Meister Eckhart Quotes

Love God, and do as you like, say the Free Spirits. Yes; but as long as you like anything contrary to God's will, you do not love Him. ~ Meister Eckhart

When God sends his angel to the soul it becomes the one who knows for sure. ~ Meister Eckhart

The story of the Good Samaritan (Luke 1o) can he interpreted mystically in such a way that the question of the knowledge of God becomes its focus. The priest and the Levite, who walk past the man who fell among robbers and was seriously hurt, are pious God-fearing persons. They "know" God and the law of God. They have God the same way that the one who knows has that which is known. They know what God wants them to be and do. They also know where God is to he found, in the scriptures and the cult of the temple. For them, God is mediated through the existing institutions. They have their God - one who is not to he found on the road between Jerusalem and Jericho.

What is wrong with this knowledge of God? The problem is not the knowledge of the Torah or the knowledge of the temple. (It is absurd to read an anti-Judaistic meaning into a story of the Jew Jesus, since it could just as well have come from Hillel or another Jewish teacher.) What is false is a knowledge of God that does not allow for any unknowing or any negative theology. Because both actors know that God is "this," they do not see "that." Hence the Good Samaritan is the anti-fundamentalist story par excellence.

"And so I ask God to rid me of God," Meister Eckhart says. The God who is known and familiar is too small for him. ~ Dorothee Solle

You should not imagine that your reason can evolve to the extent of understanding God. Rather, if God is to shine divinely within you, your natural light cannot assist this process but must become a pure nothingness, going out of itself. Only then can God enter with his light, bringing back with him all that you have renounced and a thousand times more, including a new form which contains all things in itself. ~ Meister Eckhart

Action and becoming are one. ~ Meister Eckhart

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

God is in all things, but so far as God is Divine and so far as He is rational, God is nowhere so properly as in the soul - in the innermost of the soul ~ Meister Eckhart

Pay heed to this, how you are turned toward your God, when you are in church or in your cell. Maintain this same state of mind and bear it among the crowd and into unrest and dissimilarity. ~ Meister Eckhart

Furthermore, we should keep all things only as if they had been merely lent and not given to us, without any sense of possessiveness, whether it be our body or soul, our senses, faculties, worldly goods or honour, friends, relations, house or home or anything whatsoever. ~ Meister Eckhart

Every creature is a word of God and is a book about God. ~ Meister Eckhart

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

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. ~ Meister Eckhart

How can we be directly in God, neither striving nor seeking for anything other than him, and how can we be so poor and give up everything? It is hard counsel that we should not desire any reward. Now be certain of this: God never ceases to give us everything. Even if he had sworn not to, he still could not help giving us things. It is far more important to him to give than it is for us to receive, but we should not focus upon this, for the less we strive for it, the more God will give us. God intends thereby only that we should become yet more rich and be all the more capable of receiving things from him. ~ Meister Eckhart

God is at home. We are in the far country. ~ Meister Eckhart

We ought not to have or let ourselves be satisfied with any thought of God. When the thought goes, our God goes with it. No, what we want is a real (subsistent) God who far transcends the thoughts of men and creatures. This God does not disappear unless we turn our back on him of our own accord. He who has God thus, in reality, has gotten God divinely; to him God is apparent in all things. Everything smacks to him of God; everywhere God's image stares him in the face. God is gleaming in him all the time. In him there is riddance and return; the vision of his God is ever present to his mind. ~ Meister Eckhart

You should observe, and have observed, in which direction God urges you most of all to go, for, as St. Paul says, not all people are called to follow the same path to God. If you find then that the shortest way for you does not lie in many outward works, great endurance and privation (which things are in any case of little importance unless we are particularly called to them by God or unless we have sufficient strength to perform them without disrupting our inner life), if you do not find these things right for you, then be at peace and have little to do with them.


But then you might say: if they are not important, why did our forebears, including many saints, do these things? Consider this: if our Lord gave them this particular kind of devotional practice, then he also gave them the strength to carry it through, and it was this which pleased him and which was their greatest achievement. For God has not linked our salvation with any particular kind of devotion . . . Not everyone can follow the same way, nor can all people follow only one way, nor can we follow all the different ways or everyone else's way . . . It is the same with following the severe life-style of such saints. You should love their way and find it appealing, even though you do not have to follow their example. ~ Meister Eckhart

We should not content ourselves with a God of thoughts for, when the thoughts come to an end, so too shall God. Rather, we should have a living God who is beyond the thoughts of all people and all creatures. That kind of God will not leave us, unless we ourselves choose to turn away from him. ~ Meister Eckhart

It is not by your actions that you will be saved, but by your being. ~ Meister Eckhart

There is no stopping place in this life
nor is there ever one for any person, no matter how far along the way one's gone. ~ Meister Eckhart

Though one should live through all the time from Adam and all the time to come before the judgment day doing good works, yet he who, energising in his highest, purest part, crosses from time to eternity, verily in the sight of God this man conceives and does far more than anyone who lives throughout all past and future time, because this now includes the whole of time. One master says that in crossing over time into the now each power of the soul will surpass itself ... ~ Meister Eckhart

every human who says: 'I AM this or that or whatever' - which, as Meister Eckhart points out, only God can really, really say - is a unique and quite indispensable aspect of His infinite variety. Shankara, the great Hindu sage and philosopher, tells us, 'This being-the-Self-of-all is the highest state of consciousness of the Self, His supreme natural state. But when, before this, one feels oneself to be other than the Self of all, even by a hair's breadth, that state is delusion.' D.E. Harding ~ Richard Lang

Whether you like it or not, whether you know it or not, secretly all nature seeks God and works toward [God]. ~ Meister Eckhart

Even stones have a love, a love that seeks the ground. ~ Meister Eckhart

When the Soul wants to experience something she throws out an image in front of her and then steps into it. ~ Meister Eckhart

One must not always think so much about what one should do, but rather what one should be. Our works do not ennoble us; but we must ennoble our works. ~ Meister Eckhart

We are all meant to be mothers of God ... for God is always needing to be born. ~ Meister Eckhart

I may err but I am not a heretic, for the first has to do with the mind and the second with the will! ~ Meister Eckhart

For some reason when I type the word "love" in my iPad it keeps autocorrecting to "live". I find it oddly profound. My ipad IS. My iPad is ZEN:
"Only the iPad that autocorrects can write the true thing. ~ Annastacia Dickerson

I will be silent and will hear what God will say in me ... If God wishes to speak to me, let him enter. I will not go out. ~ Meister Eckhart

God is at his greatest when I am at my least. ~ Meister Eckhart

Treat all things as if they were loaned to you without any ownership - whether body or soul, sense or strength, external goods or honors, house or hall ... everything. ~ Meister Eckhart

Only those who have dared to let go can dare to re-enter. ~ Meister Eckhart

You will have peace to the extent that you have God, and the further you are away from God the less you will be at peace ... Thus you may measure your progress with God by measuring your peace or the lack of it. ~ Meister Eckhart

When a man sees the one in all things, he is above mere understanding. ~ Meister Eckhart

As long as I am this or that, or have this or that, I am not all things and I have not all things. Become pure till you neither are nor have either this or that; then you are omnipresent and, being neither this nor that, are all things. ~ 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

As long as I am this or that, I am not all things. ~ Meister Eckhart

And suddenly you know: It's time to start something new and trust the magic of beginnings. ~ Meister Eckhart

Now, you might say: how can this be? I cannot feel his presence in any way. Listen to this. Sensing his presence is not in your power but in his. He will show himself when it suits him to do so, and he can also remain hidden if that is his wish. This is what Christ meant when he said to Nicodemus: 'The spirit breathes where it will: you hear its voice but do not know where it comes from, or where it is going' (John 3:8). ~ Meister Eckhart

In this breaking-through, I receive that God and I are one. Then I am what I was, and then I neither diminish nor increase, for I am then an immovable cause that moves all things. ~ Meister Eckhart

In Islam, and especially among the Sufi Orders, siyahat or 'errance' - the action or rhythm of walking - was used as a technique for dissolving the attachments of the world and allowing men to lose themselves in God. The aim of a dervish was to become a 'dead man walking': one whose body stays alive on the earth yet whose soul is already in Heaven. A Sufi manual, the Kashf-al-Mahjub, says that, toward the end of his tourney, the dervish becomes the Way not the wayfarer, i.e. a place over which something is passing, not a traveller following his own free will...it was quite similar to an Aboriginal concept, 'Many men afterwards become country, in that place, Ancestors.' By spending his whole life walking and singing his Ancestor's Songline, a man eventually became the track, the Ancestor and the song. The Wayless Way, where the Sons of God lose themselves and, at the same time, find themselves. ~ Meister Eckhart

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. ~ Meister Eckhart

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

Wisdom consists in doing the next thing you have to do, doing it with your whole heart, and finding delight in doing it. ~ Meister Eckhart

The Father and the Son have one Will, and that Will is the Holy Ghost, Who gives Himself to the soul so that the Divine Nature permeates the powers of the soul so that it can only do God-like works. ~ 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

Some people want to see God with their eyes as they see a cow, and to love Him as they love a cow - for the milk and cheese and profit it brings them. This is how it is with people who love God for the sake of outward wealth or inward comfort. They do not rightly love God, when they love Him for their own advantage. ~ Meister Eckhart

For God does not give us anything in order that we should enjoy its possession and rest content with it, nor has he ever done so. All the gifts which he has ever granted us in heaven or on earth were made solely in order to be able to give us the one gift, which is himself. With all other gifts he simply wants to prepare us for that gift which is himself. And all the works which God has ever performed in heaven or on earth served solely to perform the one work, that is to sanctify himself so that he can sanctify us. And so I tell you that we should learn to see God in all gifts and works, neither resting content with anything nor becoming attached to anything. For us there can be no attachment to a particular manner of behaviour in this life, nor has this ever been right, however successful we may have been. ~ 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

By humility, out of an enemy He has made a friend, which is more than to have created a new earth. ~ Meister Eckhart

The outward man is the swinging door; the inner man is the still hinge. ~ Meister Eckhart

The most important hour is always the present.
The most significant person is precisely the one sitting across from you right now.
The most necessary work is always love. ~ Meister Eckhart

People should not worry so much about what they do but rather about what they are. ~ Meister Eckhart

Do exactly what you would do if you felt most secure. ~ Meister Eckhart

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

God is a great underground river that no one can dam up and no one can stop. ~ Meister Eckhart

Only the hand that erases can write the true thing. ~ Meister Eckhart

The soul must long for God in order to be set aflame by God's love; but if the soul cannot yet feel the longing, then it must long for the longing. To long for the longing is also from God. ~ Meister Eckhart

The soul does not grow by addition but by subtraction. ~ Meister Eckhart

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

The soul is created in a place between Time and Eternity: with its highest powers it touches Eternity, with its lower Time. ~ Meister Eckhart

Obedience need never be anxious, for there is no form of goodness which it does not possess in itself. When we go out of ourselves through obedience and strip ourselves of what is ours, then God must enter into us; for when someone wills nothing for themselves, then God must will on their behalf just as he does for himself. Whenever I have taken leave of my own will, putting it in the hands of my superior , and no longer will anything for myself, then God must will on my behalf, and if he neglects me in this respect, then he neglects himself. And so in all things in which I do not will for myself, God wills on my behalf. ~ Meister Eckhart

There is a huge silence inside each of us that beckons us into itself, and the recovery of our own silence can begin to teach us the language of heaven. ~ Meister Eckhart

Where and when God finds you ready, he must act and overflow into you, just as when the air is clear and pure, the sun must overflow into it and cannot refrain from doing that. ~ Meister Eckhart

You should love, respect and regard all others as yourself; and you should feel that whatever happens to someone else, whether good things or bad, is happening to you ... If you love blessedness in yourself more than in another, this is wrong, for if you love blessedness in yourself more than in another, than you love yourself [instead of others], and where you love yourself, God is not your sole love, and that is wrong. ~ Meister Eckhart

To the extent that you eliminate ego from your activities, God comes into them - but no more and no less. Begin with that, and let it cost you your uttermost. In this way, and no other, is true peace to be found. ~ Meister Eckhart

He who would be serene and pure needs but one thing, detachment. ~ Meister Eckhart

God, who is faithful, allows his friends to fall frequently into weakness only in order to remove from them any prop on which they might lean. For a loving person it would be a great joy to be able to achieve many great feats, whether keeping vigils, fasting, performing other ascetical practices or doing major, difficult and unusual works. For them this is a great joy, support and source of hope so that their works become a product and a support upon which they can lean. But it is precisely this which our Lord wishes to take from them so that he alone will be their help and support . . . in no way do our works serve to make God give us anything or do anything for us. Our Lord wishes his friends to be freed from such an attitude, and thus he removes their support from them so that they must henceforth find their support only in him. ~ Meister Eckhart

Now rejoice, all ye powers of my soul, that you are so united with God that no one may separate you from Him. I cannot fully praise nor love Him therefore must I die, and cast myself into the divine void, till I rise from non-existence to existence. ~ Meister Eckhart

For the person who has learned to let go and let be, nothing can ever get in the way again. ~ Meister Eckhart

A just person is one who is conformed and transformed into justice. ~ Meister Eckhart

Philosophers say the Soul is double-faced, her upper face gazes at God all the time and her lower face looks somewhat down, informing the senses; and the upper face, which is the summit of the soul, is in eternity and has nothing to do with time: it knows nothing of time or of body. ~ Meister Eckhart

All that the Eternal Father teaches and reveals is His being, His nature, and His Godhead , which He manifests to us in His Son, and teaches us that we are also His Son. ~ Meister Eckhart

To get at the core of God at his greatest, one must first get to the core of himself at his least, for no one can know God who has not first known himself. This core is a simple stillness, which is unmoved itself but by whose immobility all things are moved and all receive life. ~ Meister Eckhart

I have sought earnestly and with great diligence that good and high virtue by which man may draw closest to God ... and as far as my intelligence would permit, I find that high virtue to be pure disinterest, that is, detachment from creatures. Our Lord said to Martha 'Unum est necessarium', which is to say; to be untroubled and pure, one thing is necessary and that is disinterest. ~ Meister Eckhart

Nobody at any time is cut off from God. ~ Meister Eckhart

We shall find God in everything alike, and find God always alike in everything. ~ Meister Eckhart

The seed of God is in us. Given an intelligent and hard-working farmer, it will thrive and grow up to God, whose seed it is; and accordingly its fruits will be God-nature. Pear seeds grow into pear trees, nut seeds into nut trees, and God-seed into God. ~ Meister Eckhart

God is at home, it's we who have gone out for a walk. ~ Meister Eckhart

You need seek God neither below or above.He is no farther away than the door of the heart. ~ Meister Eckhart

There is no greater valor nor no sterner fight. He who would be what he ought to be must stop being what he is. ~ Meister Eckhart

The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me. ~ Meister Eckhart

The outward work can never be small if the inward one is great, and the outward work can never be great or good if the inward is small or of little worth. ~ Meister Eckhart

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

A man should orient his will and all his works to God and having only God in view go forward unafraid, not thinking, am I right or am I wrong? One who worked out all the chances before starting his first fight would never fight at all. And if, going to someplace, we must think how to set the front foot down, we shall never get there. It is our duty to do the next thing: go straight on, that is the right way. ~ 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

If we seek God for our own good and profit, we are not seeking God. ~ Meister Eckhart

Love is the root of all joy and sorrow. ~ Meister Eckhart

In silence man can most readily preserve his integrity. ~ Meister Eckhart

If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough. ~ Meister Eckhart

And so, too, I speak of love: he who is held by it is held by the strongest of bonds, and yet the stress is pleasant. Moreover, he can sweetly bear all that happens to him. When one has found this bond, he looks for no other. ~ Meister Eckhart

Theologians may quarrel, but the mystics of the world speak the same language. ~ Meister Eckhart

The only thing that burns in hell is the part of you that won't let go of your life: your memories, your attachments.
They burn them all away, but they're not punishing you, they're freeing your soul.
If you're frightened of dying and you're holding on, you'll see devils tearing your life away.
If you've made your peace, then the devils are really angels freeing you from the earth. ~ Meister Eckhart

Above all else, know this: Be prepared at all times for the gifts of God and be ready always for new ones. For God is a thousand times more ready to give than we are to receive ~ Meister Eckhart

Saint Augustine cries, Lord I cannot love you, but come in and love yourself in me. According to Saint Paul, we must put off our own natural form and put on the form of God, and Saint Augustine tells us to discard our own mode of nature; then the divine nature will flow in and be revealed. Saint Augustine says, Those who seek and find, find not. He who seeks and finds not, he alone finds. Saint Paul says, What I was, was not I, it was God in me. ~ Meister Eckhart

The Ultimate and Highest leave taking is leaving God for GOD, leaving your notion of God for an Experience of That which transcends all notions. ~ Meister Eckhart

But many people want to look upon God with the eyes with which they look upon a cow; they want to love God the way they love a cow that you love because it gives you milk and cheese. This is how people behave who want to love God because of external wealth or inner comfort; but they do not love God properly: rather, they love their self interest. ~ Meister Eckhart

If the only prayer you said was thank you, that would be enough. ~ 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

Eckhart tells us that God 'must' give birth to himself in us fully and at all times. He has no choice in the matter; this is simply his nature. If we do not receive the spiritual benefits of this birth, then that is because we are not content to allow God to act in us. Rather, we obstruct him with our false notions of self and the determination to cling to the nothingness which is the true reality of our own creaturely being. ~ Meister Eckhart