Meister Eckhart Quotes

Seek a reality deeper than the changing forms.

What is real is not the external form, but the essence of things.

The external is in no way the essence of religion, but the external often proclaims the internal.

The soul is the truth of who we are.

Is it not by love alone that we succeed in penetrating to the very essence of being?

One hundred religious persons knit into a unity by careful organization do not constitute a church any more than eleven dead men make a football team. The first requisite is life, always

Spirituality is your original face; it is the discovery of your intrinsic nature.

Love is the essence of all religion, mysticism, and philosophy, and for the one who has learned this, love fulfills the purpose of religion, ethics, and philosophy, and the lover is raised above all diversities of faiths and beliefs.

The imagined beings have their insides on the outside; they are visible souls. And man as a whole, Man pitted against the universe, have we seen him at all till we see that he is like a hero in a fairy tale?

Forget the cringing selves you sometimes are and remember, instead, the magic essence of your own being that sings even now through your fingertips. That is the reality which you are seeking. Experience it fully.

Sport can create hope, where once there was only despair. It is more powerful than governments in breaking down racial barriers.

I shall strip away layer after layer of grime -- the toffee-colored varnish and caked soot left by a lifetime of dissembling -- until I come to the very thing itself and know it for what it is. My soul. My self.

One who not merely beholds the outward shows of things, but catches a glimpse of the soul that looks out of them, whose garment and revelation they are-if he be such, I say, he will stand, for more than a moment, speechless with something akin to that which made the morning stars sing together.

And whenever you feel that essence in another, you also feel it in yourself.

Because no man can ever feel his own identity aright except his eyes be closed; as if darkness were indeed the proper element of our essences, though light be more congenial to our clayey part.

Because we all carry the Truth within us as our essence, we recognize it immediately.

The summit sings what is being spoken in the depths.

Whatever’s inside making me what I am, it’s like film. Film only works in the dark. Tear it all open and let in the light and you kill it.

...That which they call abstract is the most realistic, because what is real is not the exterior but the idea, the essence of things.

We're not trying to form a new religion. I think that all the powerful religions are pretty much the same. People like to pretend they are very different, but they are not. They are really about believing in something bigger than yourself, something that's unseen, and about having some faith. That's not such a bad thing to have in the world.

The essence of oneself and the essence of the world: these two are one. [ The aim is not to see, but to realize that one is, that essence; then one is free to wander as that essence in the world.] Hence separateness, withdrawal, is no longer necessary. Wherever the hero may wander, whatever he may do, he is ever in the presence of his own essence-for he has the perfected eye to see.

[The essences of things] are suspended on the invisible dimension whose vibrance has been denied the human eye at all times save in the intuition of ecstasy.

It isn't necessary for a work to have a lot of things to look at, to compare, to analyze one by one, to contemplate. The thing as a whole, its quality whole, is what is interesting. The main things are alone and are more intense, clear and powerful.

True self is the part of us that does not change when circumstances do.

Trials and tribulations tend to squeeze the artificiality out of us, leaving the essence of what we really are and clarifying what we really yearn for.