Eckhart Meister Quotes & Sayings

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. — Meister Eckhart

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

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

Nothing is sharper than suffering, nothing is sweeter than to have suffered. — Meister Eckhart

Outward as well as inward morality helps to form the idea of a true Christian freedom. We are right to lay stress on inwardness, but in this world there is no inwardness without an outward expression. — Meister Eckhart

It is in the darkness that one finds the light. — Meister Eckhart

If the seal is pressed completely through the wax so that no wax remains without being impressed by the seal, then it becomes indistinguishably one with the seal. Similarly the soul becomes completely united with God. — 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

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

Every creature is a word of God. — Meister Eckhart

There is no need to look for God here or there. He is no farther away than the door of your own heart. — Meister Eckhart

The mentality of today seeks in fact to reduce everything to temporal categories: a work of art, a thought, a truth have no value in themselves and independently of any historical classification, but only as a result of the time in which they are rightly or wrongly placed; everything is considered the expression of a "period", not of a timeless and intrinsic value, and this is entirely in conformity with modern relativism and with a psychologism or biologism that destroys essential values . This philosophy derives a maximum of originality from what in effect is nothing but a hatred of God; but since it is impossible to abuse directly a God in whom one does not believe, one abuses Him indirectly through the laws of nature , and one goes so far as to disparage the very form of man and his intelligence, the intelligence with which one thinks and abuses. But there is no escaping immanent Truth: "The more he blasphemes," says Meister Eckhart, "the more he praises God. — Frithjof Schuon

My Lord told me a joke. And seeing Him laugh has done more for me than any scripture I will ever read. — 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

Though it may be called a nescience, and unknowing, yet there is in it more than all knowing and understanding without it; for this unknowing lures and attracts you from all understood things, and from yourself as well. — 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

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

The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love. — Meister Eckhart

The more deeply we are our true selves,
the less self is in us. — Meister Eckhart

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

God is not good, or else he could do better. — Meister Eckhart

People should not worry as much about what they do but rather about what they are. If they and their ways are good, then their deeds are radiant. If you are righteous, then what you do will also be righteous. We should not think that holiness is based on what we do but rather on what we are, for it is not our works which sanctify us but we who sanctify our works. — Meister Eckhart

God is greater than God. — 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

It is a fair trade and an equal exchange: to the extent that you depart from things, thus far, no more and no less, God enters into you with all that is his, as far as you have stripped yourself of yourself in all things. It is here that you should begin, whatever the cost, for it is here that you will find true peace, and nowhere else. — Meister Eckhart

When God laughs at the soul and the soul laughs back at God, the persons of the Trinity are begotten. When the Father laughs at the Son and the Son laughs back at the Father, that laughter gives pleasure, that pleasure gives joy, that joy gives love, and that love is the Holy Spirit. — Meister Eckhart

To grasp God in all things
this is the sign of your new birth. — Meister Eckhart

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

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

If the only prayer you said was thank you, that would be enough. — Meister Eckhart

If the only prayer you ever say is thank you, it is enough. — Meister Eckhart

As long as I am this or that, I am not all things. — 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

What our Lord did was done with the intent, and this alone, that he might be with us and we with him. — Meister Eckhart

Existence itself stands in need of nothing, for it lacks nothing, whereas everything else needs it, because outside of it there is nothing. Nothingness stands in need of existence, as a sick man lacks health and is in need. Health has no need of a sick man. To want nothing, therefore, characterizes the highest perfection, is fullest and purest existence. — Meister Eckhart

Let God operate in thee; Hand the work over to Him and do not disquiet thyself as to whether or no He is working with nature or above nature, for His are both nature and grace. — Meister Eckhart

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

Meister Eckhart on this topic: "If you love yourself, you love everybody else as you do yourself. As long as you love another person less than you love yourself, you will not really 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 a great and righteous person who, loving himself, loves all others equally."[14] — Erich Fromm

Jesus went into the temple and boldly drove out those that bought and sold. And when all was cleared, there was nobody left but Jesus. Observe this, for it is the same with us: when he is alone he is able to speak in the temple of the soul.
If anyone else is speaking in the temple of your soul, Jesus will keep still, as if he were not at home. And he is not at home wherever there are strange guests-guests with whom the soul holds conversation, guests who are seeking to bargain. If Jesus is to speak and be heard, the soul must be alone and quiet. — 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

There is in the soul a something in which God dwells, and there is in the soul a something in which the soul dwells in God. — Meister Eckhart

I am what I wanted and I want what I am. — 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

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

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

There is no better advice on how to find God than to seek him where we left him: do now, when you cannot find God, what you did when last you had him, and then you will find him again. — Meister Eckhart

Become aware of what is in you. Announce it, pronounce it, produce it, and give birth to it. — 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

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

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

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

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

God is the word that speaks itself. — Meister Eckhart

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

I am as sure as I live that nothing is so near to me as God. God is nearer to me than I am to myself; my existence depends on the nearness and the presence of God. — Meister Eckhart

Neither agreeable nor disagreeable," I answered. "It just is."
Istigkeit - wasn't that the word Meister Eckhart liked to use? "Is-ness." The Being of Platonic philosophy - except that Plato seems to have made the enormous, the grotesque mistake of separating Being from becoming and identifying it with the mathematical abstraction of the Idea. He could never, poor fellow, have seen a bunch of flowers shining with their own inner light and all but quivering under the pressure of the significance with which they were charged; could never have perceived that what rose and iris and carnation so intensely signified was nothing more, and nothing less, than what they were - a transience that was yet eternal life, a perpetual perishing that was at the same time pure Being, a bundle of minute, unique particulars in which, by some unspeakable and yet self-evident paradox, was to be seen the divine source of all existence. — Aldous Huxley

Man goes far away or near but God never goes far-off; he is always standing close at hand, and even if he cannot stay within he goes no further than the door. — Meister Eckhart

If anyone went on for a thousand years asking of life: 'Why are you living?' life, if it could answer, would only say, 'I live so that I may live.' That is because life lives out of its own ground and springs from its own source, and so it lives without asking why it is itself living. — Meister Eckhart

Even stones have a love, a love that seeks the ground. — 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

God cannot know himself without me. — Meister Eckhart

Whatever God does, the first outburst is always compassion. — Meister Eckhart

Love is the root of all joy and sorrow. — 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

Only those to whom God is present in everything and who employ their reason in the highest degree and have true enjoyment in it know anything of true peace and have a real kingdom of heaven. — Meister Eckhart

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

One must learn an inner solitude, wherever one may be. — 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

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

I mean those who cling to their own egos in their penances and external devotions, which such people regard as being of great importance. God have mercy on them, for they know little of the divine truth! Please people are called holy because of what they are seen to do, but inside they are asses, for they do not know the real meaning of divine truth . . . They are greatly esteemed by people who know no better . . . May they attain heaven because of their good intent, but that poverty, of which we now wish to speak, they know nothing. — Meister Eckhart

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

our Lord said, 'Blessed are the poor in spirit' (Matt. 5:3), which is to say those who are poor in will. — Meister Eckhart

No-one knows what the soul is. But what we do know is, the soul is where God works compassion — Meister Eckhart

The most powerful prayer, one well-nigh 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. To the quiet mind all things are possible. What is a quiet mind? A quiet mind is one which nothing weighs on, nothing worries, which, free from ties and from all self-seeking, is wholly merged into the will of God and dead to its own. — 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

If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, "thank you," that would suffice. — 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

And so in my view the most important thing of all is that we should give ourselves up entirely to God whenever he allows anything to befall us, whether insult, tribulation or any other kind of suffering, accepting it with joy and gratitude and allowing God to guide us all the more rather than seeking these things out ourselves. — Meister Eckhart

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

For God has not linked our salvation with any particular kind of devotion. Any one devotional practice has things which others lack, but the effectiveness of all good practices comes from God alone and is denied to none of them, for one form of goodness cannot conflict with another. Therefore people should remember that if they see or hear of a good person who is following a way which is different from theirs, then they are wrong to think that such a person's efforts are all in vain. If someone else's way of devotion does not please them, then they are ignoring the goodness in it as well as that person's good intention. This is wrong. We should see the true feeling in people's devotional practices and should not scorn the particular way that anyone follows. — Meister Eckhart

On true confidence and on hope. We should be able to recognize true and perfect love by whether or not someone has great hope and confidence in God, for there is nothing that testifies more clearly to perfect love than trust. Wholehearted love for another creates trust in them, and we will truly find in God everything that we dare hope for in him, and a thousand times more. Just as we can never love God too much, neither can we have too much trust in him. Nothing we may do can ever be so appropriate as fully trusting in God. He has never ceased to work great things through those who have great trust in him, and he has clearly shown in all such people that their trust is born of love, for love possesses not only trust but also true knowledge and unshakeable certainty. — Meister Eckhart

In true obedience there should be no 'I want this or that to happen' or 'I want this or that thing' but only a pure going out of what is our own. And therefore in the very best kind of prayer that we can pray there should be no 'give me this particular virtue or way of devotion'2 or 'yes, Lord, give me yourself or eternal life', but rather 'Lord, give me only what you will and do, Lord, only what you will and in the way that you will'. This kind of prayer is as far above the former as heaven is above earth. And when we have prayed in this way, then we have prayed well, having gone out of ourselves and entered God in true obedience. — 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

The moral task of man is a process of spiritualization. All creatures are go-betweens, and we are placed in time that by diligence in spiritual business we may grow liker and nearer to God. The aim of man is beyond the temporal in the serene region of the everlasting Present. — Meister Eckhart

No one is forgotten. It is a lie, any talk of God that does not comfort you. — Meister Eckhart

Now some people are of the opinion that they are altogether holy and perfect, and go around the place with big deeds and big words, and yet they strive for and desire so many things, they wish to possess so much and are so concerned both with themselves and with this thing and that. They assert that they are seeking great piety and devotion, and yet they cannot accept a single word of reproval without answering back. Be certain of this: they are far from God and are not in union with him. — Meister Eckhart

To the quiet mind all things are possible. — Meister Eckhart

Relation is the essence of everything that exists. — Meister Eckhart

As God can only be seen by His own light, so He can only be loved by His own love. — 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

The man who has submitted his will and purposes entirely to God, carries God with him in all his works and in all circumstances. — Meister Eckhart

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

Where there is Isness, there God is. Creation is the giving of isness from God. And that is why God becomes where any creature expresses God. — Meister Eckhart

Truly, it is in the darkness that one finds the light, so when we are in sorrow, then this light is nearest of all to us. — Meister Eckhart

The soul at its highest is found like God, but an angel gives a closer idea of him. That is all an angel is: an idea of God. — Meister Eckhart

Grace pours all beauty into the soul ... The soul means the world. — 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

Love will never be anywhere except where equality and unity are ... And there can be no love where love does not find equality or is not busy creating equality. Nor is there any pleasure without equality. Practice equality in human society. Learn to love, esteem, consider all people like yourself. What happens to another, be it bad or good, pain or joy, ought to be as if it happened to you. — Meister Eckhart

The knower and the known are one. Simple people imagine that they should see God as if he stood there and they here. This is not so. God and I, we are one in knowledge. — Meister Eckhart