Meister Eckhart Quotes

80 Sourced Quotes

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.

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

Meister Eckhart
A pure heart is one that is unencumbered, unworried, uncommitted and which does not want its own way about anything but which, rather, is submerged in the loving will of God.

Meister Eckhart
The shell must be cracked apart if what is in it is to come out, for if you want the kernel you must break the shell.

Meister Eckhart
The soul will bring forth Person if God laughs into her and she laughs back to him. To speak in parable, the Father laughs into the Son and the Son laughs back to the Father; and this laughter breeds liking and liking breeds joy, and joy begets love, and love begets Person, and Person begets the Holy Ghost.

Meister Eckhart
There are plenty to follow our Lord half-way, but not the other half. They will give up possessions, friends and honors, but it touches them to closely to disown themselves.

Meister Eckhart
A life of rest and peace in God is good; a life of pain lived in patience is still better; but to have peace in a life of pain is best of all.

Meister Eckhart
Know that when you seek anything of your own, you will never find God, because you do not seek God purely. You are seeking something along with God, and you are acting just as if you were to make a candle out of God in order to look for something with it. Once one finds the things one is looking for, one throws the candle away. This is what you are doing.

Meister Eckhart
To be properly expressed a thing must proceed from within, moved by its form: it must come, not in from without but out from within.

Meister Eckhart
Nature's intent is neither food, nor drink, nor clothing, nor comfort, nor anything else in which God is left out. Whether you like it or not, whether you know it or not, secretly nature seeks, hunts, tries to ferret out the track on which God may be found.

Meister Eckhart
One person who has mastered life is better than a thousand persons who have mastered only the contents of books, but no one can get anything out of life without God.

Meister Eckhart
I have often said that a person who wishes to begin a good life should be like one who draws a circle. Let him or her get the center in the right place and keep it so and the circumference will be good.

Meister Eckhart
The second means of attraction which He used is Emptiness, as we see when we place one end of a hollow pipe in water, and draw up it by suction; the water runs up the stem to the mouth, because the emptiness of the pipe, from which the air has been drawn, draws the water to itself.

Meister Eckhart
He who can make distinction in God without number or quantity, knows that the three persons of the Trinity are one God.

Meister Eckhart
To seek God by rituals is to get the ritual and lose God in the process

Meister Eckhart
It is permissible to take life's blessings with both hands provided thou dost know thyself prepared in the opposite event to take them just as gladly. This applies to food and friends and kindred, to anything God gives and takes away... As long as God is satisfied do thou rest content. If he is pleased to want something else of thee, still rest content.

Meister Eckhart
This then is salvation - when we marvel at the beauty of created things and praise their beautiful Creator.

Meister Eckhart
Sanctification is the best of all things, for it cleanses the soul, and illuminates the conscience, and kindles the heart, and wakens the spirit, and girds up the loins, and glorifies virtue and separates us from creatures, and unites us with God. The quickest means to bring us to perfection is suffering; none enjoy everlasting blessedness more than those who share with Christ the bitterest pangs. Nothing is sharper than suffering, nothing is sweeter than to have suffered. The surest foundation in which this perfection may rest is humility; whatever here crawls in the deepest abjectness, that the Spirit lifts to the very heights of God, for love brings suffering and suffering brings love.

Meister Eckhart
The authorities teach that next to the first emanation, which is the Son coming out of the Father, the angels are most like God. And it may well be true, for the soul at its highest is formed like God, but an angel gives a closer idea of Him. That is all an angel is: an idea of God. For this reason the angel was sent to the soul, so that the soul might be re-formed by it, to be the divine idea by which it was first conceived. Knowledge comes through likeness. And so because the soul may know everything, it is never at rest until it comes to the original idea, in which all things are one. And there it comes to rest in God.

Meister Eckhart
Apprehend God in all things, for God is in all things. Every single creature is full of God and is a book about God. Every creature is a word of God.

Meister Eckhart
He is conscious only of God...To be conscious of knowing God is to know about God and self.

Meister Eckhart
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.

Meister Eckhart
This much is certain: when a man is happy, happy to the core and root of beatitude, he is no longer conscious of himself or anything else.

Meister Eckhart
The inner work is first of all the work of God's grace in the depth of the soul which subsequently distributes itself among the faculties of the soul, in that of Reason appearing as Belief, in that of Will as Love, and in that of Desire as Hope. When the Divine Light penetrates the soul, it is united with God as light with light. This is the light of faith. Faith bears the soul to heights unreachable by her natural senses and faculties.

Meister Eckhart
If you love yourself, you love everybody else as you do yourself. As long as you love another person less than yourself, you will not succeed in loving yourself, but if you love all alike, including yourself, you will love them as one person and that person is both God and man. Thus he is the great righteous person who, loving himself, loves all others equally.

Meister Eckhart
A question arises regarding the angels who dwell with us, serve us and protect us, whether their joys are equal to those of the angels in heaven, or whether they are diminished by the fact that they protect and serve us. No, they are certainly not; for the work of the angels is the will of God, and the will of God is the work of the angels; their service to us does not hinder their joy nor their working. If God told an angel to go to a tree and pluck caterpillars off it, the angel would be quite ready to do so, and it would be his happiness, if it were the will of God.

Meister Eckhart
Grace is from God, and works in the depth of the soul whose powers it employs. It is a light which issues forth to do service under the guidance of the Spirit. The Divine Light permeates the soul, and lifts it above the turmoil of temporal things to rest in God. The soul cannot progress except with the light which God has given it as a nuptial gift; love works the likeness of God into the soul. The peace, freedom and blessedness of all souls consist in their abiding in God's will. Towards this union with God for which it is created the soul strives perpetually.

Meister Eckhart
When you are thwarted, it is your own attitude that is out of order

Meister Eckhart
God is not found in the soul by adding anything but by a process of subtraction.

Meister Eckhart
Through the higher love the whole life of man is to be elevated from temporal selfishness to the spring of all love, to God: man will again be master over nature by abiding in God and lifting her up to God.

Meister Eckhart