Meister Eckhart Quotes

What good is it that Christ was born [2,000] years ago if he is not born now in your heart?

Our bodily food is changed into us, but our spiritual food changes us into it.

The soul loves the body. And consider too how it is that the body is more in the soul than the soul is in the body.

Some people want to see God with their eyes as they see a cow, and to love Him as they love a cow - for the milk and cheese and profit it brings them. This is how it is with people who love God for the sake of outward wealth or inward comfort. They do not rightly love God, when they love Him for their own advantage.

To the extent that you eliminate ego from your activities, God comes into them - but no more and no less. Begin with that, and let it cost you your uttermost. In this way, and no other, is true peace to be found.

I need to be silent for awhile, worlds are forming in my heart.

My Lord told me a joke. And seeing Him laugh has done more for me than any scripture I will ever read.

The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.

For then I knew my soul - every soul - has always held Him.

For the person who has learned to let go and let be, nothing can ever get in the way again.

Saint Augustine cries, Lord I cannot love you, but come in and love yourself in me. According to Saint Paul, we must put off our own natural form and put on the form of God, and Saint Augustine tells us to discard our own mode of nature; then the divine nature will flow in and be revealed. Saint Augustine says, Those who seek and find, find not. He who seeks and finds not, he alone finds. Saint Paul says, What I was, was not I, it was God in me.

God cannot know himself without me.

It is in the darkness that one finds the light.

A life of rest and peace in God is good; a life of pain lived in patience is still better; but to have peace in a life of pain is best of all.

Action and becoming are one.

A human being has so many skins inside, covering the depths of the heart. We know so many things, but we don't know ourselves! Why, thirty or forty skins or hides, as thick and hard as an ox's or bear's, cover the soul. Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there.

Know that when you seek anything of your own, you will never find God, because you do not seek God purely. You are seeking something along with God, and you are acting just as if you were to make a candle out of God in order to look for something with it. Once one finds the things one is looking for, one throws the candle away. This is what you are doing.

Let God work in you, give the work to God, and have peace. Don't worry if He works through your nature or above your nature, because both are His, nature and grace.

Nobody at any time is cut off from God.

A free mind is one which is untroubled and unfettered by anything, which has not bound its best part to any particular manner of being or worship and which does not seek its own interest in anything but is always immersed in God's most precious will. . . . There is no work which men and women can perform, however small, which does not draw from this its power and strength.

Treat all things as if they were loaned to you without any ownership - whether body or soul, sense or strength, external goods or honors, house or hall . . . everything.

Think more about who you are and less about what you do, for if you are just, your ways will be just.

God is at home, it's we who have gone out for a walk.

God holds each of us by a string. When we sin, we cut the string. But God ties it up again, making a knot. Each time our wrongdoing cuts the string, God ties another knot drawing us up closer to Him.

We are all meant to be mothers of God, for God is always needing to be born.

There is no greater valor nor no sterner fight. He who would be what he ought to be must stop being what he is.

The outward work can never be small if the inward one is great, and the outward work can never be great or good if the inward is small or of little worth.

The human spirit must transcend number and break through multiplicity, and God will break through him; and just as He

Love is as strong as death, as hard as Hell. Death separates the soul from the body, but love separates all things from the soul.

...Where and when God finds you ready, he must act and overflow into you, just as when the air is clear and pure, the sun must overflow into it and cannot refrain from doing that.

One must not always think so much about what one should do, but rather what one should be. Our works do not ennoble us; but we must ennoble our works.

He who can make distinction in God without number or quantity, knows that the three persons of the Trinity are one God.

If God gave the soul his whole creation she would not be filled thereby but only with himself.

I have a capacity in my soul for taking in God entirely. I am as sure as I live that nothing is so near to me as God.

God is the word that speaks itself.

It is not by your actions that you will be saved, but by your being.

The less you feel and the more firmly you believe, the more praiseworthy is your faith and the more it will be esteemed and appreciated; for real faith is much more than a mere opinion of man. In it we have true knowledge: in truth, we lack nothing save true faith.

This is not only a commandment but also a promise or reward.

The seed of God is in us: Pear seeds grow into pear trees; Hazel seeds into hazel trees; And God seeds into God.

Do not think that saintliness comes from occupation; it depends rather on what one is. The kind of work we do does not make us holy but we may make it holy. However “sacred” a calling may be, as it is a calling, it has no power to sanctify.

Whatever thou sayest of God is untrue.

This is my only and permanent complaint, that vulgar people, empty of the Spirit of God, want to judge solely by their human thinking what they listen to or read in the Bible, which has been pronounced and written by the Holy Spirit and in the Holy Spirit.

God is greater than God.

If we seek God for our own good and profit, we are not seeking God.

In my breaking through...I transcend all creatures and am neither God nor creature...for in this breaking through I find that God and I are both the same.

When you are thwarted, it is your own attitude that is out of order

Whatever God does, the first outburst is always compassion.

Whoever possesses God in their being has Him in a divine manner, and He shines out to them in all things; for them all things taste of God and in all things it is God's image that they see.