John of Ruysbroeck Quotes

Compassion is a wound in the heart whence flows a common love to all mankind and which cannot be healed so long as any suffering lives in man.

See, all creaturely activity and all practice of virtues must fail here, for here what God works is nothing but Himself in the highest nobility of the spirit. And here there is nothing but an eternal contemplation and gazing at the light with the light and in the light. And the coming of the Bridegroom is so rapid that He is always coming and is indwelling with fathomless richness, and that He is coming anew personally, without crease, with such new brightness just as though He had never come before. For His coming consists in an eternal now, without time, which is always received with new lust and in new joy.

Such is the citadel of loving Souls where all pure intellects are united, in one simple Purity. This is the habitation of God in us, where none can operate but God alone; its Purity is eternal, there is neither time nor space, past nor future, always present and ready to be revealed to those pure intelligences raised to it.

The grace of God is to God himself as sunlight is to the sun — a means and a way leading us to the latter. It therefore shines within us in a simple, one-fold way and makes us deiform, that is, like God. This likeness constantly sinks away, dying in God and becoming and remaining one with him, for charity makes us become one with God and causes us to remain living in union with him.

God's transcending nature must be understood as oneness and simplicity, unscalable height and unfathomable depth, incomprehensible breadth and infinite length, dark silence and ferocious energy.

By By the way of perfect likeness and fullest union. Every good deed, however small, if it be directed to God by simplicity of intention, increases in us the Divine likeness, and deepens in us the flow of eternal life... Entering into and transcending itself, traversing all worlds of being,surpassing all creatures, the soul meets God in its own depths... The whole life of the spirit and its activity consists solely in the Divine likeness and this simplicity of intention; and the final peace abides on the heights in simplicity also, in simplicity of essence.

Christ prayed that He should be in us, and we in Him. This we find in many passages in the Gospel. And this is the union that is without intermediary, for the love of God is not only out-flowing, but it is also drawing into unity. And those who feel and experience this become interior, enlightened men. There the faculties are raised above all practices to the bareness of their very essence. There the faculties become simplified above reason in their essence and because of this they are filled and overflowing. For in this simplicity the spirit finds itself united with God without intermediary. And this union, together with the exercise, which is proper to it, will endure eternally, as I have already said.

The inner lover of God, who possesses God in enjoyable rest, and himself in devoted, working love, and his entire life in virtues with justice, this inner person then comes, by means of these three points and the hidden revelation of God, into a God contemplating life, at least the lover who is pious and just, whom God in His freedom wishes to choose and to elevate to a superessential contemplation in divine light and according to the way of God.

And the Light floweth forth in similitude, And indraweth Itself in unity; Which we perceive, beyond the reason, In that high point of our understanding Which is bare and turned within.

He shows Himself to the soul in the living mirror of her intelligence; Not as He is in His nature, But in images and similitudes, And in the degree in which the illuminated reason can grasp and understand Him. And the wise reason, enlightened of God, sees clearly And without error in images of the understanding All that she has heard of God, Of faith, of truth, according to her longing. But that image which is God Himself, Although it is held before her, she cannot comprehend; For the eyes of her understanding Must fail before that Incomparable Light.

The image of God is found essentially and personally in all mankind. Each possesses it whole, entire and undivided, and all together not more than one alone. In this way we are all one, intimately united in our eternal image, which is the image of God and the source in us of all our life.

See, here the beatitude is so simple And so without mode that therein all essential gazing, Inclination and distinction of creatures Pass away. For all spirits thus raised up melt away and are annihilated by reason of enjoyment in God’s essence which is the superessence of all essence. There they fall away from themselves and are lost in a bottomless unknowing. There all clarity is turned back to darkness, there where the three Persons give way to the essential unity and without distinction enjoy essential beatitude.

You are as holy as you wish to be.

Christ’s prayer is fulfilled in those united to God in this threefold manner. With God they will ebb and flow, and will always be in repose, Iin possessing and enjoying (Him). They will go out and in and find nourishment both within and without. They are drunk with love And have passed away into God in a dark luminosity.

All our ways end in superessential Being