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We mostly spend those lives conjugating three verbs: to Want, to Have, and to Do.

Evelyn Underhill

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Evelyn Underhill
Age: 65 †
Born: 1875
Born: December 6
Died: 1941
Died: June 15
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Mostly
Inspire
Spend
Lives
Three
Life
Verbs

More quotes by Evelyn Underhill

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A saint is simply a human being whose soul has ... grown up to its full stature, by full and generous response to its environment, God. He has achieved a deeper, bigger life than the rest of us, a more wonderful contact with the mysteries of the Universe a life of infinite possibility, the term of which he never feels that he has reached.
Evelyn Underhill
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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
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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
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Mysticism is the passionate longing of the soul for God.
Evelyn Underhill
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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
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The mystic lives and looks and speaks the disconcerting language of first-hand experience.
Evelyn Underhill
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If God were small enough to be understood, He would not be big enough to be worshipped.
Evelyn Underhill
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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
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Worship is the one, total adoring response of man to the one Eternal God.
Evelyn Underhill
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Never forget that the key of the situation lies in the will & not in the imagination.
Evelyn Underhill
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As the beautiful does not exist for the artist and poet alone—though these can find in it more poignant depths of meaning than other men—so the world of Reality exists for all and all may participate in it, unite with it, according to their measure and to the strength and purity of their desire.
Evelyn Underhill
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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
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God is acting on your soul all the time, whether you have spiritual sensations or not.
Evelyn Underhill
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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
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The direction and constancy of the will is what really matters, & intellect & feeling are only important in so far as they contribute to that.
Evelyn Underhill
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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
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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
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Mysticism is the art of union with Reality.
Evelyn Underhill
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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
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There is no place in my soul, no corner of my character, where God is not.
Evelyn Underhill