131 Quotes by Evelyn Underhill

Man’s will and God’s grace rise and fall together.

Your dreamer may do without a creed, but he always wants a ritual...

Christianity is a religion which concerns us as we are here and now, creatures of body and soul. We do not “follow the footsteps of his most holy life” by the exercise of a trained religious imagination, but by treading the firm, rough earth, up hill and down dale.

The heart outstrips the clumsy senses, and sees – perhaps for an instant, perhaps for long periods of bliss – an undistorted and more veritable world.

When the vivid reality which is meant by these rather abstract words is truly possessed by us, when that which is unchanging in ourselves is given its chance, and emerges from the stream of succession to recognise its true home and goal, which is God – then, though much suffering may, indeed will, remain; apprehension, confusion, instability, despair, will cease.

The will is what matters – as long as you have that, you are safe.

I do not think reading the mystics would hurt you myself: you say you must avoid books which deal with ‘feelings’ – but the mystics don’t deal with feelings but with love which is a very different thing. You have too many ‘feelings,’ but not nearly enough love.

To “purify” the senses is to release them, so far as human beings may, from the tyranny of egocentric judgments; to make of them the organs of direct perception. This means that we must crush our deep-seated passion for classification and correspondences; ignore the instinctive, selfish question, “What does it mean to me?” learn to dip ourselves in the universe at our gates, and know it, not from without by comprehension, but from within by self-mergence.

For no man understandeth what love is in itself, but such are its workings: which giveth more than one can take, and asketh more than one can pay.