Evelyn Underhill Quotes

The spiritual life is not a special career, involving abstraction from the world of things. It is a part of every man's life; and until he has realised it he is not a complete human being, he has not entered into possession of all his powers.

The deeper your realisation of the plant in its wonder, the more perfect your union with the world of growth and change, the quicker, the more subtle your response to its countless sugestions; so much more acute will become your craving for Something More.

For years your treasure has been in the Stock Exchange, or the House of Commons, or the Salon, or the reviews that "really count" (if they still exist), or the drawing-rooms of Mayfair; and thither your heart perpetually tends to stray. Habit has you in its chains. You are not free.

Because of that corporate life, transfusing you, giving to you and taking from you - conditioning you as it does in countless oblique and unapparent ways - you are still compelled to react in to many suggestions which you are no longer able to respect: controlled, to the last moment of your bodily existence and perhaps afterwords, by habit, custom, the good old average way of misunderstanding the world.

Even the power which lurks in every coal scuttle, shines in the electric lamp, pants in the motor-omnibus, declares itself in the ineffable wonders of reproduction and growth, is supersensual.

The visionary is a mystic when his vision mediates to him an actuality beyond the reach of the senses. The philosopher is a mystic when he passes beyond thought to the pure apprehension of truth. The active man is a mystic when he knows his actions to be part of a greater activity.

Wisdom is the fruit of communion; ignorance the inevitable portion of those who "keep themselves to themselves," and stand apart, judging, analysing the things which they have truly never known.

The mystics aim (Union with Reality) is not the suppression of life but it's intensification,

Francis must rank with those creative personalities to which all the deepest developments of Christian consciousness are due.

As it is not by the methods of the laboratory that we learn to know life, so it is not by the methods of the intellect that we learn to know God.

It is a lonely and arduous excursion, a sufficient test of courage and sincerity: for most men prefer to dwell in comfortable ignorance upon the lower slopes, and there to make of their obvious characteristics a drapery which shall veil the naked truth.

Because mystery is horrible to us, we have agreed for the most part to live in a world of labels; to make of them the current coin of experience, and ignore their merely symbolic character, the infinite gradation of values which they represent.

No nation is truly defeated which retains its spiritual self-possession. No nation is truly victorious which does not emerge soul unstained.

Going forth into the bareness and darkness of this unwalled world of high contemplation, you will find stored for you, and at last made real, all the highest values, all the dearest and noblest experiences of the world of growth and change.

"Of course I thoroughly agree with you that Christianity was from the first essentially a mystical religion; to me, the doctrine of the New Testament is only intelligible from that standpoint.