Quotes from Meister Eckhart

The eye in which I see God is the same eye in which God sees me. My eye and God's eye are one seeing, one knowing, and one loving.

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

The more wise and powerful a master, the more directly is his work created, and the simpler it is.

The eye through which I see God is the same eye through which God sees me; my eye and God's eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, one love.

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

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.

Words derive their power from the original word.

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.

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.

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

The soul at its highest is found like God, but an angel gives a closer idea of Him. That is all an angel is: an idea of God.

One person who has mastered life is better than a thousand persons who have mastered only the contents of books, but no one can get anything out of life without God.

If the soul knows God in creatures, night falls. If it sees how they have their being in God, morning breaks. But if it sees the Being that is in God himself alone, it is high noon! See! This is what one ought to desire with mad fervor—that all his life should become Being.

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

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.

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.

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.

Run into peace.

If anyone went on for a thousand years asking of life: 'Why are you living?' life, if it could answer, would only say, 'I live so that I may live.' That is because life lives out of its own ground and springs from its own source, and so it lives without asking why it is itself living.

God is at home. We are in the far country.

Whatever God does, the first outburst is always compassion.

The outward work will never be puny if the inward work is great.

I tell you the truth, any object you have in your mind, however good, will be a barrier between you and the inmost Truth.

Every creature is a word of God.