Key Monastery Quotes & Sayings

The heavy smell of flower petals stroked the walls of my lungs. — Haruki Murakami

The more you can create that magic bubble, that suspension of disbelief, for a while, the better. — Edward Norton

Westereners often think that the East is one vast Buddhist temple, which is rather like thinking the West is one vast Carthusian monastery. If the [Western people who like Buddhism] were to visit the East, he'd certainly experience many new things, but he'd find first, that the food is under lock and key and second, that humans are considered to be a miserable, destructive, greedy lot, just as they are in the West. — Daniel Quinn

Give me chastity and continence, but not yet. — Saint Augustine

Here below is not the land of happiness: I know it now; it is only the land of toil, and every joy which comes to us is only to strengthen us for some greater labor that is to succeed. — Johann Gottlieb Fichte

In the case of everything that belongs to the realm of sentiment, religion, politics, morality, the affections, and antipathies, etc. The most eminent men seldom surpass the standard of the most ordinary individuals. — Gustave Le Bon

Plato described ordinary life as unthinking, lived in a dim cave of shadowy reflections, but said that it is possible to leave the cave and see things in sunlit clarity as they actually are. — Huston Smith

The trajectory of my writing has moved further and further away from autobiography. My first stories in Confessions of a Falling Woman worked familiar territory - places I had lived, people I knew, my life as an actor in New York - and many were prompted by or grounded in personal experience. — Debra Dean

Most of the people I have really cared about in this world, I have elected to the position. I have a belief that a man's real relatives are scattered throughout the universe, and seldom if ever belong to his immediate kin. — Thomas Berger