Top 200 Meister Eckhart Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “There is something in the soul that is so akin to God that it is one with Him... It has nothing in common with anything created.”

— Meister Eckhart

152. “We should be able to recognize true and perfect love by whether or not someone has great hope and confidence in God, for there is nothing that testifies more clearly to perfect love than trust.”

— Meister Eckhart

153. “For then I knew my soul – every soul – has always held Him.”

— Meister Eckhart

154. “As St Denys says: they speak most beautifully of God who can maintain the deepest silence concerning him in the fullness of their inner wealth.21.”

— Meister Eckhart

155. “Indeed, the more we are our own possession, the less we are God’s possession.”

— Meister Eckhart

156. “People should not worry so much about what they do but rather about what they are. If they and their ways are good, then their deeds are radiant. If you are righteous, then what you do will also be righteous. We should not think that holiness is based on what we do but rather on what we are, for it is not our works which sanctify us but we who sanctified our works.”

— Meister Eckhart

157. “All that the Eternal Father teaches and reveals is His being, His nature, and His Godhead, which He manifests to us in His Son, and teaches us that we are also His Son.”

— Meister Eckhart

158. “When we go out of ourselves through obedience and strip ourselves of what is ours, then God must enter into us; for when someone wills nothing for themselves, then God must will on their behalf just as he does for himself.”

— Meister Eckhart

159. “And so, too, I speak of love: he who is held by it is held by the strongest of bonds, and yet the stress is pleasant. Moreover, he can sweetly bear all that happens to him. When one has found this bond, he looks for no other.”

— Meister Eckhart

160. “You should not imagine that your reason can evolve to the extent of understanding God. Rather, if God is to shine divinely within you, your natural light cannot assist this process but must become a pure nothingness, going out of itself. Only then can God enter with his light, bringing back with him all that you have renounced and a thousand times more, including a new form which contains all things in itself.”

— Meister Eckhart

161. “If my eye is to discern colour, it must itself be free from all colour.”

— Meister Eckhart

162. “The most powerful prayer, one well-nigh omnipotent, and the worthiest work of all is the outcome of a quiet mind. The quieter it is the more powerful, the worthier, the deeper, the more telling and more perfect the prayer is. To the quiet mind all things are possible. What is a quiet mind? A quiet mind is one which nothing weighs on, nothing worries, which, free from ties and from all self-seeking, is wholly merged into the will of God and dead to its own.”

— Meister Eckhart

163. “They who can go without all things, not needing them, are far more blessed than they who possess them in their need. That person is the best who can do without what they do not need.”

— Meister Eckhart

164. “And so I tell you that we should learn to see God in all gifts and works, neither resting content with anything nor becoming attached to anything. For us there can be no attachment to a particular manner of behaviour in this life, nor has this ever been right, however successful we may have been.”

— Meister Eckhart

165. “In silence man can most readily preserve his integrity.”

— Meister Eckhart

166. “The only thing that burns in hell is the part of you that won’t let go of your life: your memories, your attachments. They burn them all away, but they’re not punishing you, they’re freeing your soul.”

— Meister Eckhart

167. “There’s a place in the soul where you’ve never been wounded.”

— Meister Eckhart

168. “The soul loves the body. And consider too how it is that the body is more in the soul than the soul is in the body.”

— Meister Eckhart

169. “When God laughs at the soul and the soul laughs back at God, the persons of the Trinity are begotten. When the Father laughs at the Son and the Son laughs back at the Father, that laughter gives pleasure, that pleasure gives joy, that joy gives love, and that love is the Holy Spirit.”

— Meister Eckhart

170. “God is the word that speaks itself.”

— Meister Eckhart

171. “Action and becoming are one.”

— Meister Eckhart

172. “And so in my view the most important thing of all is that we should give ourselves up entirely to God whenever he allows anything to befall us, whether insult, tribulation or any other kind of suffering, accepting it with joy and gratitude and allowing God to guide us all the more rather than seeking these things out ourselves.”

— Meister Eckhart

173. “Our best chance of finding God is to look in the place where we left him.”

— Meister Eckhart

174. “There is no greater valor nor no sterner fight. He who would be what he ought to be must stop being what he is.”

— Meister Eckhart

175. “The outward man is the swinging door; the inner man is the still hinge.”

— Meister Eckhart

176. “It is not by your actions that you will be saved, but by your being.”

— Meister Eckhart

177. “What our Lord did was done with the intent, and this alone, that he might be with us and we with him.”

— Meister Eckhart

178. “His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama feels quite at home in the world of Meister Eckhart, and His Holiness Pope John Paul II quotes the same Meister Eckhart on occasion in a sermon. Now, there’s a bridge builder between traditions! Should this come as a surprise? No, it shouldn’t surprise us, for Meister Eckhart is a mystic. The mystics of all traditions speak one and the same language, the language of religious experience. When.”

— Meister Eckhart

179. “Your own efforts “did not bring it to pass,” only God-but rejoice if God found a use for your efforts in His work.”

— Meister Eckhart

180. “A just person is one who is conformed and transformed into justice.”

— Meister Eckhart

181. “No man was ever lost except for one reason: having once left his ground he has let himself become too permanently settled abroad.”

— Meister Eckhart

182. “When you are thwarted, it is your own attitude that is out of order.”

— Meister Eckhart

183. “Truly, if someone were to renounce a kingdom or the whole world while still holding on to themselves, then they would have renounced nothing at all.”

— Meister Eckhart

184. “God is equally near to everything and every place and is equally ready to give himself, so far as in him lies, and therefore a person shall know him aright who knows how to see him the same, under all circumstances.”

— Meister Eckhart

185. “Only those for whom God is present in all things and who make the very best use of their reason, know what true peace is and truly possess heaven.”

— Meister Eckhart

186. “This much is certain: when a man is happy, happy to the core and root of beatitude, he is no longer conscious of himself or anything else.”

— Meister Eckhart

187. “Furthermore, we should keep all things only as if they had been merely lent and not given to us, without any sense of possessiveness, whether it be our body or soul, our senses, faculties, worldly goods or honour, friends, relations, house or home or anything whatsoever.”

— Meister Eckhart

188. “If his accusers charged Eckhart with heresy, then he charged them with stupidity.”

— Meister Eckhart

189. “That we may ‘live in eternity’, so help us God. Amen.”

— Meister Eckhart

190. “It is not outside us: it is all within.”

— Meister Eckhart

191. “Pay heed to this, how you are turned toward your God, when you are in church or in your cell. Maintain this same state of mind and bear it among the crowd and into unrest and dissimilarity.”

— Meister Eckhart

192. “We must withdraw, then, from all things, for when God works, he works without an image.”

— Meister Eckhart

193. “A day, whether six or seven years ago or whether six thousand years ago, is just as near to the present as yesterday. Why? Because all time is contained in now.”

— Meister Eckhart

194. “To serve God with fear is good; to serve Him out of love is better; but to fear and love Him together is best of all. To have a restful or peaceful life in God is good; to bear a life of pain in patience is better; but to have peace in the midst of pain is the best of all.”

— Meister Eckhart

195. “Where I will nothing for myself, there wills instead my God.”

— Meister Eckhart

196. “Even stones have a love, a love that seeks the ground.”

— Meister Eckhart

197. “Man goes far away or near but God never goes far-off; he is always standing close at hand, and even if he cannot stay within he goes no further than the door.”

— Meister Eckhart

198. “There are plenty to follow our Lord half-way, but not the other half. They will give up possessions, friends and honors, but it touches them to closely to disown themselves.”

— Meister Eckhart

199. “I am what I wanted and I want what I am.”

— Meister Eckhart

200. “It is a lie – any talk of God that does not comfort you.”

— Meister Eckhart