Evelyn Underhill Quotes - Page 4

Adoration is caring for God above all else.

The spiritual life is a stern choice. It is not a consoling retreat from the difficulties of existence; but an invitation to enter fully into that difficult existence, and there apply the Charity of God and bear the cost.

Meditation is a half-way house between thinking and contemplating.

Delicate humor is the crowning virtue of the saints.

Worship is the one, total adoring response of man to the one Eternal God.

Christian history looks glorious in retrospect; but it is made up of constant hard choices and unattractive tasks, accepted under the pressure of the Will of God.

Your dreamer may do without a creed, but he always wants a ritual.

Man's will and God's grace rise and fall together

As to the most prudent logicians might venture to deduce from a skein of wool the probable existence of a sheep; so you, from the raw stuff of perception, may venture to deduce a universe which transcends the reproductive powers of your loom.

In my relations with my father, which are difficult and where I'm often met by coolness and indifference, I am constantly tempted to be cold and indifferent. Yet I know that this is a test if I could take it rightly.

The soul's house is not built on such a convenient plan; there are few soundproof partitions in it. Only when the conviction - not merely the idea - that the demand of the Spirit, however inconvenient, rules the whole of it, will those objectionable noises die down which have a way of penetrating into the nicely furnished little oratory and drowning all the quieter voices by their din.

Saints are the great teachers of the loving-kindness and fascination with God.

I have an idea heaven will be both absolutely happy and absolutely dark, to protect us from the blaze of God.

Spiritual reading is a regular, essential part of the life of prayer, and particularly is it the support of adoring prayer.

If by losing the spirit of prayer, you mean losing the heavenly sensations of deep devotion, I am afraid that does not matter a scrap.

religion, like beauty, cannot be experienced in cold blood.

The London streets are paths of loveliness; the very omnibuses look like colored archangels, their laps filled full of little trustful souls.

Sometimes I think the resurrection of the body, unless much improved in construction, a mistake!

No metaphysician has yet shaken the ordinary individual's belief in his own existence. The uncertainties only begin for most of us when we ask what else is.