Evelyn Underhill quotes

Every minute you are thinking of evil, you might have been thinking of good instead. Refuse to pander to a morbid interest in your own misdeeds. Pick yourself up, be sorry, shake yourself, and go on again. (Evelyn Underhill)
After all it is those who have a deep and real inner life who are best able to deal with the irritating details of outer life. View quote
Evelyn Underhill
All things are perceived in the light of charity, and hence under the aspect of beauty; for beauty is simply reality seen with the eyes of love. View quote
Evelyn Underhill
God is acting on your soul all the time, whether you have spiritual sensations or not. View quote
Evelyn Underhill
There is no place in my soul, no corner of my character, where God is not. View quote
Evelyn Underhill
As to the most prudent logicians might venture to deduce from a skein of wool the probable existence of a sheep; so you, from the raw stuff of perception, may venture to deduce a universe which transcends the reproductive powers of your loom. View quote
Evelyn Underhill
Adoration is caring for God above all else. View quote
Evelyn Underhill
If God were small enough to be understood, He would not be big enough to be worshipped. View quote
Evelyn Underhill
God is always coming to you in the Sacrament of the Present Moment. Meet and receive Him there with gratitude in that sacrament. View quote
Evelyn Underhill
Deliberately seek opportunities for kindness, sympathy, and patience. View quote
Evelyn Underhill
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. (Evelyn Underhill)
Try to arrange things so that you can have a reasonable bit of quiet every day. View quote
Evelyn Underhill
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 realized it, he is not a complete human being, has not entered into possession of all his powers. View quote
Evelyn Underhill
God is much in the difficult home problems as in the times of quiet and prayer. View quote
Evelyn Underhill
The direction and constancy of the will is what really matters, & intellect & feeling are only important in so far as they contribute to that. View quote
Evelyn Underhill
In my relations with my father, which are difficult and where I'm often met by coolness and indifference, I am constantly tempted to be cold and indifferent. Yet I know that this is a test if I could take it rightly. View quote
Evelyn Underhill
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. View quote
Evelyn Underhill
True contemplation can only thrive when defended from two opposite exaggerations : quietism on the one hand, and spiritual fuss upon the other. View quote
Evelyn Underhill
Mysticism is the art of union with Reality. The mystic is a person who has attained that union in greater or less degree; or who aims at and believes in such attainment. View quote
Evelyn Underhill
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. View quote
Evelyn Underhill
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. (Evelyn Underhill)
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. View quote
Evelyn Underhill
The redeeming character of Franciscan enthusiasm-it's ability to change, brace and expand the most unlikely spirits and impel them to exacting discipline and selfless work-are fully shown in her. View quote
Evelyn Underhill
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. View quote
Evelyn Underhill
I have merely attempted to put the view of the universe and man's place in it which is common to all mystics in plain and untechnical language: and to suggest the practical conditions under which ordinary persons may participate in their experience. View quote
Evelyn Underhill