Evelyn Underhill
Deliberately seek opportunities for kindness, sympathy, and patience.Collection: Patience
Towards my husband, I often fail to show interest in his affairs and amusements, not rousing myself to respond when I'm tired or concerned with other things, forgetting he is very patient with me.Collection: Patience
Adoration is caring for God above all else.Collection: God
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.Collection: Beauty
God is much in the difficult home problems as in the times of quiet and prayer.Collection: Home
There is no place in my soul, no corner of my character, where God is not.Collection: God
Never forget that the key to the situation lies in the will and not in the imagination.Collection: Imagination
God is always coming to you in the Sacrament of the Present Moment. Meet and receive Him there with gratitude in that sacrament.
Try to arrange things so that you can have a reasonable bit of quiet every day.
Every minute you are thinking of evil, you might have been thinking of good instead. Refuse to pander to a morbid interest in your own misdeeds. Pick yourself up, be sorry, shake yourself, and go on again.
The direction and constancy of the will is what really matters, and intellect and feeling are only important insofar as they contribute to that.
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.
In my relations with my father, which are difficult and where I'm often met by coolness and indifference, I am constantly tempted to be cold and indifferent. Yet I know that this is a test if I could take it rightly.
You don't have to be peculiar to find God.
The will is what matters - as long as you have that, you are safe.
God is acting on your soul all the time, whether you have spiritual sensations or not.
For lack of attention a thousand forms of loveliness elude us every day.Collection: Beauty
Do not entertain the notion that you ought to advance in your prayer. If you do, you will only find you have put on the brake instead of the acceleration. All real progress in spiritual things comes gently, imperceptibly, and is the work of God. Our crude efforts spoil it. Know yourself for the childish, limited and dependent soul you are. Remember that the only growth which matters happens without our knowledge and that trying to stretch ourselves is both dangerous and silly. Think of the Infinite Goodness, never of your own state.Collection: God
We mostly spend [our] lives conjugating three verbs: to Want, to Have, and to Do... forgetting that none of these verbs have any ultimate significance, except so far as they are transcended by and included in , the fundamental verb, to Be.Collection: Three
Many people feel unaware of any guidance, unable to discern or understand the signals of God; not because the signals are not given, but because the mind is too troubled, clouded, and hurried to receive them.Collection: People
If God were small enough to be understood, He would not be big enough to be worshipped.Collection: God
My growth depends on my walls coming down.Collection: Wall
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.Collection: Cutting
Faith is not a refuge from reality. It is a demand that we face reality ... The true subject matter of religion is not our own little souls, but the Eternal God and His whole mysterious purpose, and our solemn responsibility to Him.Collection: Christian
But so many Christians are like deaf people at a concert. They study the programme carefully, believe every statement make in it, speak respectfully of the quality of the music, but only really hear a phrase now and again. So they have no notion at all of the mighty symphony which fills the universe, to which our lives are destined to make their tiny contribution, and which is the self-expression of the Eternal God.Collection: Christian
The spiritual life of individuals has to be extended both vertically to God and horizontally to other souls; and the more it grows in both directions, the less merely individual and therefore more truly personal it will become.Collection: Spiritual
Mysticism is the passionate longing of the soul for God.Collection: Soul
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.Collection: Prayer
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.Collection: Joy
It seems so much easier in these days to live morally than to live beautifully. Lots of us manage to exist for years without ever sinning against society, but we sin against loveliness every hour of the day.Collection: Years
Christianity is a religion which concerns us as we are here and now, creatures of body and soul. We do not "follow the footsteps of his most holy life" by the exercise of a trained religious imagination, but by treading the firm, rough earth, up hill and down dale.Collection: Christian
Never let yourself think that because God has given you many things to do for Himpressing routine jobs, a life full up with duties and demands of a very practical sort---that all these need separate you from communion with Him. God is always coming to you in the Sacrament of the Present Moment. Meet and receive Him there with gratitude in that sacrament; however unexpected its outward form may be receive Him in every sight and sound, joy, pain, opportunity and sacrifice.Collection: Gratitude
The Christian is the person who sees every time and every situation, however dreary and repetitive, as God sees it - a fresh creation from his hand, demanding its own response in perhaps a wholly new and creative way. Under God he is free over it. He has won through to a purchase over events; he has risen with Christ.Collection: Christian
The life, beauty and meaning of the whole created order, from the tomtit to the Milky Way, refers back to the Absolute Life and Beauty of its Creator: and so lived, every bit has spiritual significance.Collection: Spiritual
In the created world around us we see the Eternal Artist, Eternal Love at work.Collection: Artist
The spiritual life is a stern choice. It is not a consoling retreat from the difficulties of existence; but an invitation to enter fully into that difficult existence, and there apply the Charity of God and bear the cost.Collection: Spiritual
Meditation is a half-way house between thinking and contemplating.Collection: Thinking
Worship is the one, total adoring response of man to the one Eternal God.Collection: Men
Delicate humor is the crowning virtue of the saints.Collection: Happiness
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.Collection: Christian
Your dreamer may do without a creed, but he always wants a ritual.Collection: Dreamer
Man's will and God's grace rise and fall togetherCollection: Fall
As to the most prudent logicians might venture to deduce from a skein of wool the probable existence of a sheep; so you, from the raw stuff of perception, may venture to deduce a universe which transcends the reproductive powers of your loom.Collection: Sheep
The soul's house is not built on such a convenient plan; there are few soundproof partitions in it. Only when the conviction - not merely the idea - that the demand of the Spirit, however inconvenient, rules the whole of it, will those objectionable noises die down which have a way of penetrating into the nicely furnished little oratory and drowning all the quieter voices by their din.Collection: Ideas
Saints are the great teachers of the loving-kindness and fascination with God.Collection: Teacher
I have an idea heaven will be both absolutely happy and absolutely dark, to protect us from the blaze of God.Collection: Dark
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.Collection: Prayer
Spiritual reading is a regular, essential part of the life of prayer, and particularly is it the support of adoring prayer.Collection: Inspirational
religion, like beauty, cannot be experienced in cold blood.Collection: Blood
The London streets are paths of loveliness; the very omnibuses look like colored archangels, their laps filled full of little trustful souls.Collection: Soul