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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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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

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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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Worship is the one, total adoring response of man to the one Eternal God.
Evelyn Underhill
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There is no place in my soul, no corner of my character, where God is not.
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Mysticism is the art of union with Reality.
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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 primary declaration of Christianity is not This do! but This happened!
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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.
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In the created world around us we see the Eternal Artist, Eternal Love at work.
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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.
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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.
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The mystic lives and looks and speaks the disconcerting language of first-hand experience.
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The will is what matters---as long as you have that, you are safe.
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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All artists are of necessity in some measure contemplative.
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 those lives conjugating three verbs: to Want, to Have, and to Do.
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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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
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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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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