Evelyn Underhill
Evelyn Underhill
Evelyn Underhillwas an English Anglo-Catholic writer and pacifist known for her numerous works on religion and spiritual practice, in particular Christian mysticism...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth6 December 1875
Evelyn Underhill quotes about
artist
All artist are of necessity in some measure contemplatives.
hurt book reading
I do not think reading the mystics would hurt you myself: you say you must avoid books which deal with 'feelings' - but the mystics don't deal with feelings but with love which is a very different thing. You have too many 'feelings,' but not nearly enough love.
what-matters long safe
The will is what matters---as long as you have that, you are safe.
prayer garden potatoes
The life of prayer is so great and various there is something in it for everyone. It is like a garden which grows everything, from alpines to potatoes.
god prayer live-life
Nothing in all nature is so lovely and so vigorous, so perfectly at home in its environment, as a fish in the sea. Its surroundings give to it a beauty, quality, and power which are not its own. We take it out, and at once a poor, limp dull thing, fit for nothing, is gasping away its life. So the soul, sunk in God, living the life of prayer, is supported, filled, transformed in beauty, by a vitality and a power which are not its own.
inspirational reading great-love
It is important to increase our sense of God's richness and wonder by reading what his great lovers have said about him.
art real men
Idealism, though just in its premises, and often daring and honest in their application, is stultified by the exclusive intellectualism of its own methods: by its fatal trust in the squirrel-work of the industrious brain instead of the piercing vision of the desirous heart. It interests man, but does not involve him in its processes: does not catch him up to the new and more real life which it describes. Hence the thing that matters, the living thing, has somehow escaped it; and its observations bear the same relation to reality as the art of the anatomist does to the mystery of birth.
mistake thinking afterlife
Sometimes I think the resurrection of the body, unless much improved in construction, a mistake!
god caring adoration
Adoration is caring for God above all else.
inspirational spiritual prayer
Spiritual reading is a regular, essential part of the life of prayer, and particularly is it the support of adoring prayer.
feelings important matter
The direction and constancy of the will is what really matters, and intellect and feeling are only important insofar as they contribute to that.
christian choices looks
Christian history looks glorious in retrospect; but it is made up of constant hard choices and unattractive tasks, accepted under the pressure of the Will of God.
peculiar
You don't have to be peculiar to find God,
father tests cold
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.