Albert Camus Quotes

I grew with it, and I used to go to see the monks, who had no possessions, even more extreme than my mother.

I'm just a monk, I'm like a recluse.

The greatest of all crosses is self. If we die in part every day, we shall have but little to do on the last. These little daily deaths will destroy the power of the final dying.

My Dad used to say that the balance of the world relied on all of the monks who were living outside of society in creative isolation. I don't quite understand the ascetic life or the private life or the monastic private life. But I definitely understand privacy's value.

Deny yourself! You must deny yourself! That is the song that never ends.

O Lord, self-renunciation is not the work of one day, nor children's sport; yea, rather in this word is included all perfection.

Start the practice of self-control with some penance; begin with fasting.

Every holiday on the calendar, I check in a hotel and fast - I don't eat, I don't drink, I don't talk.

I love my work with a frenetic and perverse love, as an ascetic loves the hair shirt which scratches his belly.

So, at the age of nine, I became a monk, and from then on I was there practicing that kind of nonviolence.

I enjoy living like a hermit, but I cannot live like a hermit.

First and foremost, the monk should own nothing in this world, but he should have as his possessions solitude of the body, modesty of bearing, a modulated tone of voice, and a well-ordered manner of speech. He should be without anxiety as to his food and drink, and should eat in silence.

I was obsessed with the idea of fasting and isolation.

That was my childhood. I grew up with the monks, studying Sanskrit and meditating for hours in the morning and hours in the evening, and going once a day to beg for food.

I like the monastic life... in the prayer and the praising... this has charged me with new energy, spiritual energy. This is very important for my ministry outside the monastery.

I didn't take a vow of poverty.

I would rise, monk-like, at 6 A.M., speak to no one, make tea, and go immediately to my desk from which I didn't move until frills appeared around the edges of my eyes or I heard the sound of a wine bottle being uncorked. It would give the wrong impression to describe these as Writing Days.

I have a life of sacrifice. I don't have a normal social life.

If you want to be great in what you're doing, you really need to limit yourself, so I consider my life as the life of a monk.

I had rather be a toad, and live upon the vapor of a dungeon than keep a corner in the thing I love for others uses.

Self-denial does not belong to religion as characteristic of it; it belongs to human life; the lower nature must always be denied when you are trying to rise to a higher sphere.

The convent is supreme egotism resulting in supreme self-denial.

To take up the cross of Christ is no great action done once for all; it consists in the continual practice of small duties which are distasteful to us.

If we feel that any habit or pursuit, harmless in itself, is keeping us from God and sinking us deeper in the things of earth; if we find that things which others can do with impunity are for us the occasion of falling, then abstinence is our only course. Abstinence alone can recover for us the real value of what should have been for our help but which has been an occasion of falling. ... It is necessary that we should steadily resolve to give up anything that comes between ourselves and God.

A monk should surely love his books with humility, wishing their good and not the glory of his own curiosity; but what the temptation of adultery is for laymen and the yearning for riches is for secular ecclesiastics, the seduction of knowledge is for monks.