Evelyn Underhill Quotes
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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.
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All artists are of necessity in some measure contemplative.
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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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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 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.
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Sometimes I think the resurrection of the body, unless much improved in construction, a mistake!
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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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Meditation is a half-way house between thinking and contemplating.
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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.
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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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The first question here, then, is not "What is best for my soul?" nor is it even "What is most useful to humanity?" But-transcending both these limited aims-what function must this life fulfill in the great and secret economy of God?
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You don't have to be peculiar to find God.
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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.
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The note we end on is and must be the note of inexhaustible possibility and hope.
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It is immediately apparent, however, that this sense-world, this seemingly real external universe - though it may be useful and valid in other respects - cannot be the external world, but only the Self's projected picture of it ... The evidence of the senses, then, cannot be accepted as evidence of the nature of ultimate reality; useful servants, they are dangerous guides.
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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.
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Never forget that the key of the situation lies in the will & not in the imagination.
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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.
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Spiritual achievement costs much, though never as much as it is worth.