For a heart to be perfectly ready it has to be perfectly empty. In this condition it has attained its maximum capacity.
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.
That we may ‘live in eternity’, so help us God. Amen.
If my eye is to discern colour, it must itself be free from all colour.
If his accusers charged Eckhart with heresy, then he charged them with stupidity.
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.
It is a lie – any talk of God that does not comfort you.
Time is what keeps the light from reaching us. There is no greater obstacle to God than time.
Yet if someone comes to know something well, they soon tire of it and seek out something new, and repeat this pattern again and again, continually anxious to know new things, never lingering on what they’ve learned.
It is the nature of the Word to reveal to me what has been hidden.
It is not outside us: it is all within.
Yet the now of time is infinitesimally small. If you remove the now of time, you are in all places and possess all time.
An angel exists and works as an intelligence, and its state is one of beholding God ceaselessly, who is the object of its intellectual essence.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This birth which takes place unceasingly in eternity is the very same birth which has taken place within human nature.
We must withdraw, then, from all things, for when God works, he works without an image.
Where I will nothing for myself, there wills instead my God.
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.