"Monastic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... explain that this young man, Alyosha, was not a fanatic, and, in my opinion at least, was not even a mystic. I may as well give my full opinion from the beginning. He was simply an early lover of humanity, and that he adopted the monastic life was simply because at that time it struck him, so to say, as the ideal escape for his soul struggling from the darkness of worldly wickedness to the light of love. And the reason this life struck him in this way was that he found in ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... a green fringe adorned the two windows. The scrupulous cleanliness maintained by Jacquotte 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 Country Doctor • Honore de Balzac
... found himself in the street with a woman. Seldom, indeed, was he abroad with a companion, except as he took the walk prescribed in the monastic regime with his friend, Maurice Wynne. For the most part he went his way alone, occupied in pious contemplation, shutting himself stubbornly in from outward sights and sounds. Now he was confused and unsettled. Since a fire had ...
— The Puritans • Arlo Bates
... once noble monastic pile, is a portal, or west entrance; a rich ornamented lofty arch, sixty feet high, which formed the east end of the church, supposed to have been erected in the time of Henry the Seventh; the refectory, seventy-eight feet long and twenty-seven broad, and the walls twenty-six ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 17, - Issue 493, June 11, 1831 • Various
... young father mentioned, who shows the place to English-speaking travelers, and will care to know that Padre Giacomo was born at Smyrna, and dwelt there in the family of an English lady, till he came to Venice, and entered on his monastic ...
— Venetian Life • W. D. Howells
... of popery, and especially that form and development of it exhibited in the monastic orders, be ever written, this work will be of the greatest importance:—it will show the means by which dominion was obtained over the minds of the ignorant; how the most sacred mysteries were perverted; and frauds, which can hardly be termed pious, used to support institutions ...
— The Phantom World - or, The philosophy of spirits, apparitions, &c, &c. • Augustin Calmet
... dear good girl, and the darling of her brother's heart. Her orphan state seems to press painfully upon her young mind. She seldom smiles, and I can never induce her to go into company. But we must try and break her of these monastic habits, for she is not so young as she looks, and by this time she should know ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... of 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 ...
— Orley Farm • Anthony Trollope
... been confiscated by the government, and with the loss of their property the power of the monks has declined and their numbers have also diminished. Still the liberty of public worship is denied to all save Roman Catholics. Since the suppression of monastic institutions, some of the convents have been utilized for hospitals, government storehouses, and other public offices in Havana. There are some manifest incongruities that suggest themselves as existing ...
— Due South or Cuba Past and Present • Maturin M. Ballou
... myself, and I am sure that there is no chance for anything to be concealed. In fact, I had the floor taken up once, soon after I came here, knowing the room was that of the mysterious Sister, and thinking that there, if anywhere, the monastic crime would have taken place; still, we will go in, if ...
— Masterpieces of Mystery, Vol. 1 (of 4) - Ghost Stories • Various
... were to be performed on a great scale, in the interests of science. In nearly all countries, in fact, governments (through the medium of historical committees and commissions), academies, and learned societies have endeavoured in our day, much as monastic congregations did of old, to group professed scholars for the purposes of vast collective enterprises, and to co-ordinate their efforts. But this banding of specialists in external criticism for the service and under the supervision of competent men presents great mechanical difficulties. ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... an application of the old monastic system to the treatment of criminals. The first cellular prison was built in Rome by Pope Clement XI. at the commencement of the eighteenth century; its design was taken from a monastery. The idea passed from Rome to the Puritans of Pennsylvania; and it has now taken root in ...
— Crime and Its Causes • William Douglas Morrison
... good," said Morhange. "But what you must grasp now is the practical sense of these religious men, my masters. You remember that, even after three years of monastic life, they preserved their doubts as to the stability of my vocation. They found at the same time means of testing it once for all, and of adapting official facilities to their particular purposes. One morning I was called before the Father Abbot, and this is what he said to ...
— Atlantida • Pierre Benoit
... proportions. Visitors should purchase the interesting little booklet shown on the table within the porch. The church has a fine oak screen in the south chancel and a stone altar with five crosses in the north aisle. Not far away is a large farmhouse known as "Priest-house"; this was once a monastic establishment. ...
— Seaward Sussex - The South Downs from End to End • Edric Holmes
... Sangharama. With the monasteries and the fixed residence in them appeared a fixed membership of the order, which, on account of the Jaina principle of unconditional obedience toward the teacher, proved to be much stricter than in Buddhism. On the development of the order and the leisure of monastic life, there followed further, the commencement of a literary and scientific activity. The oldest attempt, in this respect, limited itself to bringing their doctrine into fixed forms. Their results were, besides ...
— On the Indian Sect of the Jainas • Johann George Buehler
... children is a girl of fourteen years old, whom he had by Desmarets, an actress, who is still on the stage. This child has been educated at a convent at Saint Denis, but has not much inclination for a monastic life. When my son sent for her she did not ...
— Marguerite de Navarre - Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois Queen of Navarre • Marguerite de Navarre
... France, and attributed, I have since heard, to Dr. Hanna, the son-in-law and biographer of Chalmers. Christian Socialists are by no means a new sect, the Moravians representing the theory with as little offence and absurdity as may be. What is it, after all, but an out-of-door extension of the monastic system? The religious principle, more or less apprehended, may bind men together so, absorbing their individualities, and presenting an aim beyond the world; but upon merely human and earthly principles no such system can stand, I feel persuaded, and I thank God for it. If Fourierism ...
— The Letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1 of 2) • Frederic G. Kenyon
... the evening, Mlle. Virginie Sambucco said it was time to think of going home: the ladies lived with monastic regularity. Leon protested; but Clementine obeyed, though not without pouting a little. Already the parlor door was open, and the old lady had taken her hood in the hall, when the engineer, suddenly ...
— The Man With The Broken Ear • Edmond About
... of Caius Tiberius, received the agnomen of Caligula, a caligulis sine caligis levioribus, quibus adolescentior usus fuerat in exercitu Germanici patris sui. And the caligce were also proper to the monastic bodies; for we read in an ancient glossarium upon the rule of Saint Benedict, in the Abbey of Saint Amand, that caligae were ...
— Waverley, Or 'Tis Sixty Years Hence, Complete • Sir Walter Scott
... much capacity, built, like the Grange, by the monks of the convent, which had been the germ of the cathedral, and showing the grand old monastic style in the solidity of its stone barns and storehouses, all arranged around a court, whereof the dwelling-house occupied one side, the lawn behind it with fine old trees, and sloping down to the water, which was full ...
— The Trial - or, More Links of the Daisy Chain • Charlotte M. Yonge
... was different, younger, fairer, with the colour of her braided hair more than ever a not altogether lucky challenge to attention; yet he was loth wholly to explain it by her having quitted this once, for some obscure yet doubtless charming reason, her almost monastic, her hitherto inveterate black. Much as the change did for the value of her presence, she had never yet, when all was said, made it for him; and he was not to fail of the further amusement of judging her determined in the matter by Sir Luke Strett's visit. ...
— The Wings of the Dove, Volume II • Henry James
... entered by the great western door, and the arms of the cross, the transepts, extended to the north and south. Here is a very beautiful symbol, a true embodiment of the whole spirit and inspiration of the monastic orders. From one of the transepts a side door generally led to the domestic buildings, the dormitory, the refectory, the chapter house, where the friars assembled in conclave under the presidency of the abbot. There were lesser buildings, ...
— Ireland, Historic and Picturesque • Charles Johnston
... civilisation is due, the abbeys and other scholastic foundations of the Benedictine order. The book-form, in which the board still conceals itself, stands as a memorial of its secretive preservation upon the shelves of the monastic libraries. I keep my own, with a certain touch of ritualistic observance, between this seventeenth century edition of the works of Roger Bacon and this more modern one, in Latin, of the writings of Thomas Aquinas; both of whom may ...
— Angels & Ministers • Laurence Housman
... is exhibited in a state of suspension, as hanging from the inverted letter L ([Gamma]), which symbolises the fatal tree. Comminatory and exhortatory cautions not to soil, spoil, or tear books and MSS. occur so frequently in the records of monastic libraries, that a whole album could easily be filled with them. The coquettish bishop, Venantius Fortunatus, has a distich on the subject. Another learned Goth, Theud-wulf, or Theodulfus, Charlemagne's Missus dominicus, {473} recommends readers a proper ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 211, November 12, 1853 • Various
... object—somewhat on the principle of 'Lady 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 ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, June 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... and battlements below! How gladly should learned men have laid aside for a few hours Pindar's "Odes" and Aristotle's "Ethics," to escort the author of "Cecilia" from college to college! What neat little banquets would she have found set out in their monastic cells! With what eagerness would pictures, medals, and illuminated missals have been brought forth from the most mysterious cabinets for her amusement! How much she would have had to hear and to tell about Johnson, as she walked over Pembroke, and about Reynolds, ...
— The Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay Volume 1 • Madame D'Arblay
... up—Chrysantheme listlessly, affecting fatigue, under her paper parasol painted with pink butterflies on a black ground. As we ascended, we passed under enormous monastic porticoes, also in granite of rude and primitive style. In truth, these steps and these temple porticoes are the only imposing works that this people has created, and they astonish, for ...
— Madame Chrysantheme Complete • Pierre Loti
... 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 of ...
— As You Like It • William Shakespeare [Collins edition]
... drive out of mind the permanent and beautiful things in his literary work. Past and Present (1843) is certainly a success—a happy and true thought, full of originality, worked out with art and power. The idea of embedding a living and pathetic picture of monastic life in the twelfth century, and a minute study of the labours of enlightened churchmen in the early struggles of civilisation—the idea of embedding this tale, as if it were the remains of some disinterred saint, in the midst of a series ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... 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 ...
— Alvira: the Heroine of Vesuvius • A. J. O'Reilly
... monastery, Maredsous, in Belgium in 1898, and its well stocked library came to play a certain part In the drama, but already he realised, after one night's sojourn there, that he had no call for the monastic life. ...
— The Road to Damascus - A Trilogy • August Strindberg
... which cakes marked with the Tau (an Egyptian form of cross) were eaten, the people calling them the flesh of their God. These exactly resemble the sacred cakes of Egypt and other eastern nations. Like these nations too, the people of the new world had monastic orders, male and female, in which broken vows were punished with death. Like the Egyptians they embalmed their dead, they worshipped sun, moon, and planets, but over and above these adored a Deity "omnipresent, ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot
... suggestiveness. The masterpieces of the Bolognese and Neapolitan painters, while they pretend to quicken compassion for martyrs in their agony, pander to a bestial blood-lust lurking in the darkest chambers of the soul[6]. Therefore it is that piety, whether the piety of monastic Italy or of Puritan England, turns from these aesthetic triumphs as from something alien to itself. When the worshipper would fain ascend on wings of ecstasy to God, the infinite, ineffable, unrealised, how can he endure the contact of those splendid forms, in which the lust of ...
— Renaissance in Italy Vol. 3 - The Fine Arts • John Addington Symonds
... Boston,—in many a village which had a charm for them, as Stratford-on-Avon, Ferney, and Concord in Massachusetts,—in the homes of wonderful suffering, as Ferrara and Haworth.—on many enchanted waters, as the Guadalquivir, the Rhine, the Tweed, the Hudson, Windermere, and Leman,—in many a monastic nook whence had issued a chronicle or history, in many a wild birthplace of a poem or romance, around many an old castle and stately ruin, in many a decayed seat of revelry and joyous repartee,—through the long ...
— Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860 • Various
... Father Graves with any real hope of a helping word. To seek him out in his study—that esthetically bare and yet beautiful room, with its tobacco-brown hangings and monastic furnishing in black oak—would be to invite mischief. To sit there, with her eloquent eyes fixed upon his, her haunting voice wrapping itself about his senses, would be a genuine cruelty toward a harmless, well-intentioned youth whose heroism in abjuring the world, the ...
— The Heart of Rachael • Kathleen Norris
... work had been begun the preceding year, (the erection of a new Lady Chapel,) the repair of this great dilapidation was immediately undertaken, and completed in a few years, by Alan de Walsingham, at that time sacrist,[34] an officer under whose particular charge were all the monastic buildings. It has continued above five hundred years, and may it yet continue a noble proof of his consummate skill as an architect!" The conception was original, being perhaps the first building of the kind ever ...
— Ely Cathedral • Anonymous
... communities are found. Bartholemy St. 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 on the seventh day. ...
— The Freethinker's Text Book, Part II. - Christianity: Its Evidences, Its Origin, Its Morality, Its History • Annie Besant
... the faith by Erkenwald, Bishop of London, in the year of Christ 677. A man much devoted to God, greatly occupied in religious acts, frequent prayers, and pious fruits of almsgiving, preferring a private and monastic life to all the riches and honours of the kingdom, who, when he had reigned 30 years, received the religious habit at the hands of Walther, Bishop of London, who succeeded the aforesaid Erkenwald, of ...
— Old St. Paul's Cathedral • William Benham
... accompanied by a brief paper on Christian Architecture, at the close of which Mr. Britton says, "The frontispiece has been composed from the architectural members of the west front of York Minster; and it shows that the monastic artist who designed that magnificent facade, gave to it ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, Vol. 14, - Issue 402, Supplementary Number (1829) • Various
... will hear. To lead your way across Gray carpet aisles of moss Unto the chantry stalls, The sumach candelabra are alight; Along the cloister walls, Like chorister and acolyte, The shrubs are vested white; The dutiful monastic oak In his gray-friar cloak Keeps penitential ways And solemn orisons of praise; For beads upon the cincture-vine Red berries warm with color shine, And to their constant rosary The bedesmen firs incline; And fair as frescoes be Among the shrines of Italy, These lights and shadows are, Impalpable ...
— Ballads of Peace in War • Michael Earls
... of San Francisco, the largest of the monastic establishments in Lima, is an immense building, situated in the vicinity of the Plaza Mayor. In this convent mass is read daily every half-hour, from five in the morning till noon. A small chapel within the convent is called the Capilla de los Milagros, ...
— Travels in Peru, on the Coast, in the Sierra, Across the Cordilleras and the Andes, into the Primeval Forests • J. J. von Tschudi
... poetry. But at this time a deeper interest in their national history began to be awakened. This department indeed had never been entirely neglected; and more than 10,000 manuscripts, unopened and unexamined, lay scattered throughout the imperial and monastic libraries. ...
— Historical View of the Languages and Literature of the Slavic - Nations • Therese Albertine Louise von Jacob Robinson
... Chap. 47 of Rasselas Johnson had lately considered monastic life. Imlac says of the monks:—'Their time is regularly distributed; one duty succeeds another, so that they are not left open to the distraction of unguided choice, nor lost in the shades of listless ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... I am greatly impatient for my altar, and so far from mistrusting its goodness, I only fear it will be too good to expose to the weather, as I intend it must be, in a recess in the garden. I was going to tell you that my house is so monastic, that I have a little hall decked with long saints in lean arched windows, and with taper columns, which we call the Paraclete, in memory ...
— The Letters of Horace Walpole, Volume 2 • Horace Walpole
... its own reality as contrasted with other systems; but Polytheists are liberals, and hold that one religion is as good as another. Yet the theological system was developing and strengthening, as well as the monastic rule, all the while the ritual was assimilating itself, as Protestants say, to the ...
— Modern Atheism under its forms of Pantheism, Materialism, Secularism, Development, and Natural Laws • James Buchanan
... England—the Caradoc family had for centuries assembled the trophies and records of their existence. Round about this dining hall they had built and pulled down and restored, until the rest of Monkland Court presented some aspect of homogeneity. Here alone they had left virgin the work of the old quasi-monastic builders, and within it unconsciously deposited their souls. For there were here, meeting the eyes of light, all those rather touching evidences of man's desire to persist for ever, those shells of his former bodies, the fetishes and queer proofs of his faiths, together ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... out with the ease of those days when the monastic was as recognized a profession as any other calling, and yet with something of the desire to make it evident on ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... represents the original mansion, or, we should rather say, city of mansions, with its monastic chapel, and geometrical gardens, laid out in the trim style of our forefathers. The suite of state apartments in the principal front was very splendid, and previously to their being dismantled by Sir William Chambers, ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction, No. 365 • Various
... having been given to St. Elizabeth's College, and apparently some rights over Merdon, the Chancellor Wriothesley obtained that, on the confiscation of monastic property, the manor should be granted to him. Stephen Gardiner had been bishop since 1531, a man who, though he had consented to the king's assumption of the royal supremacy, grieved over the fact as an error all his life. He appeared at the bar of the House of Commons and pleaded the rights ...
— John Keble's Parishes • Charlotte M Yonge
... sonnet, to overpower his "soberness of reason." "In Brussels," he says elsewhere in his journal, "the modern taste in costume, architecture, etc., has got the mastery; in Ghent there is a struggle; but in Bruges old images are still paramount, and an air of monastic life among the quiet goings-on of a thinly-peopled city is inexpressibly soothing. A pensive grace seems to be cast over all, even the very children." This estimate, after the lapse of considerably more than half a century, still, ...
— Beautiful Europe - Belgium • Joseph E. Morris
... where they had been wont to meditate, were now given up to a lively, laughing crew of girls, whose serge skirts and white blouses among the quaint surroundings made a curious blending of ancient and modern. What remained of the monastic building occupied one side of a large quadrangle, while the other three sides were taken up with modern additions, erected, however, in such excellent taste, and so closely in accordance with the architecture of the older portion, that the whole had ...
— The Nicest Girl in the School - A Story of School Life • Angela Brazil
... has been handed down to us in manuscript form through the centuries, through the revolutionary era of Christian ascendancy, through the dark ages down to the Renaissance. Unknown agencies, mostly medical and monastic, stout custodians of antique learning, reverent lovers of good cheer have preserved it for us until printing made possible the book's wide distribution among the scholars. Just prior to Gutenberg's epoch-making printing press there was a spurt of interest ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... wife into one of these houses and up the uncarpeted stair to the third floor, where he ushered her into a room with two old-fashioned windows looking out upon grass, and trees, and old-fashioned buildings, all grave and gray, and having an air of sober peacefulness, as of a collegiate or monastic seclusion, while beyond the broad green lawn shone ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... and the regular monastic communities performed this function with pomp and singular apparatus in the parish church of Our Lady of the Conception. The Town-court carried the banner which had waved in the days of the Conquest, escorted by a company of ...
— To the Gold Coast for Gold - A Personal Narrative in Two Volumes.—Vol. I • Richard F. Burton
... monastic herbal at the doctor's head; whereupon the bleeding broke out afresh. Then ...
— The Blue Pavilions • Sir Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
... that sad Affair of the Beguine. Flesh and blood! a mortal man (I suppose) is not to be reckoned among the vilest of Humanity because he falls in Love. How could I help Wilhelmina van Praag being a Beguine? Moreover, a Beguine is not a Nun. The Beguines belong to a modified kind of Monastic Order. They reside in a large House with a wall and ditch around it, and that has a Church and Hospital inside, and is for all the world like a little Town. But the Sisterhood is perfectly secular; they mingle with the inhabitants ...
— The Strange Adventures of Captain Dangerous, Vol. 3 of 3 • George Augustus Sala
... pre-Reformation structure in Scotland of which any remains now survive, but the prescribed limits of the series necessitated a selection. The Scottish cathedrals are all here treated, with representative collegiate and monastic buildings. Reference is also made to parish churches that represent the architecture of the various periods indicated in Chapter II. A survey of Scottish mediaeval architecture will be found in pp. 194-206 that may enable readers to take a comprehensive view of the whole. ...
— Scottish Cathedrals and Abbeys • Dugald Butler and Herbert Story
... sight; his confinement was rendered each day more rigorous; and during the absence and sickness of his grandson, his inhuman keepers, by the threats of instant death, compelled him to exchange the purple for the monastic habit and profession. The monk Antony had renounced the pomp of the world; yet he had occasion for a coarse fur in the winter season, and as wine was forbidden by his confessor, and water by his physician, the sherbet of Egypt was his common ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... in the course of the morning I met so many others of the same type, that I began to think I must have made a mistake. The cowl-like habit turned out to be the coarse native blanket, used for so many purposes by rustic Indians, and which they wear in this monastic fashion in the, sometimes chill, early mornings, or when it is wet. Their walking in single file was not in order to assist them in the preservation of perpetual silence, but because jungle footpaths ...
— India and the Indians • Edward F. Elwin
... without its own spontaneous inspiration, which takes all its charm from the suddenness of its desires, which owes its attractions to the genuineness of its outbursts—this thing we call love, subjugated to a monastic rule, to that law of geometry which belongs to ...
— The Physiology of Marriage, Part II. • Honore de Balzac
... Humanity, because in the name of Humanity. For a truly vicarious act does not supersede the principal's duty of performance, but rather implies and acknowledges it. Take the case from which this very word of vicar has received its origin. In the old monastic times, when the revenues of a cathedral or a cure fell to the lot of a monastery, it became the duty of that monastery to perform the religious services of the cure. But inasmuch as the monastery was a corporate body, they appointed one of their number, ...
— Sermons Preached at Brighton - Third Series • Frederick W. Robertson
... beautiful illusion over the sanctified retirement of a nun, that almost hid from her view the selfishness of its security. But the touches, which a melancholy fancy, slightly tinctured with superstition, gave to the monastic scene, began to fade, as her spirits revived, and brought once more to her heart an image, which had only transiently been banished thence. By this she was silently awakened to hope and comfort and sweet affections; visions of happiness ...
— The Mysteries of Udolpho • Ann Radcliffe
... acres in extent; while the character of the ruins made it clear that not only had the island been chosen, for some inexplicable reason, as the site upon which to erect a vast and very magnificent temple dedicated to the worship of the Sun, but that a monastic establishment of corresponding importance had also been founded there. Now, however, the whole of the buildings were roofless and in ruins; yet, even so, they were sufficiently imposing to imbue Dick at least with several new and ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... 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 ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... grandest is that which lay at the root of the monastic system,—that religion is the wedlock of the soul to God; although the method in which this idea was exemplified was a faulty one, or, at any rate, one which rapidly became corrupt, even if it was not so at first. The ...
— Memoranda Sacra • J. Rendel Harris
... Man's Life, picture themselves to the mind of an Irish Poor-Slave; with what feelings and opinions he looks forward on the Future, round on the Present, back on the Past, it were extremely difficult to specify. Something Monastic there appears to be in their Constitution: we find them bound by the two Monastic Vows, of Poverty and Obedience; which vows, especially the former, it is said, they observe with great strictness; nay, as I have understood it, they are pledged, ...
— Sartor Resartus - The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh • Thomas Carlyle
... dallied with the subject of the monastic life, as lived by those same pious Benedictines here in England long ago. Its reasoned rejection of mundane agitations, its calm, its leisure, its profound and ardent scholarship were vastly to his ...
— Deadham Hard • Lucas Malet
... old play upon the basis of which Shakspere constructed his own "King John," we find this question dealt with in some detail. In the elder play, the Bastard does "the shaking of bags of hoarding abbots," coram populo, and thereby discloses a phase of monastic life judiciously suppressed by Shakspere. Philip sets at liberty much more than "imprisoned angels"—according to one account, and that a monk's, imprisoned beings of quite another sort. "Faire Alice, the nonne," having ...
— Elizabethan Demonology • Thomas Alfred Spalding
... from isolated notices relative to Ardea for instance, Ameria, and Interamna on the Nar; and from the collective mass of these city-chronicles some result might perhaps have been attained similar to what has been accomplished for the earlier middle ages by the comparison of different monastic chronicles. Unfortunately the Romans in later times preferred to supply the defect ...
— The History of Rome (Volumes 1-5) • Theodor Mommsen
... Port Royal, and the other its great theological centre. The abbey of St Cyran was the only preferment which D’Hauranne ever accepted, notwithstanding Richelieu’s repeated offers of a bishopric. He was content to exercise from his monastic seclusion an influence far more powerful than that of any bishop of his day. And so penetrating and dangerous did this influence seem to the great Minister whose efforts to bind him to his side had so often failed, that he at length shut him ...
— Pascal • John Tulloch
... bound to come together at stated times for general assemblies or chapters, and these general assemblies were the supreme governing body in the Order. Thus unity was established; the organisation was close, but not monarchical; the Order was a great federation. This is the highest point reached in monastic development. ...
— Mediaeval Wales - Chiefly in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries: Six Popular Lectures • A. G. Little
... Southampton Water, reached at length the practical part of the valley, where they built their stronghold under the shelter of the downs, yet within easy reach of the sea. It was by means of barges that much of the stone was brought for the building of the numerous churches and monastic buildings. This was brought from the Binstead Quarries in the Isle of Wight, from the Purbeck Quarries in Dorset, and possibly ...
— Winchester • Sidney Heath
... 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 ...
— Legends & Romances of Brittany • Lewis Spence
... chamber was I born. Thus awaking from the long night of what seemed, but was not, nonentity, at once into the very regions of fairy land—into a palace of imagination—into the wild dominions of monastic thought and erudition—it is not singular that I gazed around me with a startled and ardent eye—that I loitered away my boyhood in books, and dissipated my youth in reverie; but it is singular that as ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 2 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... always should be in France, by an ambassador who worthily expressed the intelligence, the amiability, and the wealth, of the great country to which he belonged. At the present day, the British Embassy emulates the solitude of a monastic establishment; with the exception, however, of that hospitality and courtesy which the traveller and stranger were wont to experience, ...
— Reminiscences of Captain Gronow • Rees Howell Gronow
... little worth reading in their own tongue); but I find no reference whatever to the bringing up of children. They could not have been so absurd as to omit all training for this gravest of responsibilities. Evidently, then, this was the school course of one of their monastic orders." ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... me, Weener, I was offering no exclusive indictment: I too am guilty—infinitely culpable. Even if I had devoted my life to pure science—perhaps even more certainly then—patterning myself on a medieval monastic, faithful to vows of poverty and singleness of purpose; even if I had not, for an apparently laudable end, betrayed my efforts to a base greed; even if I had never picked for a moment's use such an unworthy—do ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... hitherto indicated, may be as deliberate as you choose; there is no immediate fear of the extinction of many species of flowers or animals; and the Alps, and valley of Sparta, will wait your leisure, I fear too long. But the feudal and monastic buildings of Europe, and still more the streets of her ancient cities, are vanishing like dreams: and it is difficult to imagine the mingled envy and contempt with which future generations will look back to us, who still possessed such things, yet ...
— Lectures on Art - Delivered before the University of Oxford in Hilary term, 1870 • John Ruskin
... prayed over and blest. For good, or for ill, this deed is done. The names are registered; fees fly right and left: they thank, and salute, the curate, whose official coolness melts into a smile of monastic gallantry: the beadle on the steps waves off a gaping world as they issue forth bridegroom and bridesman recklessly scatter gold on him: carriage doors are banged to: the coachmen drive off, and the scene closes, ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... densely inhabited, counts at least 10,000 lamas in a total population of about 42,000.[1345] Not less than one-sixth of the inhabitants of Ladak are in religious houses as monks and nuns.[1346] Families in Tibet are small, yet each devotes one or more children to convent or monastic life.[1347] In western Tibet, especially about Taklakot in the Himalayan border, one boy in every family is invariably devoted to the priesthood, and one or more daughters must become nuns. But the nun generally resides with her family or lives ...
— Influences of Geographic Environment - On the Basis of Ratzel's System of Anthropo-Geography • Ellen Churchill Semple
... another beautiful broad surrounded by feathery reeds and thick with rushes where kingfishers and wild duck are to be found. The ruins of St. Benet's Abbey are an interesting feature along the river Bure. Within the monastic walls a windmill has been built, and this too is now an old ruin, having lost ...
— What to See in England • Gordon Home
... the other monks and became silent. There was a tradition that the ghost of Walgierz appeared when the morals of the monastic lives became corrupted, and when the monks thought more about worldly riches and ...
— The Knights of the Cross • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... accrue to him upon such creation: for if so, he ought to restrain and change the course of inheritance by the law of the land; and that he cannot do, no more than if the King wished to (p. 044) give or grant to a man that he should hold his lands after he has entered upon a monastic life, and professed; for such grant would be contrary to the common law of the land, and therefore would be altogether void. So also in this case." To this argument Horton replied, among other points, "I take it that the Apostle may ...
— Henry of Monmouth, Volume 2 - Memoirs of Henry the Fifth • J. Endell Tyler
... important; with questions of freedom of conscience and of national existence. The time seems not far distant when they must be reconsidered for their own sake. Already in France the persons leading a monastic life are believed to be twice as numerous as they were at the outbreak of the Revolution. It is difficult to ascertain the number in our own country, but it is not inconsiderable.[Footnote: Rambaud ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... 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
... became a saint, Was much imbued with vulgar earthly taint; E'er he renounced the honors of a Knight And doffed his coat of mail and helmet bright, For sober cassock and monastic hood, Leaving the castle for the cloister rude, And changed the banquet's sumptuous repast For frugal crusts and the ascetic fast; Forsook his charger and equipments for The crucifix and sacerdotal war; While yet with valiant sword and blazoned shield He braved the dangers of the ...
— Mountain idylls, and Other Poems • Alfred Castner King
... to Ephesus, and after having submitted to the tonsure, joined the monastic order. At this Antonina entirely lost her reason, showed her distress by putting on mourning and by her general behaviour, and roamed about the house, wailing and lamenting (even in the presence of her husband) the good friend she had lost—so faithful, so pleasant, so tender a companion, ...
— The Secret History of the Court of Justinian • Procopius
... or younger brother, which you will—had at his heart a heavy sorrow; but it bred in him no misanthropy or monastic gloom. He went forth into the world, a lover of his kind. For a long, long time, it was his chief delight to travel in the steps of the old man and the child (so far as he could trace them from her last narrative), to halt where they had halted, sympathise where ...
— The Old Curiosity Shop • Charles Dickens
... But the peace of an ordinary 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 ...
— The Prodigal Father • J. Storer Clouston
... many a fat partrich eke in mewe.” The Cistercian rules of diet were very severe, allowing only one meal a day, and none but the sickly were permitted to partake of animal food. Consequently, fish were in great demand, and the greater the variety, the more toothsome would be the monastic fare. {74} Roach abound in the Witham, and attain a very fair size, not unfrequently up to 1¼lb.; and the artizans of Sheffield, and elsewhere, brought by special trains, in hundreds, often carry away with them very fair baskets. Bream of both kinds are very abundant in the Witham. I am told ...
— Records of Woodhall Spa and Neighbourhood - Historical, Anecdotal, Physiographical, and Archaeological, with Other Matter • J. Conway Walter
... purposes, or for the amusement of the inmates. There is nothing new in asceticism. The craving after self-righteousness, and the desire of acquiring merit by self-mortification, is an innate principle of the human heart, and ineradicable even by Christianity. Witness the monastic institutions of the Romish Church, of which Indian penance-groves were the type. The Superior of a modern Convent is but the antitype of Kanwa; and what is Romanism but humanity developing itself in some of its most ...
— Sakoontala or The Lost Ring - An Indian Drama • Kalidasa
... in the adjacent Serb state of Bosnia. Like many other Serbian rulers, he abdicated in later life in favour of his younger son, Stephen, called Nemanjie ( Nemanya's son), and himself became a monk (1196), travelling for this purpose to Mount Athos, the great monastic centre and home of theological learning of the Eastern Church. There he saw his youngest son, who some years previously had also journeyed thither and entered a monastery, taking the name ...
— The Balkans - A History Of Bulgaria—Serbia—Greece—Rumania—Turkey • Nevill Forbes, Arnold J. Toynbee, D. Mitrany, D.G. Hogarth
... unreasonable and monstrous. The history of philosophy is the broad demonstration of this. The Church philosophers, (with exceptions, of course,) receiving the traditions of the common faith, partaking in the superstitions of their age, banished from the bosoms of men by their monastic position, and inflamed with hierarchic pride, with but a faint connection or intercourse between conscience and intellect or between heart and fancy, strove to spin out theories which would explain ...
— The Destiny of the Soul - A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life • William Rounseville Alger
... write to her that I was unable to resist my inclination for a monastic life, and that I have gone, without giving her notice, to the nunnery of St. Marie that we were ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - April 1843 • Various
... of this personage resembled that of his companion in shape, being a long monastic mantle; but the colour, being scarlet, showed that he did not belong to any of the four regular orders of monks. On the right shoulder of the mantle there was cut, in white cloth, a cross of a peculiar form. This upper robe concealed what at first view seemed rather inconsistent ...
— Ivanhoe - A Romance • Walter Scott
... a sleepless, jaded air—the room that under his own occupation had shown a rigid, almost monastic severity. The plain dressing-table was littered with cigarette ends and marked with black and tawny patches where the tobacco had been left to burn itself out. On one corner of the table a carafe of water and a whiskey-decanter rested one against the other, as if for support, and ...
— The Masquerader • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... born in Barcelona, but spent most of his life in Valencia. In 1821, when sixteen years old, Arolas, much against the wishes of his parents, joined a monastic order. Arolas wrote in all the literary genres of his time, but he distinguished himself most as a poet by his ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... but half real, something cloistral or monastic, as we should say, united to this exquisite order, made the whole place seem to Marius, as it were, sacellum, the peculiar sanctuary, of his mother, who, still in real widowhood, provided the deceased Marius the elder with that secondary sort of life which we can ...
— Marius the Epicurean, Volume One • Walter Horatio Pater
... mue?a being familiar to us as household words, it seems impossible that he who had tried them once should have need of them no more. Instances—all with initial m—are as follows: mechanics, machine, maxim, mission, mode, monastic, marsh, magnify, malcontent, majority, manly, malleable, malignancy, maritime, manna, manslaughter, masterly, market-day-folks, maid-price, mealy, meekly, mercifully, merchant-like, memorial, mercenary, mention, memorandums, ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... different times, its teaching has become both negative and positive, agnostic and gnostic. It passes from apparent atheism and materialism to theism, polytheism, and spiritualism. It is, under one aspect, mere pessimism; under another, pure philanthropy; under another, monastic communion; under another, high morality; under another, a variety of materialistic philosophy; under another, simple demonology; under another, a mere farrago of superstitions, including necromancy, witchcraft, idolatry, and fetishism. In some form or other it may be held with almost ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... was built a few years since at L1,100 expense, they tell me, and I perfectly believe it. And I get it for L35 exclusive of moderate taxes. We think ourselves most lucky. It is not our intention to abandon Regent Street, and West End perambulations (monastic and terrible thought!) but occasionally to breathe the FRESHER AIR of the metropolis. We shall put up a bedroom or two (all we want) for occasional ex-rustication, where we shall visit, not be visited. Plays too we'll see—perhaps our own. ...
— Charles Lamb • Walter Jerrold
... or a wandering pair of friars who had seen strange sights must have passed with their wallets from the neighbouring convents, collecting the day's provision, and leaving news and gossip behind, such as flowed to these monastic hostelries from all quarters—tales of battles, and anecdotes of the Court, and dreadful stories of English atrocities, to stir the village and rouse ever generous sentiment and stirring of national ...
— Jeanne d'Arc - Her Life And Death • Mrs.(Margaret) Oliphant
... and cursed by the populace. Many well-meaning men, too, had not approved of his attack on celibacy and monastic life. The country gentry threatened to seize the outlaw on the highways because he had destroyed the nunneries into which, as into foundling asylums, the legitimate daughters of the poverty-stricken gentry ...
— The German Classics Of The Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries, Volume 12 • Various
... Protestant pew and pulpit for him. Another fit of it, in the Roman Catholic direction, had proposed, during his latest dilemma, to relieve him of the burden of his pledged word. He had plunged for a short space into the rapturous contemplation of a monastic life—'the clean soul for the macerated flesh,' as that fellow Woodseer said once: and such as his friend, the Roman Catholic Lord Feltre, moodily talked of getting in his intervals. He had gone down to a young and novel trial establishment of English penitents ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... veil, take vows. Adj. ecclesiastical, ecclesiological[obs3]; clerical, sacerdotal, priestly, prelatical, pastoral, ministerial, capitular[obs3], theocratic; hierarchical, archiepiscopal; episcopal, episcopalian; canonical; monastic, monachal[obs3]; monkish; abbatial[obs3], abbatical[obs3]; Anglican[obs3]; pontifical, papal, ...
— Roget's Thesaurus
... the transalpine pope, and his Holiness, by Estienne, he had the whole monastic Church of France on his side, and treated the Holy Father as an equal. Vain of his eloquence, and one of the greatest theologians of his time, he kept incessant watch over France and Italy by means of three religious orders who were absolutely devoted to him, ...
— Catherine de' Medici • Honore de Balzac
... into a sheepfold by a neighboring farmer. Yet at one time it was one of the richest and most extensive monasteries in England. On our return to Shrewsbury, we passed through Much Wenlock, a very ancient town, which also has its ruined abbey. It is remarkable how thickly these monastic institutions were at one time scattered over the Kingdom, and when one considers what such elaborate establishments must have cost to build and to maintain, it is easy to understand why, in the ages of church supremacy, the common people were ...
— British Highways And Byways From A Motor Car - Being A Record Of A Five Thousand Mile Tour In England, - Wales And Scotland • Thomas D. Murphy
... century, however, when the monastic movement was rapidly developing, there were some who withstood the tendencies of the new ascetics. Thus, in 850, Ratramnus, the monk of Corbie, wrote a treatise (Liber de eo quod Christus ex Virgine natus est) to prove that Mary really gave birth to Jesus ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... suburbs were sanctified with frequent monasteries, and the holy abbots, Dalmatius and Eutyches, [49] had devoted their zeal and fidelity to the cause of Cyril, the worship of Mary, and the unity of Christ. From the first moment of their monastic life, they had never mingled with the world, or trod the profane ground of the city. But in this awful moment of the danger of the church, their vow was superseded by a more sublime and indispensable duty. At the head ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 4 • Edward Gibbon
... guilds, and the respective powers and duties of the Courts of Aldermen and Common Council, and of the Livery of London assembled in their Common Hall. Others have devoted themselves to the study of the ecclesiastical and monastic side of the City's history—its Cathedral, its religious houses, and hundred and more parish churches, which occupied so large an extent of the City's area. The ecclesiastical importance of the City, however, is too often ignored. "We are prone," writes Bishop ...
— London and the Kingdom - Volume I • Reginald R. Sharpe
... student at Padua was much livelier than the monastic seclusion of an English university. He need not attend many lectures, for, as Thomas Hoby explains, after a scholar has been elected by the rectors, "He is by his scholarship bound to no lectures, nor nothing elles ...
— English Travellers of the Renaissance • Clare Howard
... and is an excellent specimen of their monastic buildings. It is now in as romantic a state as the most poetic imagination could desire. Here are gloomy halls and dark and decayed rooms; long corridors of chambers, uninhabited except by the lizard and the bat; terraces upon the brow of stupendous ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... been to E——-; that important event in my monastic life has been concluded. Lady Margaret was as talkative as usual; and a Mrs. Dalton, who, I find, is an acquaintance of yours, asked very tenderly after your poodle and yourself. But Lady Emily! Ay, Monkton, I know not well how to describe her to you. Her beauty interests not less than ...
— Falkland, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... Monastic Community, is the third treasure of Buddhism, and the satisfaction of the Buddhist laity with the monastic body is said to be very great. At any rate, the cause of education in Burma owes much to the monks, but it is hard to realize how the Monastic Community ...
— The Reconciliation of Races and Religions • Thomas Kelly Cheyne
... in Jesus Christ, and unceasingly exhorted them to good works. Amongst his spiritual children were men who had been robbers for many years, and had been persuaded by the exhortations of the holy abbot to embrace the monastic life, and who now edified their companions by the purity of their lives. One, who had been cook to the Queen of Abyssinia, and was converted by the Abbot of Antinoe, never ceased to weep. There was also Flavian, ...
— Thais • Anatole France
... making himself like in habit and life to St. Benedict, St. Augustine, St. Francis, and St. Dominic, but likewise one may turn to good and true religion in a state of matrimony, for God wills no religion in us but of the heart." If he had ever thought of taking monastic vows, his marriage would have cut short any such intention. If he ever wished to wed the real Beatrice Portinari, and was disappointed, might not this be the time when his thoughts took that direction? If so, the impulse came ...
— Among My Books • James Russell Lowell
... which, at the time when it first attracted Sir James Simpson's notice, was used as a pig-stye, had few external features to suggest the necessity of farther inquiry; but after his eye had become accustomed to the architecture of the early monastic cells in Ireland, its real character flashed upon him, and he found that his conclusions coincided with the facts of the early history of ...
— Archaeological Essays, Vol. 1 • James Y. Simpson
... she replied, 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 ...
— Wild Wales - Its People, Language and Scenery • George Borrow
... donations had been given was to be handed over to the surviving party and half to the heirs of the deceased; but if the solemn osculum had not yet taken place, all gifts went to the heirs of the deceased. There was also a law that if either party broke the engagement to enter monastic life, the man who did so lost all that he had given by way of earnest money for the marriage contract (arrarum nomine); if it was the woman who took the initiative, she was compelled to return twice the amount of any sums she had received. ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... personality, in itself fascinating, was made all the more pictorial by an investiture of romance, alike in the scenery and the incidents through which it moved. Around such a figure funereal banners well might wave, and under dark and lowering skies the chill wind of the sea might moan through monastic ruins and crumbling battlements. Edgar of Ravenswood, standing by his lonely hearth, beneath the groined arches of his seaside tower, revealed by the flickering firelight, looked the ideal of romantic manhood; the incarnation of poetic fancy ...
— Shadows of the Stage • William Winter
... from the other, it perishes. A stiff breeze may set in from the north, the Rochefort squadron will be taken, and the Minister will be the most holy of men: if it comes from some other point, Ireland is gone; we curse ourselves as a set of monastic madmen, and call out for the unavailing satisfaction of Mr. Perceval's head. Such a state of political existence is scarcely credible: it is the action of a mad young fool standing upon one foot, and peeping down the crater ...
— Political Pamphlets • George Saintsbury
... aggravation of that peril—that Mrs Lee was deplorably ignorant of English life; indeed, of life universally. Strictly speaking, she was even yet a raw, untutored novice, turned suddenly loose from the twilight of a monastic seclusion. Under any circumstances, such a situation lay open to an amount of danger that was afflicting to contemplate. But one dreadful exasperation of these fatal auguries lay in the peculiar temper of Mrs. Lee, as connected ...
— Autobiographic Sketches • Thomas de Quincey
... 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 ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 07 • Various
... drawing, as they fancied, the principles of their conduct from the literal precepts of the Gospel, formed those views of human nature which were more practicable in a desert than a city, and which were rather suited to a monastic order than to a polished people. These were our puritans, who at first, perhaps from utter simplicity, among other extravagant reforms, imagined that of the extinction of the theatre. Numerous works from that time fatigued their own pens and ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. II (of 3) - Edited, With Memoir And Notes, By His Son, The Earl Of Beaconsfield • Isaac D'Israeli
... the duty to which he had been appointed, and which would scarcely have seemed an amelioration of destiny to any one save a man who had for years been deprived of the light of the sun and the scent of the free air. Some deed there had been in that life which had called for such monastic discipline; some outcome of human passion when the blood, that now crept slowly, while the aged monk passed the hours in waiting for visions before the altar of St. Apollinare, was running in his veins too ...
— A Siren • Thomas Adolphus Trollope
... But monastic retreat had no attractions for the founder of Fort St. Louis. Parkman says: "Champlain, though in Paris is restless. He is enamoured of the New World, whose rugged charms have seized his fancy and his heart. His restless ...
— Famous Firesides of French Canada • Mary Wilson Alloway
... proceeded to the completion of the Constitution, one deprived him of the right of deciding on peace and war, a power which all wise statesmen regard as inseparable from the executive government; another extinguished the right of primogeniture; and a third confiscated all the property of the monastic establishments. ...
— The Life of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France • Charles Duke Yonge
... some degree, the extinction of families; for, instead of younger branches becoming the votaries of a monastic life, they became the votaries of hymen: Hence the kingdom was enriched by population. It eased the people of a set of masters, who had for ages ruled them ...
— An History of Birmingham (1783) • William Hutton
... [tr. note: sic] collapse or 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 College; that Girolamo ...
— Evolution - An Investigation and a Critique • Theodore Graebner
... flocks of royal and other penguins people these islets, finding good lodging on their rocky and mossy surface. These stupid birds, in their yellow and white feathers, with their heads thrown back and their wings like the sleeves of a monastic habit, look, at a distance, like monks in single file walking ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... proper way to get things was to go through the starosta. In every village is a teacher, more or less trained. Each child is compelled to attend three years. If desirous he may go to high schools of liberal arts and science and technical scope, seminaries and monastic schools. ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... was ten years old, his father died; and an uncle, considering the widowed solitariness and helplessness of the mother, urged him to renounce the monastic life, and return to her, but the boy replied, "I did not quit the family in compliance with my father's wishes, but because I wished to be far from the dust and vulgar ways of life. This is why I choose monkhood." The uncle approved of his words ...
— Chinese Literature • Anonymous
... from Christ, with the same religion after it fell into other hands—with the extravagant merit very soon ascribed to celibacy, solitude, voluntary poverty; with the rigours of an ascetic, and the vows of a monastic life; the hair-shirt, the watchings, the midnight prayers, the obmutescence, the gloom and mortification of religious orders, and of those who ...
— Evidences of Christianity • William Paley
... local accent of the children sounded soft in the churchyard. It was simply the sense of England—a sort of apprehended revelation of his country. The dim annals of the place were sensibly, heavily in the air—foundations bafflingly early, a great monastic life, wars of the Roses, with battles and blood in the streets, and then the long quietude of the respectable centuries, all corn-fields and magistrates and vicars—and these things were connected with an emotion that arose ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... not lead into the Zeil by the Church of Our Lady, and that we always had to go a roundabout way by the /Hasengasse/ or the Catherine Gate. But what chiefly attracted the child's attention, were the many little towns within the town, the fortresses within the fortress; viz., the walled monastic enclosures, and several other precincts, remaining from earlier times, and more or less like castles,—as the Nuremberg Court, the Compostella, the Braunfels, the ancestral house of the family of Stallburg, and ...
— Autobiography • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
... and the idea once expressed, there was no desire to extend the circle of figures or to alter their wretched appearance. The same uncouth forms return with a killing monotony. Centuries do not change them. The uniformity of monastic life by no means tended to relax the inflexibility of invention. Religion, not art, was the sculptor's or the painter's object; his production was a creation of faith, not of beauty. Such is the character of almost all the carvings in wood and stone which have been found in the catacombs ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine - Volume 62, No. 384, October 1847 • Various
... father before his retirement from the world, and which she and Salinguerra conspire to break, the one from love of Sordello, the other in the interests of her House. Eccelino's real assumption of the monastic habit after Adelaide's death is represented as in part caused by remorse—for Salinguerra is his old and faithful ally, and he has connived at the wrong done to him in the concealment of his son; and his return to the Guelph connexion from ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... the slope of the Caelian, facing the palace of the Caesars, on a street named the Clivus Scauri, which corresponds very nearly to the modern Via dei SS. Giovanni e Paolo. Fond as he was of monastic life, he extended hospitality to men of his own sentiments and habit of thought; and transformed the old lararium into a chapel of S. Andrew. The place, which was governed by the rule of S. Benedict, became known ...
— Pagan and Christian Rome • Rodolfo Lanciani
... almost monastic; for as the monks had nothing in the world to do but when they had said their prayers at stated hours to employ themselves in instructive studies, no more have these. They are divided into three tables: the ...
— Travels in England and Fragmenta Regalia • Paul Hentzner and Sir Robert Naunton
... certain aloofness from the rough and tumble of workaday life. The Christianity of the Middle Ages was fertilized from the cloister, with the result that the spiritual ideals even of those Christians who remained "in the world" tended to be coloured by the monastic tradition. The Christian man of the world who took seriously the practice of his religion aimed at reproducing at second hand the Christianity of the monk. The salvation of the individual soul tended to be regarded as the supreme ...
— Religious Reality • A.E.J. Rawlinson
... who adopts the full course should also follow a number of healthy monastic rules with reference to dress, sitting, dining, etc., which are called the dhuta@ngas or pure disciplinary parts [Footnote ref 3]. The practice of sila and the dhutangas help the sage to adopt the course of samadhi. Samadhi ...
— A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. 1 • Surendranath Dasgupta
... controlling intelligence, either individual or collective. It is easy to understand then, how such an organization gives rise in its opponents—who see in the individualist world only the advantages of liberty, and who forget the evils which so copiously flow from it—the impression of a system of monastic ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... a quarrel, but the order is so entirely opposed to the monastic spirit. What I mean is—well, their worldliness is repugnant to me—fashionable friends, confidences, meddling in family affairs, dining out, letters from ladies who need consolation.... I don't mean anything wrong; ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... reverent hands; and, to my mind, the perfunctory in things ecclesiastical is hardly more distressing than the service of books as conducted in many great libraries. One feels that the librarii should be a sacred order, nearly allied to the monastic, refined by varying steps of initiation, and certainly celibates. They should give out their books as the priest his sacrament, should wear sacred vestments, and bear about with them the priestlike aura, as of divine incarnations of the great spirit of Truth ...
— The Book-Bills of Narcissus - An Account Rendered by Richard Le Gallienne • Le Gallienne, Richard
... There are cliffs more terrible, and winds more wild, on other shores; but nowhere else do so many white sails lean against the bleak wind, and glide across the cliff shadows. Nor do I know many other memorials of monastic life so striking as the abbey on that dark headland. We are apt in our journeys through lowland England, to watch with some secret contempt the general pleasantness of the vales in which our abbeys were founded, without taking any pains to inquire into the particular circumstances ...
— The Harbours of England • John Ruskin
... who entered the monastic life while be was still the real governor of the country, led as simple a life, as is shown in his verse, which ran ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... desire of the Brothers to build a monastery burned fiercely within them, and the elder amongst them especially, with their Rector, were eager to do this work and carry it forward with all speed, for certain urgent reasons did compel them. They saw that without monastic discipline the way of life in the House could not continue to be ordered duly, and therefore they determined that the habit of an holy order must be their refuge, for they were instant to make prudent provision for themselves and those that should come ...
— The Chronicle of the Canons Regular of Mount St. Agnes • Thomas a Kempis
... of 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 ...
— The American Architect and Building News, Vol. 27, No. 733, January 11, 1890 • Various
... wishes were now stripped to bare wants. He was free of the skeleton hand of the Future which had so long held him prisoner—which had frightened him into depriving himself of all life's garnishings until his condition had been reduced to one of monastic simplicity without the monk's redeeming inspiration. He was no longer mocked by ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... holy days, for the twenty-four hours of rest, wherein one recovers strength and courage. If he had gone out, the sight of a workingman with his wife and child would have made him weep, but his monastic seclusion gave him other forms of suffering, the despair of recluses, their terrible outbreaks of rebellion when the god to whom they have consecrated themselves does not respond to their sacrifices. Now, Risler's god was work, and as he no longer found comfort or serenity therein, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Vergilian hexameters, composed about 930 by Ekkehard, a pupil in the monastic school at St. Gall, and afterwards revised by another monk of the same name. It is based on a lost German poem and preserves, with but little admixture of Christian and Latin elements, a highly interesting saga of the Hunnish-Burgundian cycle. The selections are from the translation by H. Althof, ...
— An anthology of German literature • Calvin Thomas
... Arnold's advantages. Indeed, all the great foundation schools of London, bearing in their very codes of organization the impress of a double function—viz., the conservation of sound learning and of pure religion—wear something of a monastic or cloisteral character in their aspect and usages, which is peculiarly impressive, and even pathetic, amidst the uproars of a capital the most colossal and ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... strong, struck in great chords the air of a gloomy march from the half-forgotten muse of some monastic composer. While she played, Claude de Chauxville proceeded with his delicate touch to play on the hidden chords of ...
— The Sowers • Henry Seton Merriman
... 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 ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... life at Mount St. Agnes, a monastery of Augustinian canons in the diocese of Utrecht. Here he died on July 26, 1471, after an uneventful life spent in copying manuscripts, reading, and composing, and in the peaceful routine of monastic piety. ...
— The Imitation of Christ • Thomas a Kempis
... inextinguishable self-confidence." With the reign of Charlemagne began the development of the architecture of France, but not until the tenth and eleventh centuries did the "movement reach its full force; and its development was due mainly to the great monastic community, which, founded by St. Benedict early in the sixth century, had poured from the heights of Monte Cassino its beneficent influence ...
— Frederic Lord Leighton - An Illustrated Record of His Life and Work • Ernest Rhys
... composed were mainly theological (as became their sacred profession and ascetic life). The Latin, however, being the almost universal language for so many centuries, the love of learning conspired to widen the field of monastic study. Many zealous ecclesiastics were found who revived the classic authors, and copies of the works of poets, historians, philosophers and rhetoricians were multiplied. Then were gradually formed those monastic libraries to ...
— A Book for All Readers • Ainsworth Rand Spofford
... time the Greeks 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 ...
— History Of Egypt From 330 B.C. To The Present Time, Volume 10 (of 12) • S. Rappoport
... its aspects, revealing or consoling—religion in connection with any of its affinities, ethics or metaphysics, when self-evoked by a person of earnest nature, not imposed from without by the necessities of monastic life, not caught as a contagion from the example of friends that surround you, argues some 'vast volcanic agency' moving at subterraneous depths below the ordinary working mind of daily life, and entitled by its ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. 1 (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... is as usual clear. We are in fifteenth-century Florence at night. There is no set description, but the slight touches are enough to make us see the silent lonely streets, the churches, the high walls of the monastic gardens, the fortress-palaces. The sound of the fountains is in our ears; the little crowds of revelling men and girls appear and disappear like ghosts; the surly watch with their weapons and torches bustle round the corner. Nor does Browning neglect to ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... the dark and evil time in which he lived, amidst the untold horrors of the "Black Plague," he illustrated by deeds of charity and mercy his doctrine of disinterested benevolence. Woolman's whole life was a nobler Imitation of Christ than that fervid rhapsody of monastic piety ...
— The Complete Works of Whittier - The Standard Library Edition with a linked Index • John Greenleaf Whittier
... which Newstead had been the scene, is, like most other imputations against him, founded on his own testimony, greatly exaggerated. He describes, it is well known, the home of his poetical representative as a "monastic dome, condemned to ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. I. (of VI.) - With his Letters and Journals. • Thomas Moore
... likely to seek for it. No one loves a cross any more than did Peter, when he had the hardiness to rebuke his Master.[84] And yet we remember those earnest souls in earlier times, who shut themselves up behind monastic walls, and inflicted pain upon themselves by privation and by bodily self-infliction. And we cannot help admiring their earnestness and saintliness, even while we see how morbid was their conception of life, and ...
— Quiet Talks on Following the Christ • S. D. Gordon |
