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Action(s)
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People should not worry as 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 sanctify our works.
-Meister Eckhart
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Angels
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The soul at its highest is found like God, but an angel gives a closer idea of Him. That is all an angel is: an idea of God.
-Meister Eckhart
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Birth
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We are celebrating the feast of the Eternal Birth which God the Father has borne and never ceases to bear in all eternity.... But if it takes not place in me, what avails it? Everything lies in this, that it should take place in me.
-Meister Eckhart
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Faith
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To be sure, our mental processes often go wrong, so that we imagine God to have gone away. What should be done then? Do exactly what you would do if you felt most secure. Learn to behave thus even in deepest distress and keep yourself that way in any and every estate of life. I can give you no better advice than to find God where you lost him.
-Meister Eckhart
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God
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Know that when you seek anything of your own, you will never find God, because you do not seek God purely. You are seeking something along with God, and you are acting just as if you were to make a candle out of God in order to look for something with it. Once one finds the things one is looking for, one throws the candle away. This is what you are doing.
-Meister Eckhart, Ordinary Graces, ed. Lorraine Kisly
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Whoever possesses God in their being, has him in a divine manner, and he shines out to them in all things; for them all things taste of God and in all things it is God's image that they see.
-Meister Eckhart
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Jesus might have said, I became man for you. If you do not become God for me, you wrong me.
-Meister Eckhart
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To be full of things is to be empty of God. To be empty of things is to be full of God.
-Meister Eckhart
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The seed of God is in us. Given an intelligent and hard-working farmer, it will thrive and grow up to God, whose seed it is; and accordingly its fruits will be God-nature. Pear seeds grow into pear trees, nut seeds into nut trees, and God-seed into God.
-Meister Eckhart
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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
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God is at home, it's we who have gone out for a walk.
-Meister Eckhart
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Heart
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All God wants of man is a peaceful heart.
-Meister Eckhart
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Identity
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God expects but one thing of you, and that is that you should come out of yourself in so far as you are a created being made and let God be God in you.
-Meister Eckhart
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A human being has so many skins inside, covering the depths of the heart. We know so many things, but we don't know ourselves! Why, thirty or forty skins or hides, as thick and hard as an ox's or bear's, cover the soul. Go into your own ground and learn to know yourself there.
-Meister Eckhart
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Kindness
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You may call God love, you may call God goodness. But the best name for God is compassion.
-Meister Eckhart
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Knowledge
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The knower and the known are one. Simple people imagine that they should see God as if he stood there and they here. This is not so. God and I, we are one in knowledge.
-Meister Eckhart
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Life
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There is no stopping place in this life--nor is there ever one for any person, no matter how far along the way one's gone.
-Meister Eckhart
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Nature
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If you seek the kernel, then you must break the shell. An likewise, if you would know the reality of Nature, you must destroy the appearance, and the farther you go beyond the appearance, the nearer you will be to the essence.
-Meister Eckhart
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Prayer
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If the only prayer you ever say in your entire life is thank you, it will be enough.
-Meister Eckhart
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To be sure, this requires effort and love, a careful cultivation of the spiritual life, and a watchful, honest, active oversight of all one's mental attitudes towards things and people. It is not to be learned by world-flight, running away from things, turning solitary and going apart from the world. Rather, one must learn an inner solitude, where or with whomsoever he may be. He must learn to penetrate things and find God there, to get a strong impression of God firmly fixed on his mind.
-Meister Eckhart
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Present, the
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There exists only the present instant... a Now which always and without end is itself new. There is no yesterday nor any tomorrow, but only Now, as it was a thousand years ago and as it will be a thousand years hence.
-Meister Eckhart
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Property
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The more we have the less we own.
-Meister Eckhart
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Right, Rightness
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To be right, a person must do one of two things: either he must learn to have God in his work and hold fast to him there, or he must give up his work altogether. Since, however, we cannot live without activities that are both human and various, we must learn to keep God I everything we do, and whatever the job or place, keep on with him, letting nothing stand in our way.
-Meister Eckhart
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Self-love
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If you love yourself, you love everybody else as you do yourself. As long as you love another person less than yourself, you will not succeed in loving yourself, but if you love all alike, including yourself, you will love them as one person and that person is both God and man. Thus he is the great righteous person who, loving himself, loves all others equally.
-Meister Eckhart, The Art of Loving
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Serenity
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He who would be serene and pure needs but one thing, detachment.
-Meister Eckhart
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Books by and about Meister Eckhart