there that was ...
— Anahuac • Edward Burnett Tylor
... and beards, and a strange sight Of high, monumental hats, ta'en at the fight Of Eighty-eight; while every burgess foots The mortal pavement in eternal boots. Hadst thou been bachelor, I had soon divined Thy close retirements, and monastic mind; Perhaps some nymph had been to visit; or The beauteous churl was to be waited for, And, like the Greek, ere you the sport would miss, You stayed and stroked ...
— Specimens with Memoirs of the Less-known British Poets, Complete • George Gilfillan
... black, very modest and plain. The effect of her pale face in all this contrasting black was almost monastic. ...
— McTeague • Frank Norris
... of the philosophers of sages varied according to the character and knowledge of each; their relative acquaintance with the secrets of natural science, their intellectual and sectarian egotism, and their mystic or monastic tendencies, for there is a classic as well as a mediaeval monasticism. They end in losing the life of Greece in play upon words; but we owe to their early thought some of the soundest ethics, and the foundation of the best practical laws, yet known ...
— The Queen of the Air • John Ruskin
... experience; only through intuition could man come to true knowledge. This idea shows an element of meditative Buddhism along lines which the philosopher Lu Hsiang-shan (1139-1192) had first developed, while classical Neo-Confucianism was more an integration of monastic Buddhism into Confucianism. Lu had felt himself close to Wang An-shih (1021-1086), and this whole school, representing the small gentry of the Yangtze area, was called the Southern or the Lin-ch'uan school, Lin-ch'uan in Kiangsi being Wang An-shih's home. During the Mongol ...
— A history of China., [3d ed. rev. and enl.] • Wolfram Eberhard
... Guides'—the full title being 'The agency for supplying Brothers to brotherless girls, or those with unobliging brothers.' I resolved to call it shortly 'The Brothers' Agency.' It is a good name, and gives to the undertaking a kind of monastic flavour that I find is ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... of innocence, he dwelt longer than others. The house where he was born, in which a cultivated clergyman ruled as father; the ancient, linden-embowered monastery of Bergen on the Elbe, where a pious teacher kept up his patriarchal activity; Tuebingen, still monastic in its essential form; those simple Swiss dwellings about which the brooks murmured, which the lakes laved, and which the cliffs surrounded—everywhere he found another Delphi, everywhere the groves in which as a mature and cultivated youth he continued to revel even yet. There he ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. II • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... part of the Middle Ages, the desire for reform of the Church was constant. It was strongest and most apparent among laymen, for a famous monastic writer of the fourteenth century testified that the laity led better lives than the clergy. To the bulk of ordinary Christians reform meant morality in the priesthood. It became intolerable to them to see the Sacrament administered ...
— Lectures on Modern history • Baron John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
... teaching, so that in 1257 the troublesome monk was forbidden to lecture; all men were solemnly warned not to listen to his teaching, and he was ordered to Paris, to be kept under surveillance by the monastic authorities. Herein was exhibited another of the myriad examples showing the care exercised over scientific teaching by the Church. The reasons for thus dealing with Bacon were evident: First, he had dared attempt scientific explanations of natural phenomena, which under the mystic ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... the abolition of slavery; in her Truce of God; in her monastic orders; in her councils which united nations, and her edicts which ran without regard to political boundaries; in the low-born hands in which she placed a sign before which the proudest knelt; in her bishops who by consecration became the ...
— English Prose - A Series of Related Essays for the Discussion and Practice • Frederick William Roe (edit. and select.)
... illustrate at the same time various aspects of social life in the Middle Ages and various classes of historical material. Thus Bodo illustrates peasant life, and an early phase of a typical medieval estate; Marco Polo, Venetian trade with the East; Madame Eglentyne, monastic life; the Menagier's wife, domestic life in a middle-class home, and medieval ideas about women; Thomas Betson, the wool trade, and the activities of the great English trading company of Merchants of the Staple; and Thomas Paycocke, the ...
— Medieval People • Eileen Edna Power
... receive novices, and forcibly removed several bishops from their dioceses. The excesses were such that Pius IX. was obliged to recall his representative from Madrid. There were similar persecutions in the South American Republics and in Mexico. The congress of Mexico forbade monastic vows, banished the Archbishop of Mexico, and imprisoned the Bishop of Michoacan. Germany, at the same time, was not without its troubles. A learned theologian of the diocese of Cologne, Dr. Anthony Gunther, had allowed himself ...
— Pius IX. And His Time • The Rev. AEneas MacDonell
... and priest-ridden part of the people. On the other side, there was a small party of the more liberal minded, who supported the French, because they had abolished the Inquisition, and all the old monastic humbug with which the country had been cursed for so many ages. Joseph Buonaparte, who had been made King of Spain, but who had been obliged to retreat from Madrid, was now restored by Napoleon, who entered Spain at the head of the French army, defeated the Spaniards in many engagements, ...
— Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq. Volume 2 • Henry Hunt
... with equal pertinacity to the old common law; both of them reciprocally jealous of what they were unacquainted with, and neither of them perhaps allowing the opposite system that real merit which is abundantly to be found in each. This appears on the one hand from the spleen with which the monastic writers[e] speak of our municipal laws upon all occasions; and, on the other, from the firm temper which the nobility shewed at the famous parliament of Merton; when the prelates endeavoured to procure an act, to declare all bastards ...
— Commentaries on the Laws of England - Book the First • William Blackstone
... extinction of every other dynasty in the days of the Roman pornocracy, should survive, while the illustrious house of Henry I. sank away to ruin in the third and fourth generation; that John Hus should die at the stake and Jean Charlier de Gerson in timid monastic retirement, while Balthasar Cossa, by far their inferior in talents and learning, and every inch an infamous scoundrel, having for a time disgraced even the Roman see as John XXIII, ended his days as a Cardinal and Bishop of Tusculum and Dean of the Sacred ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... abundantly, and quotes Scripture, Matt. 19, 29: Every one that hath forsaken houses, etc. Accordingly, here, too, it claims perfection also for factitious religious rites. But this passage of Scripture in no way favors monastic life. For Christ does not mean that to forsake parents, wife, brethren, is a work that must be done because it merits the remission of sins and eternal life. Yea, such a forsaking is cursed. For if any one forsakes parents or wife ...
— The Apology of the Augsburg Confession • Philip Melanchthon
... counted it a worthy mortification of the flesh to till the ground. And be ready to refresh me without grinning, when I come back muddy from performing the labor to which I might send you, if I were a man who loved sinful ease. Monastic habits are above the understanding of a black ...
— Old Kaskaskia • Mary Hartwell Catherwood
... REWLE. A Treatise on the Rules and Duties of Monastic Life, in the Anglo-Saxon Dialect of the Thirteenth Century, addressed to a Society of Anchorites, being a translation from the Latin Work of Simon de Ghent, Bishop of Salisbury. To be edited from MSS. in the Cottonian Library, British Museum, with an Introduction, Glossarial Notes, ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 223, February 4, 1854 • Various
... basement were concealed by the brethren before they fled from the monastery, and the lower part of the shrine was reconstructed by the daughter of the sovereign to whom the devastation was due; to her also we owe the wooden top, which replaced the glorious golden feretory. The monastic community, who were restored to their home by the same {6} Queen, the "bloody" Mary of Protestant history, survived a few years longer into the days of Elizabeth, and the former intimate connection between the Crown and the convent, severed with the ...
— Westminster Abbey • Mrs. A. Murray Smith
... half his little merits has no claim, For very indolence has raised his name; Happy in this, that, under Satan's sway, His passions tremble, but will not obey. The vicar at the table's front presides, Whose presence a monastic life derides; The reverend wig, in sideway order placed, The reverend band, by rubric stains disgraced, The leering eye, in wayward circles roll'd, Mark him the pastor of a joyial fold, Whose various texts excite a loud applause, Favouring the bottle, ...
— Inebriety and the Candidate • George Crabbe
... reforms—at first, perhaps, in all simplicity—founding their opinions upon cramped and literal interpretations of divine precepts, and forming views of human nature "more practicable in a desert than a city, and rather suited to a monastic order than to a polished people." Still, these fanatics could scarcely have dreamed that power would ever be given them to carry their peculiar theories into practice, and to govern a nation as though it were composed entirely of precisians and bigots. For two generations—from ...
— A Book of the Play - Studies and Illustrations of Histrionic Story, Life, and Character • Dutton Cook
... rise up again, but the enemy reconciled is truly vanquished. In the moral philosophy of Kant the idea of duty is proposed with a harshness enough to ruffle the Graces, and one which could easily tempt a feeble mind to seek for moral perfection in the sombre paths of an ascetic and monastic life. Whatever precautions the great philosopher has been able to take in order to shelter himself against this false interpretation, which must be repugnant more than all else to the serenity of the free mind, he has lent it a strong impulse, it seems to me, ...
— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller
... care to her. Such being her disposition, it was by no means matter of joy to her when she found that Madeline was laying out for herself little ways of life, tending in some slight degree to the monastic. Nothing was said about it, but she fancied that Madeline had doffed a ribbon or two in her usual evening attire. That she read during certain fixed hours in the morning was very manifest. As to that daily afternoon service at four o'clock—she had very often attended that, and it was hardly ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... only the loss of his son, but still more the fact that he was cut off so suddenly in the full flush of careless and not altogether blameless youth. So poignant, indeed, were the old man's feelings that he cast off his knightly armour and joined one of the great monastic orders, vowing to devote all the remainder of his life to prayer, first for the soul of his son, and secondly that henceforward no descendant of his might ever again encounter what seemed to his simple and pious mind the terrible danger of meeting death unprepared. ...
— The Astral Plane - Its Scenery, Inhabitants and Phenomena • C. W. Leadbeater
... in Egypt were beginning to follow the custom of their Egyptian brethren, to take upon themselves monastic vows, and to shut themselves up in the temples in religious idleness. But these foreigners were looked upon with jealousy by the Egyptian monks as intruders on their endowments, and we meet with a petition addressed to Philometor by Ptolemy, the son of Glaucias, a monk ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... it was a retirement from the vexing world, a recreant forsaking of the active duties of life, as if it consisted in immunity from temptation rather than in victory over it. Others have placed it in surpliced observance or in monastic vow; an equivocal regard to patterns of things in the heavens which common men mistake for idolatry. Others again, reversing the old Pythagorean maxim, and wearing the image of God upon their ring, have expressed it by unworthy familiarity, a continual adverting ...
— The Wesleyan Methodist Pulpit in Malvern • Knowles King
... our modern culture. Their flight from the life of traffic and bustle in the larger towns was by no means a flight from the beauties of Nature.' The last statement is only partly true. In the prime of the monastic era the beauties of Nature were held to be a snare of the devil. Still, in choosing a site, beauty of position was constantly referred to as an auxiliary motive. 'Bernhard loved the valley,' 'but Bernhard chose ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... brought with him from Rome, together with those of Theodore, formed the nucleus of the well-known monastic library at Canterbury. In the library at Peterborough there were no fewer than 1700 MSS. That of the Grey Friars in London was 129 feet long by 31 feet broad, and was well filled with books. That the Abbey of Leicester and the Priory of ...
— Studies from Court and Cloister • J.M. Stone
... of the country women. Her features had the delicacy of an aristocratic and well cared for nun, the pale texture of milk and roses, lightened by the luminous reflection of her teeth and the timid glow of her eyes, under a kerchief resembling a monastic head-dress. ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... toward the monastery and sent his son to be educated there, and when he himself fell sick and believed his last hours to be nigh he caused himself to be carried to this religious house, where his hair was shaven to the monastic pattern. Contrary to expectation, he recovered, and after settling his affairs at his castle he returned to Redon, where he died at a later date. St Convoyon had some difficulty in obtaining confirmation of the grants given to him by this seigneur. He set out with a disciple named Gwindeluc ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... rest—to pray;[15] Where visionary nuns yet seem to tread, A pale dim troop, the cloisters of the dead, Though twice three hundred years have flown away! But when, with silent step and pensive mien, In weeds, as mourning for her sisters gone, The mistress of this lone monastic scene Came; and I heard her voice's tender tone, I said, Though centuries have rolled between, One gentle, beauteous nun is left, on ...
— The Poetical Works of William Lisle Bowles, Vol. 1 • William Lisle Bowles
... which were very like the doctrines of the Pythagoreans. They carried the pharisaic demand for separateness to the extreme of asceticism. While they were found in nearly every town in Palestine, some of them even practising marriage, the largest group of them lived a celibate, monastic life near the shores of the Dead Sea. This community was recruited by the initiation of converts, who only after a novitiate of three years were admitted to full membership in the order. They were characterized by an extreme scrupulousness concerning ceremonial ...
— The Life of Jesus of Nazareth • Rush Rhees
... was appointed to entertain the strangers. He led them to points on the mountain where the view was most enchanting; skilled in ancient monastic lore, he entertained them with anecdotes and histories from which he drew the most instructive morals. One cheerful afternoon, when seated on the rocks viewing a magnificent sunset, the aged monk told them his own history. He had been a soldier of fortune. In youth his ambition ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... love books, I love computers, too. Computers are fundamentally different from modern books in the same way that printed books are different from monastic Bibles: they are malleable. Time was, a "book" was something produced by many months' labor by a scribe, usually a monk, on some kind of durable and sexy substrate like foetal lambskin. [ILLUMINATED BIBLE] Gutenberg's xerox machine ...
— Ebooks: Neither E, Nor Books • Cory Doctorow
... ever in the hearts of his friends the truths he had taught in his life. This was especially the case with the younger alumni in the colleges, and the less ignorant and dissolute inmates of the priory and other monastic establishments in the city. As at a later period it was felt certain that a stern Covenanter had been detected when a suspected one refused to own that the killing of Archbishop Sharp was to be ...
— The Scottish Reformation - Its Epochs, Episodes, Leaders, and Distinctive Characteristics • Alexander F. Mitchell
... the true scale of values,—here was a man who by his experience and example proved that personal holiness of life is not incompatible with personal attention to every detail of human affairs. Jesus did not isolate Himself in a monastic cell in order to live the life of the spirit. He practically taught that the very supreme test of the life of the spirit is to live it in the heart of human activities. It is in the resistless tide of daily affairs,—in the office of the lawyer, the journalist, the physician, the architect; ...
— The Life Radiant • Lilian Whiting
... didactic composition ought to take. As in ancient Greece the dialogue reflected most truly the intellectual life of the people, and as in the Middle Ages learned literature naturally assumed with the recluse in his monastic cell the form of a long monologue, so with us the lecture places the writer most readily in that position in which he is accustomed to deal with his fellow-men, and to communicate his knowledge to others. It has no doubt certain disadvantages. In ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... modernised, but on the south side fronting the gardens they are still picturesque. Both Colleges were, originally, places of residence for the students, as at Oxford and Cambridge, and the discipline, especially at St. Leonard's, was rather monastic. The Reformation caused violent changes; all through these troubled ages the new doctrines, and then the violent Presbyterian pretensions to clerical influence in politics, and the Covenant and the Restoration and Revolution, kept ...
— Robert F. Murray - his poems with a memoir by Andrew Lang • Robert F. Murray
... principle of the variously arranged coats of the human stomach,—and the principle of Oliver Cromwell's "fluted pot." There have been elaborate treatises written on those ornate flooring-tiles of the classical and middle ages, that are occasionally dug up by the antiquary amid monastic ruins, or on the sites of old Roman stations. But did any of them ever tell a story half so instructive or so strange as that told by the incalculably more ancient ganoid tiles of the Palaeozoic ...
— The Cruise of the Betsey • Hugh Miller
... forbidden by the rites of the Order; at the close of his life, however, he took the Templars' habit as an associate, and was buried here in 1227. On the opposite side is a Purbeck marble sarcophagus, said to be that of Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine, but her effigy is at Fontevrault, where the monastic annals prove that she took the veil after the murder of Prince Arthur. Henry II. left five hundred marks by his will for his burial in the Temple Church, but was also buried at Fontevrault. Gough considers that the tomb here ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume I. - Great Britain and Ireland • Various
... were Athanasius (d. 373), to whom is attributed the formulation of the creed of the Orthodox Church as opposed to the Arians, against whom he waged unremitting war; Basil (d. 379), the promoter of the monastic life; Ambrose, Bishop of Milan (d. 397); Jerome (d. 420), who prepared a new Latin version of the Scriptures, which became the standard (Vulgate) edition; and, above all, Augustine (354-430), whose voluminous writings have exercised ...
— An Introduction to the History of Western Europe • James Harvey Robinson
... coffers to the poor and needy, and dispenses the accumulated store with a liberal hand! The voluptuary, too, is snatched from the pleasures of the table; ambition flies at my command to the wholesome discipline of the monastic cell; while female frailty, tottering on the brink of ruin, with one ear open to the siren voice of the seducer and the other to my saintly correctives, is restored to domestic happiness and the approving smile of heaven, by the ...
— The Best of the World's Classics, Restricted to Prose, Vol. VII (of X)—Continental Europe I • Various
... been formed. Fragments of old tiles were also frequently found, and are still sometimes turned up. No trace even of the "Abbey house" is left; it was purchased in 1809 by a stock-broker, who in the following year sold the materials—and so ends the great monastic history of Chertsey. Where are now its spiritualities in Surrey?—its temporalities in Berkshire and Hampshire?—its revenues of Stanwell, and rents of assize?—its spiritualities in Cardiganshire? Alas! they have left no sign, except on the yellow ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... Winkel, schoolmaster of Goude; and the fortune left him was amply sufficient for his support, if his executors had faithfully discharged their trust Although he was fit for the university, his guardians were averse to sending him there, as they designed him for a monastic life, and therefore removed him to Bois-le-duc, where, he says, he lost near three years, living in a Franciscan convent The professor of humanity in this convent, admiring his rising genius, daily importuned ...
— In Praise of Folly - Illustrated with Many Curious Cuts • Desiderius Erasmus
... scene in the life of Christ, the Marriage at Cana, is of course introduced incidentally; but even here, such were the monastic principles and prejudices, that I find it difficult to point out any very early example. In the "Manual of Greek Art," published by Didron, the rules for the representation are thus laid down:—"A ...
— Legends of the Madonna • Mrs. Jameson
... the sound, and looking upon a little bay, a cluster of monastic cells marked the northern limits of the Christian church. From this outpost it had for the time receded, and all save two of the rude stone dwellings looked deserted and forlorn. A thin thread of smoke rose straight heavenward in the still air, and before the entrance of the cell whence it ...
— Vandrad the Viking - The Feud and the Spell • J. Storer Clouston
... appears, a numerous body, consisting of several thousand members, who are said to perform or superintend the administration of 300 hospitals in France. They are united under several denominations, as nuns of those monastic communities which escaped the storms of the revolution. Many of them are in the prime of life, and though not bound by absolute vows, devote the whole of their time, and even die in the act of doing good. In spiritual matters, they are under the jurisdiction of the bishop of the ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Vol. 14, Issue 383, August 1, 1829 • Various
... before Brigaut's arrival Sylvie had come suddenly upon Gouraud and Pierrette talking together. Instantly, jealousy rushed into her heart with monastic violence. Jealousy, eminently credulous and suspicious, is the passion in which fancy has most freedom, but for all that it does not give a person intelligence; on the contrary, it hinders them from having any; and in Sylvie's case jealousy only filled ...
— The Celibates - Includes: Pierrette, The Vicar of Tours, and The Two Brothers • Honore de Balzac
... cheer, and not think only of ourselves, but much rather of Him who works on and in and for us. If we lift up our hearts to Him, and keep ourselves near Him, and let Him work, He will work. If we do not—like the demons in the old monastic stories, who every night pulled down the bit of walling that the monks had in the daytime built for their new monastery—by our own hands pull down what He, by His hand, has built up, the structure will rise, and we shall be 'builded together for a habitation of God through the ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... their servants to the village square, not only to find out the hour but to learn of the sun, moon, stars, and the religious feasts and fasts. For, you see, the majority of the clocks were put up by the clergy for the purpose not only of regulating their own monastic life, but to prod worshipers to remember the masses and prescribed ...
— Christopher and the Clockmakers • Sara Ware Bassett
... changing. She had become religious; so much I knew from my sister's letters. And, in fact, this change had been due to her intercourse with my mother. But, in reality, her premature disgust with the world would, at any rate, have made her such; and, had any mode of monastic life existed for Protestants, I believe that she would before this have entered it, supposing Lord Carbery to have consented. People generally would have stated the case most erroneously; they would have said that she was sinking into gloom under religious influences; whereas ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... man find more everlasting foundation than in the seeming injustice of God?" Strange that the man who has written these words should have spent all his school life at a Jesuit college, subjected to its severe, semi-monastic discipline; compelled, at the end of his stay, to go, with the rest of his fellows, through the customary period of "retreat," lasting ten days, when the most eloquent of the fathers would, one after the other, deliver sermons ...
— Wisdom and Destiny • Maurice Maeterlinck
... measure, but in all these things nothing at all of Christ, faith, and the commandments of God. Lastly, it is nothing else than the devil himself, because above and against God he urges [and disseminates] his [papal] falsehoods concerning masses, purgatory, the monastic life, one's own works and [fictitious] divine worship (for this is the very Papacy [upon each of which the Papacy is altogether founded and is standing]), and condemns, murders and tortures all Christians who do ...
— The Smalcald Articles • Martin Luther
... which threatens civilisation, have suggested the formation of a society for mutual encouragement in the higher life. Mr. Wells developed this idea in his 'Modern Utopia.' He contemplated a brotherhood, like the Japanese Samurai, living by a Rule, a kind of lay monastic order, who should endeavour to live in a perfectly rational and wholesome manner, so as to be the nucleus of whatever was best in the society of the time. The scheme is interesting to a Platonist, because of its resemblance to the Order of ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... drawing-room was a bank holiday compared with the Walkingshaws'. Not too much gas was burned, or too much coal, since money is not made and well-born wives secured by waste of fuel. That leads to mere cheerfulness. The monastic atmosphere was completed by the Victorian upholstery and the hushed voices of the four ladies, so that even the young soldier instinctively trod more like a burglar than a Cromarty Highlander as he advanced towards one of the groups ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... Monastic life was one of the features of Mexico at that time. Most cities, large and small, were full of churches, monasteries, and convents; and Madame Calderon (who became a Catholic three years later) was not then well acquainted with the ceremonies and liturgy of the Church, and consequently falls into ...
— Life in Mexico • Frances Calderon De La Barca
... him in the habit of a monk, and carries him, assisted by her lover, to the entrance of a convent. When he awakes and sees himself thus transformed he imagines that God by a miraculous exercise of His grace had called him to the monastic life. He presents himself before the abbot and requests to be received among the brethren. The lady hastens to the convent in well-feigned despair, and is exhorted to be resigned and to congratulate her husband on the saintly vow he has ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 2 • Richard F. Burton
... interest, for he was a rare phenomenon—the fruit of a system persistently and uninterruptedly applied. He struck me, in a fashion, as certain young monks I had seen in Italy; he had the same candid, unsophisticated cloister face. His education had been really almost monastic. It had found him evidently a very compliant, yielding subject; his gentle affectionate spirit was not one of those that need to be broken. It had bequeathed him, now that he stood on the threshold of the great world, an extraordinary freshness of impression and alertness of desire, and I confess ...
— Eugene Pickering • Henry James
... then forswear him; now weep for him, then spit at him; that I drave my suitor from his mad humour of love to a living humour of madness; which was, to forswear the full stream of the world and to live in a nook merely monastic. And thus I cured him; and this way will I take upon me to wash your liver as clean as a sound sheep's heart, that there shall not be one spot ...
— As You Like It • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... Dauphins, and tossed into the costly whirl to float as best they can—on nothing. Then, on the lives and deaths that follow; on the graves where a dishonored alien lies forgotten by the dark Austrian lakeside, or under the monastic shadow of some crumbling Spanish crypt; where a red cross chills the lonely traveler in the virgin solitudes of Amazonian forest aisles, or the wild scarlet creepers of Australia trail over a nameless mound above the trackless stretch of sun-warmed ...
— Under Two Flags • Ouida [Louise de la Ramee]
... quaint or tragic: Dunfermline, in whose royal towers the king may be still observed (in the ballad) drinking the blood-red wine; somnolent Inverkeithing, once the quarantine of Leith; Aberdour, hard by the monastic islet of Inchcolm, hard by Donibristle where the "bonny face was spoiled": Burntisland, where, when Paul Jones was off the coast, the Reverend Mr. Shirra had a table carried between tide-marks, and publicly prayed against the rover at the pitch of his voice and his broad lowland ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 16 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... the Augustinian Priory of Guisborough is standing to-day, it is sufficiently imposing to convey a powerful impression of the former size and magnificence of the monastic church. This fragment is the gracefully buttressed east-end of the choir, which rises from the level meadow-land to the east of the town. The stonework is now of a greenish-grey tone, but in the shadows ...
— Yorkshire Painted And Described • Gordon Home
... exactly like the feeling of an underground room where paper moulders and leaves the wall, a feeling of ineradicable contagion in the Gothic buildings, in the narrow ditch-like rivers, in those roads and roads of stuffy little villas. Those little villas have destroyed all the good of the old monastic system and none of ...
— The New Machiavelli • Herbert George Wells
... of the Human Healer being radically a sacred one and connected with the highest priesthoods, or rather being itself the outcome and acme of all priesthoods, and divinest conquests of intellect here below. As will appear one day, when men take off their old monastic and ecclesiastic spectacles, and look with eyes again! In essence the Physician's task is always heroic, eminently human: but in practice most unluckily at present we find it too become in good part beaverish; yielding a money-result alone. And what of it is not beaverish,—does ...
— Latter-Day Pamphlets • Thomas Carlyle
... Mrs. Jameson, in her Legends of the Monastic Orders, has left unnoticed the very remarkable book of the Conformity of St. Francis's Life with that of Jesus Christ, a work, the blasphemy of which is only equalled ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 78, April 26, 1851 • Various
... educated a Franciscan friar, and, on Easter day, 1730, ordained a priest by the Archbishop of Treves, and subsequently preferred to the post of superior in the convent of the Recollects at Montreal. But, disgusted with monastic life, M. Houdin, at the commencement of the French war, left Canada and retired to the city of New York. Here, on Easter day, 1747, he made a public renunciation of Popery, and joined the Church of England. Attaining great proficiency in the ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 3, No. 1 January 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... its interior, I of course cannot be expected to know much of its economy. I could not, however, fall to be struck with the order, neatness, and system which pervaded it. There was, however, an air of severe monastic discipline, though I am far from asserting that such actually existed. We were attended throughout by the sub-rector, the principal being absent. Of all the curiosities of this college, the most remarkable is the picture gallery, which contains neither more ...
— The Bible in Spain • George Borrow
... costume was totally different in character and detail from any such as are worn by the various religious fraternities of the Greek, Roman, or Armenian faith, and one especial feature of their outward appearance served as a distinctly marked sign of their severance from all known monastic orders—this was the absence of the disfiguring tonsure. They were all fine-looking men seemingly in the prime of life, and they intoned the Magnificat not drowsily or droningly, but with a rich tunefulness and warmth of utterance that stirred to a faint surprise ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... Exactly when or how the first little centre of learning was established in the town is still a matter of uncertainty, but there seems to have been some strong influence emanating from the Continent in the twelfth century which encouraged the idea of establishing monastic schools. Cambridge in quite early times began to be sprinkled with small colonies of canons and friars, and in these religious hostels the young monks from the surrounding abbeys were educated. Mr. A.H. Thompson, in his Cambridge and ...
— Beautiful Britain—Cambridge • Gordon Home
... in the Calvinist and the Arminian, must triumph. The Catholic system will perhaps, last the longest; and bids fair to continue as a political establishment, when all its professors shall laugh at its absurdity. Destroy its monastic orders, and marry the priests, and the rest is a pretty puppet-show, with the idols, and the incense, and the polytheism, and the pomp of paganism. ...
— Reminiscences of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey • Joseph Cottle
... their origin prior to Christianity, yield all their sweetness only in a Christian atmosphere. What is characteristic in them is the strange suggestion of a deliberate choice between Christ and a rival lover. That religion, monastic religion at any rate, has its sensuous side, a dangerously sensuous side, has been often seen: it is the experience of Rousseau as well as of the Christian mystics. The Christianity of the Middle Age made way ...
— Aesthetic Poetry • Walter Horatio Pater
... petitions seem scarcely worthy of serious consideration; but a closer study of their contents shows us that we possess in them documents of the greatest value in the history of manners. They prove that the great Monastic Idea—which under the influence of Christianity grew to be of such vast moral and historical significance—first struck root in one of the centres of heathen religious practices; besides affording us a quite unexpected insight into the internal life of the temple of ...
— Uarda • Georg Ebers
... world be warned. Deceiving prophets, emissaries of the devil, would be active, some alluring people into the deserts, and impelling them to hermit lives of pernicious asceticism, others insisting that Christ could be found in the secret chambers of monastic seclusion; and some of them showing forth through the power of Satan, such signs and wonders as "to seduce, if it were possible, even the elect"; but of all such scheming of the prince of evil, the Lord admonished ...
— Jesus the Christ - A Study of the Messiah and His Mission According to Holy - Scriptures Both Ancient and Modern • James Edward Talmage
... had been ruthlessly destroyed by military force, while a quarrel over ownership and rents was still pending in the courts. The Captain-General at the time was Valeriano Weyler, the pitiless instrument of the reactionary forces manipulated by the monastic orders, he who was later sent to Cuba to introduce there the repressive measures which had apparently been so efficacious in the Philippines, thus to bring on the interference of the United States to end Spain's colonial power—all of which induces the reflection that there ...
— The Social Cancer - A Complete English Version of Noli Me Tangere • Jose Rizal
... in crowds to the East returned at the close of the fourth century to found similar retreats in the isles which line the coasts of the Mediterranean. The sea took the place of the desert, but the type of monastic life which the solitaries had found in Egypt was faithfully preserved. The Abbot of Lerins was simply the chief of some thousands of religious devotees, scattered over the island in solitary cells, and linked together by the common ties of obedience and prayer. By a curious concurrence ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... Villon showed such intimate acquaintance with certain physical peculiarities or whimsical adventures private to each damsel that she believed the speaker's knowledge to be little less than supernatural. Literature of the skittish sort must deplore the monastic reticence, but history can do no more than accept it and leave imagination to fill in the blank as best ...
— If I Were King • Justin Huntly McCarthy
... more than one wife. I would not forbid it to-day, albeit I would not advise it.... Yet neither would I condemn it." Other opinions on the nature of the sexual relation were equally broad; for in one of his writings on monastic celibacy his words plainly indicate his belief that chastity, no more than other fleshly mortifications, was to be considered a divine ordinance for all men or women. In an address to the clergy ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... cannot escape from a certain degree of human sympathy with the dread tumults going on in that vast theatre—a conscience-haunted mind. So far he stands on common ground; but how this mode of shedding terror can borrow any alliance from chapels, from ruins, from monastic piles, from Inquisition dungeons, inscrutable to human justice, or dread of confessionals,—all this is unfathomably mysterious to Southern Europe. The Southern imagination is passively and abjectly dependent on social interests; and these ...
— Theological Essays and Other Papers v2 • Thomas de Quincey
... Hilaire, in his book on Buddha, gives an account of the Buddhist monasteries which is worthy perusal. From Egypt the contagion of asceticism spread over Christendom. "From Philo also we learn that a large body of Egyptian Jews had embraced the monastic rules and the life of self-denial, which we have already noted among the Egyptian priests. They bore the name of Therapeuts. They spent their time in solitary meditation and prayer, and only saw one another ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... captain's stateroom. It had an austere, almost monastic appearance. An iron bedstead, a worktable, some washstand fixtures. Subdued lighting. No luxuries. Just ...
— 20000 Leagues Under the Seas • Jules Verne
... Catholics make. But it can only be upheld by writing history in the spirit of an advocate, or by giving a preference, not in accordance with modern ethical views, to certain types of character which are produced by the monastic life of the Catholic 'religious,' It is increasingly difficult to find, in the lives of those who belong to any one denomination, proofs of marked superiority over other Christians. Of course, we know little of the real character of our neighbours as they appear in ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... the rounds slowly and reverently; and then, when I supposed our inspection was over, and was turning to take my leave, he opened a door I had not noticed, and showed me into a slit of a room beyond. It was a mere monastic cell, scarcely large enough for his narrow iron bed and the chest which probably held his few clothes; but there, in a niche of the bare wall, facing the foot of the ...
— Tales Of Men And Ghosts • Edith Wharton
... suddenly burst out laughing, but immediately caught himself up, and making a straight, low, monastic obeisance, he added:—"Will not you contribute something for the journey? For I am going to the monastery ...
— A Reckless Character - And Other Stories • Ivan Turgenev
... archway, and a lateral passage beneath it, both decorated with numerous ornamental mouldings and columns, flanked at the angles by octagonal turrets of surpassing elegance. An apartment over the arch, which, during the reign of monastic power, had been used as a small oratory, for the celebration of early mass to the servants and labourers of the convent, was now appropriated to the accommodation of the porter and ...
— The Buccaneer - A Tale • Mrs. S. C. Hall
... gave a certain air of distinction to this picture of simplicity, but everything in it, down to the round table littered with stray papers, and the very pens on the writing-desk, gave the idea of an almost monastic life—a life so wholly filled with thought and feeling of a wider kind that outward surroundings had come to be matters of no moment. An open door allowed the commandant to see the smaller room, which doubtless the doctor seldom occupied. It ...
— The Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... particularly in that age and country; and the permission to publish the poem, and its reception among the classics of Italy, prove that it neither was nor is so interpreted. That he intended to ridicule the monastic life, and suffered his imagination to play with the simple dulness of his converted giant, seems evident enough; but surely it were as unjust to accuse him of irreligion on this account, as to denounce Fielding for his Parson Adams, Barnabas,[334] Thwackum, ...
— The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 4 • Lord Byron
... perfecting which might yet await it, in the many revolutions of its existence. In the midst of that aesthetically [58] so brilliant world of Greater Greece, as if anticipating Plato, he has, like the philosophic kings of the Platonic Republic, already something of the monk, of monastic ascesis, about him. Its purpose is to fit him for, duly to refine his nature towards, that closer vision of truth to which perchance he may be even now upon his way. The secrecy again, that characteristic silence ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... of his just and upright Christian rule, St. Comgan was obliged to fly the country, and together with his widowed sister, who had been married to an Irish prince, took refuge in Scotland. St. Comgan devoted himself to monastic life, and {3} Kentigerna retired to an island in Loch Lomond to live as an anchoress. Here in her solitary cell, on the hilly, wooded isle which is now called in memory of her Innis na Caillich (the Nun's Island), she spent many years of the remainder ...
— A Calendar of Scottish Saints • Michael Barrett
... 'Astron. Nachr.', 1843, No. 498. While the comet of 837 (which, according to Du Sejour, continued during twenty-four hours within a distance of 2,000,000 miles from the Earth) terrified Louis I. of France to that degree that he busied himself in building churches and founding monastic establishments, in the hope of appeasing the evils threatened by its appearance, the Chinese astronomers made observations on the path of this cosmical body, whose tail extended over a space of 60 degrees, appearing sometimes single and sometimes multiple. ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... but she, no more than the boy down below, could tell me the name of the strange-looking hill across the valley. This second Spytty or monastic hospital, which I had come to, looked in every respect an inferior place to the first. Whatever its former state might have been, nothing but dirt and wretchedness were now visible. Having reached the top of the hill I entered upon a wild ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... at the age of twenty, though well provided for in a worldly point of view, to retire to the cloister; he professed himself accordingly a brother of the monastery of S. Domenico at Fiesole in 1407, assuming his monastic name from the Apostle of love, S. John. He acquired from his residence there the distinguishing surname 'da Fiesole;' and a calmer retreat for one weary of earth and desirous of commerce with heaven would in vain be sought for;—the purity of the atmosphere, the freshness of the morning ...
— On the Old Road Vol. 1 (of 2) - A Collection of Miscellaneous Essays and Articles on Art and Literature • John Ruskin
... attested by his encouragement of the learned, by the foundation of schools, and by his patronage of the arts of music and painting, gave a great impulse to the practice of illumination: and the Benedictines, whose influence extended throughout Europe, assigned an eminent rank among monastic virtues to the guardianship and reproduction of valuable manuscripts. In each Benedictine monastery a chamber was set apart for this sacred purpose, and Charlemagne assigned to Alcuin, a member of their order, the important ...
— International Weekly Miscellany Vol. I. No. 3, July 15, 1850 • Various
... Cardinal d'Herouville, his great-uncle, a passionate lover of the works of printing, had there collected a library as interesting for the number as for the beauty of its volumes, and prudence had caused him to build into the walls one of those curious inventions suggested by solitude or by monastic fears. A silver chain set in motion, by means of invisible wires, a bell placed at the bed's head of a faithful servitor. The count now pulled the chain, and the boots and spurs of the man on duty sounded on the stone steps of a spiral staircase, placed in the tall tower which flanked the western ...
— The Hated Son • Honore de Balzac
... fourteenth century the monastic system was still in its full vigor, the power of the religious orders and brotherhoods was revered by the people, and the hierarchy was still formidable to the temporal power. It was, therefore, in the natural constitution of society that bigoted zeal, which in such times ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... have another ancient Catalogue of a monastic library equally curious, and even more important from its magnitude, and the numerous works it contains on English history, early ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 6. Saturday, December 8, 1849 • Various
... The monastic work inquired after is noticed by another Correspondent at p. 569. of the ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 215, December 10, 1853 • Various
... that revealed itself stood with an impressive dignity among its stern and blackish woods. The long, plain front suggested a monastic origin; and there was indeed what looked like a ruined chapel at one end. Its whole aspect was dilapidated and forlorn; and yet it seemed to have grown into the landscape, and to be so deeply rooted in it that one could not imagine ...
— The Case of Richard Meynell • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... age. For Voltaire corresponded with all Europe. His reputation, already vast before he settled at Ferney, rose after that date to a well-nigh incredible height. No man had wielded such an influence since the days when Bernard of Clairvaux dictated the conduct of popes and princes from his monastic cell. But, since then, the wheel had indeed come full circle! The very antithesis of the Middle Ages was personified in the strange old creature who in his lordly retreat by the Lake of Geneva alternately coquetted with empresses, received the homage of statesmen and philosophers, domineered over ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... was another son of this extraordinary woman, and he bought the Welbeck estate, towards the end of the sixteenth century, from two or three men of obscurity to whom it had passed, after Henry the Eighth had ordered the monastic establishment at the Abbey to be dissolved. His son became Baron Ogle and Viscount Mansfield, and subsequently Earl, Marquis and Duke ...
— The Portland Peerage Romance • Charles J. Archard
... putting the past history of England into dramatic form may possibly have suggested to him to put more recent history on the stage by means of this Comedy. Light as it is, the point of it is to satirize the monastic and exclusive element in current educational schemes. Fictitious as the story is, it touches upon names and incidents belonging to actual history. So familiar were these actual happenings of the day to his audience that it could especially ...
— Shakespeare Study Programs; The Comedies • Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke
... not of the generally understood ascetic or monastic type, yet his spirit and deeds are of the very essence ...
— The War Romance of the Salvation Army • Evangeline Booth and Grace Livingston Hill
... organization and venerable tradition of the Roman Catholic Church. We are only in the very beginning of a great Roman Catholic revival. The diversified countryside of the coming time will show many a splendid cathedral, many an elaborate monastic palace, towering amidst the abounding colleges and technical schools. Along the moving platforms of the urban centre, and athwart the shining advertisements that will adorn them, will go the ceremonial procession, ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells
... in an academy of painting, and, paying all his debts, retired to a lonely cloister, where he soon afterwards took the vows. There he amazed every one by the strictness of his life, and his untiring observance of all the monastic rules. The prior of the monastery, hearing of his skill in painting, ordered him to paint the principal picture in the church. But the humble brother said plainly that he was unworthy to touch a brush, that his was contaminated, that with toil and great sacrifice must he first purify his ...
— Taras Bulba and Other Tales • Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol
... steps toward the residence of M. des Rameures, of which he at last obtained correct information. He took the same road as the preceding evening, passed the monastic-looking building that held Madame de Tecle, glanced at the old oak that had served him for an observatory, and about a mile farther on he discovered the small house with towers ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... I was, to study the authorities; and, imbued with the strict necessity of judging for myself, I turned from the limpid pages of the modern historians to the notes and authorities at the bottom of the page. These, of course, sent me back to my monastic acquaintances, and I again found myself in such congenial company to a youthful and ardent mind as Florence of Worcester and Simeon of Durham, the Venerable Bede and Matthew Paris; and so on to Gregory and Fredegarius, down to the more modern and ...
— Memoir of John Lothrop Motley, Complete • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... as a contribution to the social history of the thirteenth century, is the next work; and for which the Camden Members are indebted to the learned Vicar of Holbeach, The Rev. James Morton. The Ancren Riwle; a Treatise on the Rules and Duties of Monastic Life, which he has edited and translated from a Semi-Saxon MS. of the thirteenth century, is a work which many of our best scholars have long desired to see in print,—we believe we may add, that many have thought seriously of editing. The information to be derived ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 216, December 17, 1853 • Various
... were mainly the authors) has so little good to say of any of them, Edward the First only excepted. It is not easy to say why the exception was made, unless it were because he was too firmly rooted in popular admiration, and perhaps a little too munificent to the monastic Orders, for much evil to be discreetly said of him. Coeur-de-Lion was a Gallio who cared for none of those things: Henry the Third played into the hands of the Pope to-day, and of the Anglican Church to-morrow. Edward ...
— Earl Hubert's Daughter - The Polishing of the Pearl - A Tale of the 13th Century • Emily Sarah Holt |
