THE BEST MEISTER ECKHART QUOTES

This list is arranged by which famous Meister Eckhart quotes have received the most votes, so only the greatest Meister Eckhart quotes are at the top of the list.

All the most popular quotes from Meister Eckhart should be listed here, but if any were missed you can add more at the end of the list. This list includes notable Meister Eckhart quotes on various subjects, many of which are inspirational and thought provoking.

This list answers the questions, "What are the best Meister Eckhart quotes?" and "What is the most famous Meister Eckhart quote?"

If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.

You may call God love, you may call God goodness. But the best name for God is compassion.

There exists only the present instant... a Now which always and without end is itself new. There is no yesterday nor any tomorrow, but only Now, as it was a thousand years ago and as it will be a thousand years hence.

To be full of things is to be empty of God. To be empty of things is to be full of God.

Time is what keeps the light from reaching us. There is no greater obstacle to God than time: and not only time but temporalities, not only temporal things but temporal affections, not only temporal affections but the very taint and smell of time.

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

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.

The more we have the less we own.

We are celebrating the feast of the Eternal Birth which God the Father has borne and never ceases to bear in all eternity.... But if it takes not place in me, what avails it? Everything lies in this, that it should take place in me.

Jesus might have said, I became man for you. If you do not become God for me, you wrong me.

God expects but one thing of you, and that is that you should come out of yourself in so far as you are a created being made and let God be God in you.

To be right, a person must do one of two things: either he must learn to have God in his work and hold fast to him there, or he must give up his work altogether. Since, however, we cannot live without activities that are both human and various, we must learn to keep God I everything we do, and whatever the job or place, keep on with him, letting nothing stand in our way.

He who would be serene and pure needs but one thing, detachment

What a man takes in by contemplation, that he pours out in love.

The knower and the known are one. Simple people imagine that they should see God as if he stood there and they here. This is not so. God and I, we are one in knowledge.

All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.

Only the hand that erases can write the true thing.

Man goes far away or near but God never goes far-off; he is always standing close at hand, and even if he cannot stay within he goes no further than the door.

The seed of God is in us. Given an intelligent and hard-working farmer, it will thrive and grow up to God, whose seed it is; and accordingly its fruits will be God-nature. Pear seeds grow into pear trees, nut seeds into nut trees, and God-seed into God.

To be sure, this requires effort and love, a careful cultivation of the spiritual life, and a watchful, honest, active oversight of all one's mental attitudes towards things and people. It is not to be learned by world-flight, running away from things, turning solitary and going apart from the world. Rather, one must learn an inner solitude, where or with whomsoever he may be. He must learn to penetrate things and find God there, to get a strong impression of God firmly fixed on his mind.

Every creature is a word of God.

No-one knows what the soul is...But what we do know is, the soul is where God works compassion.

The outward man is the swinging door; the inner man is the still hinge.

What we plant in the soil of contemplation, we shall reap in the harvest of action.

THE GOSPEL OF LUKE: A COMMENTARY & MEDITATION

"When the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her."

Scripture: Luke 7:11-17
11 Soon afterward he went to a city called Na'in, and his disciples and a great crowd went with him. 12 As he drew near to the gate of the city, behold, a man who had died was being carried out, the only son of his mother, and she was a widow; and a large crowd from the city was with her. 13 And when the Lord saw her, he had compassion on her and said to her, "Do not weep." 14 And he came and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still. And he said, "Young man, I say to you, arise." 15 And the dead man sat up, and began to speak. And he gave him to his mother. 16 Fear seized them all; and they glorified God, saying, "A great prophet has arisen among us!" and "God has visited his people!" 17 And this report concerning him spread through the whole of Judea and all the surrounding country.

Meditation: How do you respond when you meet misfortune? In a number of places the gospel records that Jesus was "moved to the depths of his heart." Our English word "compassion" is a weak translation of the Hebrew word for "sympathy". Why was Jesus so moved on this occasion? Jesus not only grieved the untimely death of a youth, but he showed the depth of his concern for a woman who lost not only a husband, but an only child as well. The scriptures make clear that God takes no pleasure in the death of anyone (see Ezekiel 33:11); he desires life, not death. Jesus not only had compassion, he also had power -- the ability to restore life and make whole again.

Jesus, however, incurred grave risk by approaching the bier, since contact with a dead body made one ritually impure. His touch not only restored life but brought freedom and wholeness to soul as well as body. This miracle took place near the spot where the prophet Elisha raised another mother's son (see 2 Kings 4:18-37). Jesus claimed as his own one whom death had seized as its prey. By his word of power he restored life for a lad marked for death. Jesus is Lord not only of the living but of the dead as well. Jesus triumphed over the grave and he promises that because he lives, we also shall live in him (John 14:19). Do you trust in the Lord's power to give life and hope in the face of misfortune and despair?

"Lord, your presence brings life and restores us to wholeness of mind, body, and spirit. Speak your word to me and give me renewed hope, strength and courage to follow you in all things and to eagerly serve others with a glad and generous heart."

by Don Schwager

WHY THE WORLD NEEDS CHRISTIAN VALUES

Presentation by Fr Henry Charles at the CCSJ sponsored Values and Virtues seminar at Assumption Centre, Thursday, April 20

I am taking it that “the world” in the title of this talk means just what it says, and is not just an expansive way of “society today” or “Trinidad society”. Taken that way, what the title suggests is that the world doesn’t have Christian values. It may once have had them, but now no longer does; or, it never had them, and now urgently needs them.

I want to respond to this issue in terms of four areas. First, I think that the connection between Christian beliefs and Christian values in the West or in Western society today has been severed, or is very much attenuated; that what we’re left with is a descriptive Christianity, the moral or ethical ghost that remains when full-bodied Christianity recedes. What we need is a renewal of Christianity itself, not a renewal of Christianpassion values. If the substance is recovered, the values will follow.

Secondly, under the heading of “Christian values” one needs to distinguish at least two levels. Some of what are considered Christian values, e.g., courage, compassion, generosity, justice, moderation etc, are not values of purely Christian origin. They occur both in the Bible and in ancient culture(s). Historically, the Christian vision incorporated much from the latter, particularly ancient classical culture. On the other hand, it gave rise to unique first-order values, as I would call them, which sprang directly from its fundamental beliefs.

Thirdly, I want to say something on whether or not morality is viable without religion; and finally, something on the serious hurdles in the way of recovering the Christian vision.

First of all, my point about the severance between beliefs and values. That there has been some diminution in Christian beliefs in the West, i.e. North America and particularly Europe, cannot be denied. One of the big items on Pope Benedict’s agenda for his pontificate is the return of Europe to its Christian heritage. You will remember how we grew up as Catholics praying for the conversion of Russia. Today Europe, for more than a century the missionary centre of the Church, has replaced Russia as the focus of conversion.

In England today and in parts of Europe, churches are being sold as real estate to enterprising entrepreneurs who convert them to fancy restaurants and bistros (next door to cemeteries). It’s difficult to judge whether this represents an index of the de-Christianization of society. Some observers, for instance, claim that while the numbers of people going to Church may have fallen dramatically, (as is also the case in the Caribbean), this does not mean that people have given up on belief. They may have ceased to be “religious”, (as they say these days), but they are “spiritual”. What this distinction means, however, is something I have difficulty grasping. All Western spirituality owes its origins to Western religious traditions. It is not and has never been a free-floating entity, above or distinct from such traditions, their forms and practices.

For example, you can’t talk about Jesuit spirituality without recognising the connection with Ignatius of Loyola. The same for Franciscan or Carmelite spirituality or the spirituality of the Desert Fathers and Mothers. In every instance, you deal with connections to a living tradition. How spirituality in the form of “spiritual but not religious” can remain unconnected to specific roots is something quite difficult to imagine. What will happen, I surmise, is that it will morph into different things, continually incorporating other free-floating elements in the environment – as in fact it already has. What else is “new age” spirituality, for instance, except this?

My second point is that Christian first-order values (which secular culture routinely endorses) have direct roots in Christian beliefs. They were never conclusions reached from other premises; nor did they become values because we took a personal decision to espouse them. We are all valuable as persons, for instance, because God values us and created us with immortal souls; not because of some independently natural source of value. We have dignity as human beings not because a constitution gave it to us. Constitutions recognise dignity, they cannot confer it.

They say that rights are entailed by it. It is God the creator who gave us dignity from the fact that as human beings we are made in His image, and because Christ, the paradigm human individual, became “as we are.” We are all fundamentally equal because there is no hierarchy in importance among souls, and God has no favourites. The least among us is as important as the greatest because Christ is identified with the least. You can see from this what is meant by the nexus between beliefs and values.

Implications of these values were often at variance with those promoted in ancient culture. Aristotle, for instance, described the slave as “a living tool”, a piece of machinery with life. The vision that a slave was a person was something that eventually changed the entire social order in the West. It didn’t do so immediately, of course, and for quite some time, but from the beginning the die was cast. The same with the equality of the sexes. We still have a long way to go there, in the Church too; but the same thing applies. The die was cast from the beginning.

Ancient society did not regard the weak and the handicapped as worthy of any kind of personal or social preservation. It practiced a sort of natural eugenics. It left such infants on the hillsides to be devoured by wild animals or die from exposure.

How does one account today for the severance that has set these values adrift? The major reason is the rise of secular society. We live today in a secular age, as the philosopher Charles Taylor argues, i.e. an age quite different from conditions under Christendom. By Christendom is meant, according to Taylor, a society where Christianity provided social coherence and self-identity. God was present in a host of social practices and at all levels of society. You couldn’t participate in anything without encountering God. Religious feasts, like Corpus Christi, for example, were occasions when Christian society displayed itself to itself.

In secular society, on the other hand, feasts like Corpus Christi represent vestiges of a bygone era, even for believers. Other public events with some religious import, such as our traditional opening of the Law Term, for instance, hardly reflect any encounter with the sacred, or with “ultimate reality,” despite the rhetoric and the location.

Taylor understands this to be secularity’s first meaning: “public spaces” become “emptied of God.”

This situation is still compatible with high statistics for religious belief, as the US exceptionally shows. What is shown elsewhere, however, in Europe, for instance, is secularity’s second meaning, namely, a declension or a falling off in religious practice, and a turn to privacy; people stop going to church.

The third meaning is the change from a society where belief in God is basically unproblematic and unchallenged, to one where belief is just one option among others. Belief today is no longer socially axiomatic. Alternatives exist, which are not necessarily aggressively anti-religious, though aggressiveness and antagonism have not vanished. One cannot even describe the situation in terms of indifferentism. A life without belief simply represents in lived experience a plausible way to live. It is a form of self-sufficient humanism, where the values formerly associated with an external transcendence are now located within the human.

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