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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
Fundamentals
Transcended
None
Verb
Ultimate
Verbs
Except
Included
Spend
Forgetting
Forget
Significance
Lives
Mostly
Three
Fundamental

More quotes by Evelyn Underhill

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In prayer the soul comes nearest the experience of absolute love: in belief it ascends by means of symbols towards absolute truth.
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We mostly spend those lives conjugating three verbs: to Want, to Have, and to Do.
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The will is what matters---as long as you have that, you are safe.
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Never forget that the key of the situation lies in the will & not in the imagination.
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All artists are of necessity in some measure contemplative.
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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.
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The primary declaration of Christianity is not This do! but This happened!
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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.
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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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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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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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Adoration is caring for God above all else.
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.
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If God were small enough to be understood, He would not be big enough to be worshipped.
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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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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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The mystic lives and looks and speaks the disconcerting language of first-hand experience.
Evelyn Underhill
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The business and method of mysticism is love.
Evelyn Underhill
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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