I may err but I am not a heretic, for the first has to do with the mind and the second with the will!Collection: Mind
This is not only a commandment but also a promise or reward.Collection: Promise
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.Collection: Christian
He who can make distinction in God without number or quantity, knows that the three persons of the Trinity are one God.Collection: Numbers
The less you feel and the more firmly you believe, the more praiseworthy is your faith and the more it will be esteemed and appreciated; for real faith is much more than a mere opinion of man. In it we have true knowledge: in truth, we lack nothing save true faith.Collection: Real
Through the higher love the whole life of man is to be elevated from temporal selfishness to the spring of all love, to God: man will again be master over nature by abiding in God and lifting her up to God.Collection: Spring
To walk on not wondering am I right or doing something wrong.Collection: Wonder
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.Collection: Spiritual
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.Collection: Wisdom
No one is forgotten. It is a lie, any talk of God that does not comfort you.Collection: Spiritual
The greatest power available to man is not to use it.Collection: Men
God must act and pour himself into you the moment he finds you ready. Don't imagine that God can be compared to an earthly carpenter, who acts or doesn't act, as he wishes; who can will to do something or leave it undone, according to his pleasure. It is not that way with God: 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.Collection: Air
Therefore, look only for this fishhook, and you will be happily caught. The more you are caught, the more you will be liberated.Collection: Looks
The soul loves the body. And consider too how it is that the body is more in the soul than the soul is in the body.Collection: Soul
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.Collection: Spiritual
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.Collection: Life
A pure heart is one that is unencumbered, unworried, uncommitted and which does not want its own way about anything but which, rather, is submerged in the loving will of God.Collection: Heart
Time is what keeps the light from reaching us. There is no greater obstacle to God than time: and not only time but temporalities, not only temporal things but temporal affections, not only temporal affections but the very taint and smell of time.Collection: Time
What our Lord did was done with the intent, and this alone, that he might be with us and we with him.Collection: Done
One must learn an inner solitude, where or with whomsoever he may be. He must learn to penetrate things and find God there, to get a strong impression of God firmly fixed on his mind.Collection: Strong
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.Collection: Spiritual
If I had a friend and loved him because of the benefits which this brought me and because of getting my own way, then it would not be my friend that I loved but myself. I should love my friend on account of his own goodness and virtues and account of all that he is in himself. Only if I love my friend in this way do I love him properly.Collection: I Love Him
The soul will bring forth Person if God laughs into her and she laughs back to him. To speak in parable, the Father laughs into the Son and the Son laughs back to the Father; and this laughter breeds liking and liking breeds joy, and joy begets love, and love begets Person, and Person begets the Holy Ghost.Collection: Laughter
This then is salvation - when we marvel at the beauty of created things and praise their beautiful Creator.Collection: Beautiful
I have a capacity in my soul for taking in God entirely. I am as sure as I live that nothing is so near to me as God.Collection: God
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.Collection: Knowledge
I maintain that all sorrow comes from love of those things of which loss deprives me.Collection: Loss
I have often said that a person who wishes to begin a good life should be like one who draws a circle. Let him or her get the center in the right place and keep it so and the circumference will be good.Collection: Good Life
My children, mark me. I pray you. Know! God loves my soul so much that his very life and being depend upon his loving me, whether he would or no. To stop God loving me would be to rob him of his Godhood; for God is love no less than he is truth; as he is good, so is he love as well. It is the absolute truth, as God lives... If anyone would ask me what God is, I should answer: God is love, and so altogether lovely that creatures all with one accord essay to love his loveliness, whether they do so knowingly or unbeknownst, in joy or sorrow.Collection: Children
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. . . .Collection: Past
God is at his greatest when I am at my least.Collection: Spirituality
God wants nothing from you but the gift of a peaceful heart.Collection: Heart
I do not find God outside myself or conceive him except as my own and in me.Collection: My Own
When a man sees the one in all things, he is above mere understanding.Collection: Men
God is a great underground river that no one can dam up and no one can stop.Collection: Rivers
As God can only be seen by His own light, so He can only be loved by His own love.Collection: Light
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.Collection: Fighting
[W]e must come into a transformed knowing, an unknowing which comes not from ignorance but from knowledge.Collection: Ignorance
God is at home. We are in the far country.Collection: Country
People should think less about what they ought to do and more about what they ought to be. If only their being were good, their works would shine forth brightly. Do not imagine that you can ground your salvation upon actions; it must rest on what you are.Collection: Faith
I tell you the truth, any object you have in your mind, however good, will be a barrier between you and the inmost Truth.Collection: Mind
Grace pours all beauty into the soul ... The soul means the world.Collection: Beauty
Jesus might have said, I became man for you. If you do not become God for me, you wrong me.Collection: Inspirational
In silence man can most readily preserve his integrity.Collection: Integrity
That which a man acquires by contemplation he should spend in love.Collection: Love
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. However “sacred” a calling may be, as it is a calling, it has no power to sanctify.Collection: Work
To be sure, our mental processes often go wrong, so that we imagine God to have gone away. What should be done then? Do exactly what you would do if you felt most secure. Learn to behave thus even in deepest distress and keep yourself that way in any and every estate of life. I can give you no better advice than to find God where you lost him.Collection: Faith
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.Collection: Freedom
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.Collection: Shining