Evelyn Underhill Quotes
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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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God is acting on your soul all the time, whether you have spiritual sensations or not.
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The note we end on is and must be the note of inexhaustible possibility and hope.
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Sometimes I think the resurrection of the body, unless much improved in construction, a mistake!
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When you put aside your preconceived ideas, your self-centered scale of values, and let intuition have its way with you, you open up by this act new levels of the world. Such an opening-up is the most practical of all activities.
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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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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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Have you ever noticed that Jesus is never recorded as taking a holiday? He retired for the purposes of his mission, not from it. He was never destroyed by his work; he was always on top of it. He moved among people as the master of every situation. He was busier than anyone; the multitudes were always at him, yet he had time, for everything and everyone. He was never hurried, or harassed, or too busy. He had complete supremacy over time; he never let it dictate to him. He talked of my time; my hour. He knew exactly when the moment had come for doing something and when it had not.
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Meditation is a half-way house between thinking and contemplating.
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All artists are of necessity in some measure contemplative.
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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Never forget that the key of the situation lies in the will & not in the imagination.
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Delicate humor is the crowning virtue of the saints.