Evelyn Underhill Short Quotes

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Mysticism is the passionate longing of the soul for God...

Evelyn Underhill
Religion, like beauty, cannot be experienced in cold blood.

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

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

Evelyn Underhill
Spiritual achievement costs much, though never as much as it is worth.

Evelyn Underhill
For lack of attention a thousand forms of loveliness elude us every day.

Evelyn Underhill
The primary declaration of Christianity is not "This do!" but "This happened!

Evelyn Underhill
Grace is God himself, his loving energy at work within his church and within our souls.

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

Evelyn Underhill
It is important to increase our sense of God's richness and wonder by reading what his great lovers have said about him.

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

Evelyn Underhill
God is always coming to you in the Sacrament of the Present Moment. Meet and receive Him there with gratitude in that sacrament.

Evelyn Underhill
After all it is those who have a deep and real inner life who are best able to deal with the 'irritating details of outer life.'

Evelyn Underhill
In prayer the soul comes nearest the experience of absolute love: in belief it ascends by means of symbols towards absolute truth.

Evelyn Underhill
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.

Evelyn Underhill
Love is creative. It does not flow along the easy paths, spending itself in the attractive. It cuts new channels, goes where it is needed.

Evelyn Underhill
No nation is truly defeated which retains its spiritual self-possession. No nation is truly victorious which does not emerge soul unstained.

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

Evelyn Underhill
True contemplation can only thrive when defended from two opposite exaggerations : quietism on the one hand, and spiritual fuss upon the other.

Evelyn Underhill
All things are perceived in the light of charity, and hence under the aspect of beauty: for beauty is simply Reality seen with the eyes of love.

Evelyn Underhill
The direction and constancy of the will is what really matters, and intellect and feeling are only important insofar as they contribute to that.

Evelyn Underhill
As it is not by the methods of the laboratory that we learn to know life, so it is not by the methods of the intellect that we learn to know God.

Evelyn Underhill
As the social self can only be developed by contact with society, so the spiritual self can only be developed by contact with the spiritual world.

Evelyn Underhill
We have descended into the garden and caught 300 slugs. How I love the mixture of the beautiful and the squalid in gardening. It makes it so lifelike.

Evelyn Underhill
The life of prayer is so great and various there is something in it for everyone. It is like a garden which grows everything, from alpines to potatoes.

Evelyn Underhill
The heart outstrips the clumsy senses, and sees — perhaps for an instant, perhaps for long periods of bliss — an undistorted and more veritable world.

Evelyn Underhill
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.

Evelyn Underhill
I have just been given a very engaging Persian kitten, named after St. Philip Neri (who was very sound on cats) and his opinion is that I have been given to him.

Evelyn Underhill
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.

Evelyn Underhill
If we ask of the saints how they achieved spiritual effectiveness, they are only able to reply that, insofar as they did it themselves, they did it by love and prayer.

Evelyn Underhill