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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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Evelyn Underhill
Age: 65 †
Born: 1875
Born: December 6
Died: 1941
Died: June 15
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Ultimate
Verbs
Except
Included
Spend
Forgetting
Forget
Significance
Lives
Mostly
Three
Fundamental
Fundamentals
Transcended
None
Verb

More quotes by 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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The mystic lives and looks and speaks the disconcerting language of first-hand experience.
Evelyn Underhill
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God is always coming to you in the Sacrament of the Present Moment. Meet and receive Him there with gratitude in that sacrament.
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The primary declaration of Christianity is not This do! but This happened!
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Saints are the great teachers of the loving-kindness and fascination with God.
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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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For lack of attention a thousand forms of loveliness elude us every day.
Evelyn Underhill
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Mysticism is the art of union with Reality.
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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Meditation is a half-way house between thinking and contemplating.
Evelyn Underhill
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I have just been given a very engaging Persian kitten... and his opinion is that I have been given to him.
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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Mysticism is the passionate longing of the soul for God.
Evelyn Underhill
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All artists are of necessity in some measure contemplative.
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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God is acting on your soul all the time, whether you have spiritual sensations or not.
Evelyn Underhill
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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
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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
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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
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The Christian is the person who sees every time and every situation, however dreary and repetitive, as God sees it - a fresh creation from his hand, demanding its own response in perhaps a wholly new and creative way. Under God he is free over it. He has won through to a purchase over events he has risen with Christ.
Evelyn Underhill