"A Kempis" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... who had spent seventy-two of his ninety-one years behind the sheltering walls of the cloister of Mount St. Agnes near the good town of Zwolle, the old Dutch Hanseatic city on the river Ysel. He was known as Brother Thomas and because he had been born in the village of Kempen, he was called Thomas a Kempis. At the age of twelve he had been sent to Deventer, where Gerhard Groot, a brilliant graduate of the universities of Paris, Cologne and Prague, and famous as a wandering preacher, had founded the Society of the Brothers of the Common Life. The ...
— The Story of Mankind • Hendrik van Loon
... how he might only half give in to your representation, and then I gloried in Anderson's coming down from his height, and being seen in his true colours. So it went on till morning came, and I got up. You know you gave me my mother's little 'Thomas a Kempis'. I always read a bit every morning. To-day it was, 'Of four things that bring much inward peace'. And what do you ...
— The Daisy Chain, or Aspirations • Charlotte Yonge
... continuance of the Great Schism had so injured Church discipline that the clergy and ecclesiastics were in the worst state of all, especially the monastic orders, who owned no superior but the Pope, and between the two rivals could avoid supervision altogether. Such men as Thomas a Kempis, or the great Jean Gerson, were rare indeed; and the monasteries had let themselves lose their missionary character, and become mere large farms, inhabited by celibate gentlemen and their attendants, or by the superfluous daughters of the nobles and gentry. Such devotion ...
— The Caged Lion • Charlotte M. Yonge
... thirteen—the proud, little head and its cap of close-cropped curls showing up against a background of thick-set foliage. On the table, too, lay a well-worn, vellum-bound copy of that holiest of books ever, perhaps, conceived by the heart and written by the hand of man—Thomas a Kempis' Imitation of Christ. It was open at the chapter which is thus entitled—"Of the Zealous Amendment of our Whole Life." While close against it was a packet of Richard's letters—those curt, businesslike communications, ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... race,—thinkers, leaders, seers. Confucius, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, the mediaeval philosophers, the Egyptian, Persian, and Arabian thinkers, Roger Bacon, Thomas Aquinas, Eckhart, William of Occam, Bede, Thomas a Kempis, Francis Bacon, Kant, John Stuart Mill, Spencer,—with what dignity the processional moves down the years! The sum of human knowledge is vast; but how much more vast seem the achievements of each of these men, when we realize how few his years, and how many the obstacles and impediments of ...
— The Warriors • Lindsay, Anna Robertson Brown
... amount of pleasure. Hooker I found a wonder, both for excellency of style and richness of sentiment; and his piety and wisdom, his candor and his charity, have never been surpassed since the days of Christ and His Apostles. And Hoadley too I liked, and Butler, and Thomas a Kempis, and William Law. And then came Bolton and Howe, and Doddridge and Watts. Then Penn, and Barclay, and Clarkson, and Sewell, and Hales, and Dell caught my attention, giving me interesting revelations of ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... Petersburg Pierre did not let anyone know of his arrival, he went nowhere and spent whole days in reading Thomas a Kempis, whose book had been sent him by someone unknown. One thing he continually realized as he read that book: the joy, hitherto unknown to him, of believing in the possibility of attaining perfection, and in the possibility of active brotherly love among men, which Joseph Alexeevich ...
— War and Peace • Leo Tolstoy
... acquaintance with the great Church Fathers, especially with St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, Clement of Alexandria, Origen and the two Gregorys, and with the mystics, especially with the writings of Dionysius the Areopagite, St. Bernard, Thomas a Kempis, and John Tauler. He was intensely Puritan in temper and sympathies in his earlier period of life, and much of his writing at this stage was for the purpose of promoting the increase of a deeper and more adequate reform ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... explains why Father Faber regarded an honest sense of the ridiculous as a help to goodness. The man or woman who is impervious to the absurd cannot well be stripped of self-delusion. For him, for her, there is no shaft which wounds. The admirable advice of Thomas a Kempis to keep away from people whom we desire to please, and the quiet perfection of his warning to the censorious, "In judging others, a man toileth in vain; for the most part he is mistaken, and he easily sinneth; but in judging and scrutinizing himself, he always laboureth with ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... released me once and for all from the trammels of such obligation as is incurred by praise, and set me firmly on my feet in that complete independence which to me (and to all who seek what I have found) is a paramount necessity. For, as Thomas a Kempis writes: "Whosoever neither desires to please men nor fears to displease them shall enjoy much peace." I took my freedom gratefully, and ever since that time of unjust and ill-considered attack from persons who were too malignantly minded ...
— The Life Everlasting: A Reality of Romance • Marie Corelli
... life, by inward feeling and possession, and waits in quietude for divine illumination. The German mysticism of Eckhart[1] (about 1300), which had been continued in Suso and Tauler and had received a practical direction in the Netherlands,—Ruysbroek (about 1350) to Thomas a Kempis (about 1450),—now puts forth new branches and blossoms at the turning point of ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... little incident she often laughed over afterward. It happened that in the "On-looker" there was a quotation from some unnamed medieval writer; she and her father had a discussion as to whom it could be, Raeburn maintaining that it was Thomas a Kempis. Wishing to verify it, Erica went to a bookseller's and asked for the "Imitation of Christ." A rather prim-looking dame ...
— We Two • Edna Lyall
... taken out of his pocket a stumpy, and very shabby little brown volume of Thomas a Kempis, which was ...
— Thistle and Rose - A Story for Girls • Amy Walton
... Michelet thinks to lodge an arrow in our sides by a very odd remark upon Thomas a Kempis: which is, that a man of any conceivable European blood—a Finlander, suppose, or a Zantiote—might have written Tom; only not an Englishman. Whether an Englishman could have forged Tom must remain a matter of doubt, unless the thing had been tried long ago. That ...
— The English Mail-Coach and Joan of Arc • Thomas de Quincey
... C. T. Martin, in Dictionary of National Biography, vol. ix. For Hilton's alleged authorship of the De Imitatione Christi, see J. E. G. de Montmorency, Thomas a Kempis, his Age and ...
— The Cell of Self-Knowledge - Seven Early English Mystical Treaties • Various
... be questioned whether the great work of Thomas a Kempis has ever been presented to better ...
— Astronomy of To-day - A Popular Introduction in Non-Technical Language • Cecil G. Dolmage
... that Fenelon was mainly in the right. Certainly he had an easy task in justifying his statements from the writings of the saints. But we need not trouble ourselves with the "mystic paradox," that it would be better to be with Christ in hell than without Him in heaven—a statement which Thomas a Kempis once wrote and then erased in his manuscript. For wherever Christ is, there is heaven: nor should we regard eternal happiness as anything distinct from "a true conjunction of the mind with God.[13]" "God is not without ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge |
