Top 85 Evelyn Underhill Quotes
#1. We are surrounded on all sides by God but often we are no more conscious of him than we are of air pressing against us. We don't turn our attention to Him. (Evelyn Underhill)
Sue Monk Kidd
#2. Anyone can retire into a quiet place, wrote Evelyn Underhill, but it's the shutting of the door that makes the difference. Solitude is a time for stripping away everything in order to focus on God. (Matt 6:6)
Sue Monk Kidd
#3. 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.
Evelyn Underhill
#4. Sometimes I think the resurrection of the body, unless much improved in construction, a mistake!
Evelyn Underhill
#5. If God were small enough to be understood, He would not be big enough to be worshipped.
Evelyn Underhill
#6. There is no place in my soul, no corner of my character, where God is not.
Evelyn Underhill
#7. 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.
Evelyn Underhill
#8. We spend most of our lives conjugating three verbs: to want, to have, and to do.
Evelyn Underhill
#9. Try to arrange things so that you can have a reasonable bit of quiet every day.
Evelyn Underhill
#10. Why, after all, take as our standard a material world whose existence is affirmed by nothing more trustworthy than the sense-impressions of "normal men"; those imperfect and easily cheated channels of communication?
Evelyn Underhill
#11. The primary declaration of Christianity is not "This do!" but "This happened!
Evelyn Underhill
#12. No metaphysician has yet shaken the ordinary individual's belief in his own existence. The uncertainties only begin for most of us when we ask what else is.
Evelyn Underhill
#13. The individual is reminded that in him, no less than in the Archetypal Universe, real life must be born if real life is to be lived.
Evelyn Underhill
#14. After all it is those who have a deep and real inner life who are best able to deal with the irritating details of outer life.
Evelyn Underhill
#15. The note we end on is and must be the note of inexhaustible possibility and hope.
Evelyn Underhill
#16. Deliberately seek opportunities for kindness, sympathy, and patience.
Evelyn Underhill
#17. A wise man has said: 'Only a Christian can live wholly in the present, for to him the past is pardoned and the future is safe in God.' ... the Christian life must be a life without regrets, without remorse.
Evelyn Underhill
#18. Worship is the one, total adoring response of man to the one Eternal God.
Evelyn Underhill
#19. Saints are the great teachers of the loving-kindness and fascination with God.
Evelyn Underhill
#20. Towards my husband, I often fail to show interest in his affairs and amusements, not rousing myself to respond when I'm tired or concerned with other things, forgetting he is very patient with me.
Evelyn Underhill
#21. 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.
Evelyn Underhill
#22. We mostly spend [our] lives conjugating three verbs: to Want, to Have, and to Do ... forgetting that none of these verbs have any ultimate significance, except so far as they are transcended by and included in , the fundamental verb, to Be.
Evelyn Underhill
#23. 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.
Evelyn Underhill
#25. 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.
Evelyn Underhill
#26. 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.
Evelyn Underhill
#27. This is the secret of joy. We shall no longer strive for our own way; but commit ourselves, easily and simply, to God's way, acquiesce in His will, and in so doing find our peace.
Evelyn Underhill
#28. The direction and constancy of the will is what really matters, and intellect and feeling are only important insofar as they contribute to that.
Evelyn Underhill
#29. Faith is not a refuge from reality. It is a demand that we face reality ... The true subject matter of religion is not our own little souls, but the Eternal God and His whole mysterious purpose, and our solemn responsibility to Him.
Evelyn Underhill
#30. God is always coming to you in the Sacrament of the Present Moment. Meet and receive Him there with gratitude in that sacrament.
Evelyn Underhill
#31. Many people feel unaware of any guidance, unable to discern or understand the signals of God; not because the signals are not given, but because the mind is too troubled, clouded, and hurried to receive them.
Evelyn Underhill
#32. 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.
Evelyn Underhill
#33. The will is what matters - as long as you have that, you are safe.
Evelyn Underhill
#34. Mysticism is the passionate longing of the soul for God ...
Evelyn Underhill
#35. Here we part from the "nature mystics," the mystic poets, and all who shared in and were contented with the illuminated vision of reality. Those who go on are the great and strong spirits, who do not seek to know, but are driven to be.
Evelyn Underhill
#36. It looks impossible until you do it, and then you find it is possible.
Evelyn Underhill
#38. Love makes the whole difference between an execution and a martyrdom.
Evelyn Underhill
#39. As to the most prudent logicians might venture to deduce from a skein of wool the probable existence of a sheep; so you, from the raw stuff of perception, may venture to deduce a universe which transcends the reproductive powers of your loom.
Evelyn Underhill
#40. 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.
Evelyn Underhill
#41. Grace is God himself, his loving energy at work within his church and within our souls.
Evelyn Underhill
#42. He goes because he must, as Galahad went towards the Grail: knowing that for those who can live it, this alone is life.
Evelyn Underhill
#43. When we are in good health, we all feel very real, solid, and permanent; and this is of all our illusions the most ridiculous, and also the most obviously useful from the point of view of the efficiency and preservation of the race.
Evelyn Underhill
#44. Never forget that the key to the situation lies in the will and not in the imagination.
Evelyn Underhill
#46. 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.
Evelyn Underhill
#49. All artist are of necessity in some measure contemplatives.
Evelyn Underhill
#51. 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.
Evelyn Underhill
#52. God is much in the difficult home problems as in the times of quiet and prayer.
Evelyn Underhill
#53. It seems so much easier in these days to live morally than to live beautifully. Lots of us manage to exist for years without ever sinning against society, but we sin against loveliness every hour of the day.
Evelyn Underhill
#54. God is acting on your soul all the time, whether you have spiritual sensations or not.
Evelyn Underhill
#55. 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.
Evelyn Underhill
#57. 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?
Evelyn Underhill
#58. The determined fixing of our will upon God, and pressing toward him steadily and without deflection; this is the very center and the art of prayer.
Evelyn Underhill
#59. Spiritual achievement costs much, though never as much as it is worth.
Evelyn Underhill
#61. 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.
Evelyn Underhill
#62. In the created world around us we see the Eternal Artist, Eternal Love at work.
Evelyn Underhill
#64. Meditation is a half-way house between thinking and contemplating ...
Evelyn Underhill
#65. Spiritual reading is a regular, essential part of the life of prayer, and particularly is it the support of adoring prayer.
Evelyn Underhill
#66. As the genuine religious impulse becomes dominant, adoration more and more takes charge. 'I come to seek God because I need Him', may be an adequate formula for prayer. 'I come to adore His splendour, and fling myself and all that I have at His feet', is the only possible formula for worship.
Evelyn Underhill
#67. A simple rule, to be followed whether one is in the light or not, gives backbone to one's spiritual life, as nothing else can.
Evelyn Underhill
#68. The mystic lives and looks; and speaks the disconcerting language of first-hand experience.
Evelyn Underhill
#69. Religion, like beauty, cannot be experienced in cold blood.
Evelyn Underhill
#70. Though humility and acknowledgement of one's real failings is good, the gratuitous eating of worms not put before us by God does not nourish our souls a bit - merely in fact upsets the spiritual tummy.
Evelyn Underhill
#71. We have descended into the garden and caught three hundred slugs. How I love the mixture of the beautiful and the squalid in gardening. It makes it so lifelike.
Evelyn Underhill
#72. For a lack of attention a thousand forms of loveliness elude us everyday
Evelyn Underhill
#73. Your dreamer may do without a creed, but he always wants a ritual ...
Evelyn Underhill
#74. When you let intution have its way with you, you open up new levels of the world. Such opening-up is the most practical of all activities.
Evelyn Underhill
#75. 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.
Evelyn Underhill
#76. 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.
Evelyn Underhill
#77. The spiritual life is not a special career, involving abstraction from the world of things. It is a part of every man's life; and until he has realised it he is not a complete human being, has not entered into possession of all his powers. It
Evelyn Underhill
#78. I do hope your Christmas has had a little touch of Eternity in among the rush and pitter patter and all. It always seems such a mixing of this world and the next - but that after all is the idea!
Evelyn Underhill
#79. True contemplation can only thrive when defended from two opposite exaggerations: quietism on the one hand, and spiritual fuss upon the other. Neither from passivity nor from anxiety has it anything to gain.
Evelyn Underhill
#80. I have an idea heaven will be both absolutely happy and absolutely dark, to protect us from the blaze of God.
Evelyn Underhill
#81. The spiritual life of individuals has to be extended both vertically to God
and horizontally to other souls; and the more it grows in both directions, the less merely individual and therefore more truly personal it will become.
Evelyn Underhill
#82. The London streets are paths of loveliness; the very omnibuses look like colored archangels, their laps filled full of little trustful souls.
Evelyn Underhill
#83. In prayer the soul comes nearest the experience of absolute love: in belief it ascends by means of symbols towards absolute truth.
Evelyn Underhill
#84. It is important to increase our sense of God's richness and wonder by reading what his great lovers have said about him.
Evelyn Underhill
#85. Christian history looks glorious in retrospect; but it is made up of constant hard choices and unattractive tasks, accepted under the pressure of the Will of God.
Evelyn Underhill
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