Johannes Tauler Quotes
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In prayerful silence you must look into your own heart. No one can tell you better than yourself what comes between you and God. Ask yourself. Then listen!
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Commemoration of Katherine of Alexandria, Martyr, 4th century If ye keep watch over your hearts, and listen for the Voice of God and learn of Him, in one short hour ye can learn more from Him than ye could learn from Man in a thousand years.
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In the most intimate, hidden and innermost ground of the soul, God is always essentially, actively, and substantially present. Here the soul possesses everything by grace which God possesses by nature.
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God touches and moves, warns and desires all equally, and He wants one quite as much as another. The inequality lies in the way in which His touch, His warnings, and His gifts are received.
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A good meditation, even when it is interrupted by occasional nodding, is much more beneficial than many outward religious exercises.
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God in His wisdom has decided that He will reward no works but His own.
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If you fall seventy times a day, rise seventy times and return to God so that you will not fall too often.
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Even then take heart! The Lord is certainly nearby. Hold fast to the support of the true living faith. Things will be fine. But it is unbelievable to the poor soul in its tortured state that this unbearable darkness could ever turn into light.
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Like blind hens, we are ignorant of our own self and the depths within us.
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Spiritually good people, pure in heart, who long for the Blessed Sacrament but cannot receive at the time, can receive spiritually... even a hundred times a day, in sickness and in health, with immeasurable grace and profit.
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So you must be silent. Then God will be born in you, utter his word in you and you shall hear it; but be very sure that if you speak the word will have to be silent. If you go out, he will most surely come in; as much as you go out for him He will come in to you; no more, no less….
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It is certain that if God is to be born in the soul it must turn back to eternity…. It must turn in toward itself with all is might, must recall itself, and concentrate all its faculties within itself, the lowest as well as the highest. All its dissipated powers must be gathered up into one, because unity is
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If one would a
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Never believe that true prayer consists in mere babbling, reciting so many psalms and vigils, saying your beads while you allow your thoughts to roam.
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The mystery of our union with God affected by the Eucharist, is a union more intimate than the human mind can conceive.
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To discern what weaknesses and faults separate you from God, you must enter into your own inward ground and then confront yourself.
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The second stage is like this: When God has drawn a person so far away from all things, and he is no longer a child and he has been strengthened with the comfort of sweetness. Then indeed one gives him coarse rye bread. He has become a man and has reached maturity. Solid, strong food is what is good and useful for a grown man. He
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Children, to be truly in this stage is the deepest ground of genuine humility and annihilation. This, in truth, cannot be grasped by the senses. For here he receives the most
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Often when He comes, He finds the soul occupied. Other guests are there, and He has to turn away. He cannot gain entry, for we love and desire other things; therefore, His gifts, which He is offering to everyone unceasingly, must remain outside.
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You have within you many strong and cruel enemies to overcome. You must know that there are still a thousand ties which you must break. No one can tell you what they are; only you can tell by looking at yourself and into your heart.
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Judge yourself; if you do that you will not be judged by God, as St. Paul says. But it must be a real sense of your own sinfulness, not an artificial humility.
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Because in the school of the Spirit man learns wisdom through humility, knowledge by forgetting, how to speak by silence, how to live by dying.
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Every one should find some suitable time, day or night, to sink into his depths, each according to his own fashion. Not every one is able to engage in contemplative prayer.
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When shall we find an know this birth of God within us? Only when we concentrate all our faculties within us and direct them all towards God. Then he will be born in us and make himself our very own. He will give himself to us as our own, more completely ours than anything we have ever called our own.