Evelyn Underhill Quotes

If God were small enough to be understood, He would not be big enough to be worshipped.

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

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.

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

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.

This is the secret of joy. We shall no longer strive for our own way; but commit ourselves, easily and simply, to God's way, acquiesce in His will, and in so doing find our peace.

My growth depends on my walls coming down.

On every level of life, from housework to heights of prayer, in all judgment and efforts to get things done, hurry and impatience are sure marks of the amateur.

Mysticism is the art of union with Reality.

Try to arrange things so that you can have a reasonable bit of quiet every day.

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

Deliberately seek opportunities for kindness, sympathy, and patience.

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

I do hope your Christmas has had a little touch of Eternity in among the rush and pitter patter and all. It always seems such a mixing of this world and the next - but that after all is the idea!

God is acting on your soul all the time, whether you have spiritual sensations or not.

In the created world around us we see the Eternal Artist, Eternal Love at work.

The direction and constancy of the will is what really matters, & intellect & feeling are only important in so far as they contribute to that.

The will is what matters---as long as you have that, you are safe.

The determined fixing of our will upon God, and pressing toward him steadily and without deflection; this is the very center and the art of prayer.

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

I have just been given a very engaging Persian kitten... and his opinion is that I have been given to him.

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.

Mysticism is the passionate longing of the soul for God.

A simple rule, to be followed whether one is in the light or not, gives backbone to one's spiritual life, as nothing else can.

God is much in the difficult home problems as in the times of quiet and prayer.

It looks impossible until you do it, and then you find it is possible.

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.

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

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

The mystic lives and looks; and speaks the disconcerting language of first-hand experience.

The note we end on is and must be the note of inexhaustible possibility and hope.

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.

All artists are of necessity in some measure contemplative.

There is no place in my soul, no corner of my character, where God is not.

Adoration is caring for God above all else.

Delicate humor is the crowning virtue of the saints.

Never forget that the key of the situation lies in the will & not in the imagination.

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.

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

We mostly spend those lives conjugating three verbs: to Want, to Have, and to Do.

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

The business and method of mysticism is love.

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

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.

Love makes the whole difference between an execution and a martyrdom.

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

You don't have to be peculiar to find God.

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

Worship is the one, total adoring response of man to the one Eternal God.

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.