Meister Eckhart Best 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

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

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

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

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

God is greater than God. — 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

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

The very best and highest attainment in this life is to
remain still and let God act and speak in you. — Meister Eckhart

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

You may call God love, you may call God goodness. But the best name for God is compassion. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

Our best chance of finding God is to look in the place where we left him. — Meister Eckhart

The freer the mind is, the more powerful and worthy, the more useful, praiseworthy and perfect the prayer and the work become. A free mind can achieve all things. But what is a free mind? 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 devotion and which does not seek its own interest in anything but is always immersed in God's most precious will, having gone out of what is its own. There is no work which men and women can perform, however small, which does not draw from this its power and its strength. — 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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

God cannot know himself without me. — 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

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