Vincent McNabb Quotes

Today we often think that before we start living a religious life we have first to accept the creedal doctrines and that before one can have any comprehension of the loyalty and trust of faith, one must first force one's mind to accept a host of incomprehensible doctrines. But this is to put the cart before the horse.

Early on, you talk about God because you consider Him to be most important. But later, you realize there are means by which God is known and portrayed.

God cannot be realized through the intellect. Intellect can lead one to a certain extent and no further. It is a matter of faith and experience derived from that faith.

All men are born with a nose and five fingers, but no one is born with a knowledge of God.

There is the illusion of the world and the reality of the Torah.

The uninitiated have real questions and valid concerns over how the things of God appear to them.

It is up to God to reveal a religion, but up to us to understand and realise it.

When it comes to spiritual truth, how can we know that we are on the right path? One way is by asking the right questions - the kind that help us ponder our progress and evaluate how things are working for us.

People talk about revelation, and say it has ceased; but what ignorance it bespeaks, when man knows not the least thing on earth without revelation.

What I love about believing in a living God is that I believe God is constantly revealing God's self to us over time, and with each succeeding generation, we come a little closer to understanding the mind of God.

For I do not seek to understand in order to believe, but I believe in order to understand. For I believe this: unless I believe, I will not understand.

If God be God and man a creature made in image of the divine intelligence, his noblest function is the search for truth.

I'm just telling you, God permits things in our lives sometimes for reasons that we do not understand yet because of the spiritual level that we're on. We can't have any understanding of it, because we're not at a place of spiritual growth yet where we understand the deeper things of God.

THE PATH IS exceedingly vast. From ancient times to the present day, even the greatest sages were unable to perceive and comprehend the entire truth; the explanation and teachings of masters and saints express only part of the whole. It is not possible for anyone to speak of such things in their entirety. Just head for the light and heat, learn from the gods, and through the virtue of devoted practice of the Art of Peace, become one with the divine.

The revealed and mystic literature of mankind bears ample testimony to the fact that religious experience has been too enduring and dominant in the history of mankind to be rejected as mere illusion. There seems to be no reason, then, to accept the normal level of human experience as fact and reject its other levels as mystical and emotional.

The Holy Scriptures lead us to God and open the path to the knowledge of God.

One of the extraordinary things about awakening is that it carries with it the realization that there is only Spirit. Even the things of the world that we look at as problems are simply part of the way the world manifests, because it does so in terms of opposites.

We rejoice in God since he has taught us that every thing which is true in us, is but a faint expression of what is in him. And thus all our joys become to us the echo of higher joys, and our very life is as a dream of that nobler life, to which we shall awaken when we die.

The eternal wisdom of God ... has shown itself forth in all things, but chiefly in the mind of man, and most of all in Jesus Christ.

The Holy Spirit illuminates the minds of people, makes us yearn for God, and takes spiritual truth and makes it understandable to us.

When we say we begin with God, we begin with our idea of God, and our idea of God is not God. Instead, we ought to begin with God’s idea of God, and God’s idea of God is Christ

In darkness God's truth shines most clear.

God’s purposes are not for me to understand His plans: His plan is for me to understand Who He is.

You are incarnations of God, all of you. You are incarnations of the Almighty, Omnipresent, Divine Principle. You may laugh at me now, but the time will come when you will understand. You must. Nobody will be left behind.

In all matters of eternal truth, the soul is before the intellect; the things of God are spiritually discerned. You know truth by being true; you recognize God by being like Him.