Evelyn Underhill Quotes
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Religion, like beauty, cannot be experienced in cold blood.
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Saints are the great teachers of the loving-kindness and fascination with God.
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The mystic cannot wholly do without symbol and image, inadequate to his vision though they must always be: for his experience must be expressed if it is to be communicated, and its actuality is inexpressible except in some hint or parallel which will stimulate the dormant intuition of the reader.
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Deliberately seek opportunities for kindness, sympathy, and patience.
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The direction and constancy of the will is what really matters, & intellect & feeling are only important in so far as they contribute to that.
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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.
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Mysticism is the art of union with Reality.
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Grace is God himself, his loving energy at work within his church and within our souls.
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Adoration is caring for God above all else.
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Much is now being said about evangelism; but before we get effective evangelism, we have to get effective evangelists. Evangelism is useless unless it is the work of one devoted to God, willing and glad to suffer all things for God, penetrated by the attractiveness of God. New machinery, adaptations and adjustments, are not the first need... but more devoted, adoring, sacrificial souls.
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The heart outstrips the clumsy senses, and sees - perhaps for an instant, perhaps for long periods of bliss - an undistorted and more veritable world.
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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.
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You don't have to be peculiar to find God.
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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.
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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.
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God is much in the difficult home problems as in the times of quiet and prayer.
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Spiritual reading is a regular, essential part of the life of prayer, and particularly is it the support of adoring prayer.
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It is important to increase our sense of God's richness and wonder by reading what his great lovers have said about him.
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Worship is the one, total adoring response of man to the one Eternal God.
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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.
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Try to arrange things so that you can have a reasonable bit of quiet every day.
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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.
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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.
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Spiritual achievement costs much, though never as much as it is worth.