Top 200 Meister Eckhart Quotes (2025 Update)
Page 4 of 5

151. “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

152. “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

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

— Meister Eckhart

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

— Meister Eckhart

155. “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

156. “A life of rest and peace in God is good; a life of pain lived in patience is still better; but to have peace in a life of pain is best of all.”

— Meister Eckhart

157. “Every creature is a word of God and is a book about God.”

— Meister Eckhart

158. “If anyone went on for a thousand years asking of life: ‘Why are you living?’ life, if it could answer, would only say, ‘I live so that I may live.’ That is because life lives out of its own ground and springs from its own source, and so it lives without asking why it is itself living.”

— Meister Eckhart

159. “The Father and the Son have one Will, and that Will is the Holy Ghost, Who gives Himself to the soul so that the Divine Nature permeates the powers of the soul so that it can only do God-like works.”

— Meister Eckhart

160. “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

161. “God is in all things, but so far as God is Divine and so far as He is rational, God is nowhere so properly as in the soul – in the innermost of the soul.”

— Meister Eckhart

162. “He who can make distinction in God without number or quantity, knows that the three persons of the Trinity are one God.”

— Meister Eckhart

163. “Let God operate in thee; Hand the work over to Him and do not disquiet thyself as to whether or no He is working with nature or above nature, for His are both nature and grace.”

— Meister Eckhart

164. “Run into peace.”

— Meister Eckhart

165. “The outward work will never be puny if the inward work is great.”

— Meister Eckhart

166. “Now rejoice, all ye powers of my soul, that you are so united with God that no one may separate you from Him. I cannot fully praise nor love Him therefore must I die, and cast myself into the divine void, till I rise from non-existence to existence.”

— Meister Eckhart

167. “For however devoted you are to him, you may be sure that he is immeasurably more devoted to you and has incomparably more faith in you. For he is faithfulness itself – of this we can be certain as those who love him are certain.”

— Meister Eckhart

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

— Meister Eckhart

169. “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

170. “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

171. “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

172. “Eckhart tells us that God ‘must’ give birth to himself in us fully and at all times. He has no choice in the matter; this is simply his nature. If we do not receive the spiritual benefits of this birth, then that is because we are not content to allow God to act in us. Rather, we obstruct him with our false notions of self and the determination to cling to the nothingness which is the true reality of our own creaturely being.”

— Meister Eckhart

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

— Meister Eckhart

174. “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

175. “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

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

— Meister Eckhart

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

— Meister Eckhart

178. “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

179. “Action and becoming are one.”

— Meister Eckhart

180. “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

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

— Meister Eckhart

182. “The human spirit must transcend number and break through multiplicity, and God will break through him; and just as He.”

— Meister Eckhart

183. “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

184. “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

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

— Meister Eckhart

186. “Time is what keeps the light from reaching us. There is no greater obstacle to God than time.”

— Meister Eckhart

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

— Meister Eckhart

188. “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

189. “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

190. “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

191. “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

192. “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

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

— Meister Eckhart

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

— Meister Eckhart

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

— Meister Eckhart

196. “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

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

— Meister Eckhart

198. “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

199. “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

200. “Yet the now of time is infinitesimally small. If you remove the now of time, you are in all places and possess all time.”

— Meister Eckhart