Meister Eckhart Quotes - Page 5

When I experience Love I must go to God. When I experience non-attachment God must come to me.

[W]e must come into a transformed knowing, an unknowing which comes not from ignorance but from knowledge.

Behold how all those people are merchants who shun great sins and would like to be good and do good deeds in God's honour, such as fasts, vigils, prayers, and similar good deeds of all kinds. They do all these things so that our Lord may give them something, or so that God may do something dear to them. All these people are merchants.

The outward work will never be puny if the inward work is great.

That which a man acquires by contemplation he should spend in love.

I do not find God outside myself or conceive him except as my own and in me.

To be sure, our mental processes often go wrong, so that we imagine God to have gone away. What should be done then? Do exactly what you would do if you felt most secure. Learn to behave thus even in deepest distress and keep yourself that way in any and every estate of life. I can give you no better advice than to find God where you lost him.

Jesus might have said, I became man for you. If you do not become God for me, you wrong me.

Love is as strong as death, as hard as Hell. Death separates the soul from the body, but love separates all things from the soul.

I tell you the truth, any object you have in your mind, however good, will be a barrier between you and the inmost Truth.

God does not work in all hearts alike, but according to the preparation and sensitivity He finds in each.

A man may go into the field and say his prayer and be aware of God, or he may be in Church and be aware of God; but if he is more aware of Him because he is in a quiet place, that is his own deficiency and not due to God, Who is alike present in all things and places, and is willing to give Himself everywhere so far as lies in Him... He knows God rightly who knows Him everywhere.

The most powerful prayer, one wellnigh omnipotent, and the worthiest work of all is the outcome of a quiet mind. The quieter it is the more powerful, the worthier, the deeper, the more telling and more perfect the prayer is.

The love by which we love God is the very same love with which God has first loved us.

Whoever possesses God in their being has Him in a divine manner, and He shines out to them in all things; for them all things taste of God and in all things it is God's image that they see.

Once a man came to me - it was not too long ago - and said that he had given away much landed property and many goods for his own sake so that he might save his soul. Then I thought: 'How little and how insignificant is what you have let go of! It is blindness and foolishness for you to continue looking at all you've let go of. If, however, you've let go of yourself, then you've really let go.'

Remember this: all suffering comes to an end. And whatever you suffer authentically, God has suffered from it first.

A free mind is one which is untroubled and unfettered by anything, which has not bound its best part to any particular manner of being or worship and which does not seek its own interest in anything but is always immersed in God's most precious will. . . . There is no work which men and women can perform, however small, which does not draw from this its power and strength.

Do not think that saintliness comes from occupation; it depends rather on what one is. The kind of work we do does not make us holy, but we may make it holy.

Be ready at all times for the gifts of God, and always for new ones.

Let God work in you, give the work to God, and have peace. Don't worry if He works through your nature or above your nature, because both are His, nature and grace.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

This is my only and permanent complaint, that vulgar people, empty of the Spirit of God, want to judge solely by their human thinking what they listen to or read in the Bible, which has been pronounced and written by the Holy Spirit and in the Holy Spirit.

Even now one rarely hears of people achieving great things unless they first stumble in some respect.

God is equally near in all creatures.