Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Evelyn Underhill
Age: 65 †
Born: 1875
Born: December 6
Died: 1941
Died: June 15
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Soul
Aim
Firsts
Useful
First
Function
Must
Question
Great
Economy
Transcending
Even
Humanity
Aims
Life
Secret
Fulfill
Best
Limited

More quotes by Evelyn Underhill

Image
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
Image
There is no place in my soul, no corner of my character, where God is not.
Evelyn Underhill
Image
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
Image
Mysticism is the art of union with Reality.
Evelyn Underhill
Image
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
Image
The business and method of mysticism is love.
Evelyn Underhill
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Adoration is caring for God above all else.
Evelyn Underhill
Image
In the created world around us we see the Eternal Artist, Eternal Love at work.
Evelyn Underhill
Image
Spiritual achievement costs much, though never as much as it is worth.
Evelyn Underhill
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
In prayer the soul comes nearest the experience of absolute love: in belief it ascends by means of symbols towards absolute truth.
Evelyn Underhill
Image
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