Favourite quotations from world religious traditions (mystics, saints, thinkers etc.)

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“…I once had a dream. I dreamt that I, even though a man, was pregnant, pregnant and full with Nothingness like a woman is with child. And that out of this Nothingness, God was born…The being and the nature of God are mine; Jesus enters the castle of the soul; the spark in the soul is beyond time and space; the soul’s light is uncreated and cannot be created, it takes possession of God with no mediation; the core of the soul and the core of God are one…”

- Meister Eckhart (1260-1328), Catholic mystic and Dominican priest
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This is why the contemporary Eckhart took the name of the former one. Try to explain that anyone. But Meister Eckhart is of a rare stream in Catholicism, best exemplified contemporarily by Bernadette Roberts. One of my favorite quotes from her is
“You will have a personal God as long as you believe you are a person.”
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Not so much a quotation, but an extract from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s “Letters from Prison”.

Bear in mind he’s in prison, and would be executed in due course by the Nazis, and he’s also protestant.
"… And we cannot be honest unless we recognise that we have to live in the world etsi deus non daretur. And this is just what we do recognise - before God! God Himself compels us to recognise it. So our coming of age leads us to a true recognition of our situation before God. God would have us know that we must live as men who manage our lives without Him. The God who is with us is the God who forsakes us (Mark 15:34). The God who lets us live in the world without the working hypothesis of God is the God before whom we stand continually. Before God and with God we live without God. God lets Himself be pushed out of the world on to the cross. He is weak and powerless in the world, and that is precisely the way, the only way, in which He is with us and helps us. Matt. 8:17 makes it quite clear that Christ helps us, not by virtue of His omnipotence, but by virtue of His weakness and suffering.
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Here is the decisive difference between Christianity and all religions. Man’s religiousity makes him look in his distress to the power of God in the world: God is the deus ex machina. The Bible directs man to God’s powerlessness and suffering: only the suffering God can help. To that extent we may say that the development towards the world’s coming of age outlined above, which has done away with a false conception of God, opens up a way of seeing the God of the Bible, who wins power and space in the world by His weakness. This will probably be the starting-point for our ‘secular interpretation’."
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Whenever I read this, it reminds me of the suffering God, particularly if I’m feeling a bit cranky about some suffering of my own or others, but it also sets me to thinking.
 
*"…The nightingale
does not resent
the cuckoo’s song.
But you, if I don’t sing,
like you,
mock me as wrong.

While gazing at the Sun
I almost lost my sight.
The fault lies in my eye -
Not in the Light

Until One-ness
has absorbed all Otherness
no man can find
his Suchness

Love’s power
to restore the broken shards
into one whole
is the supreme attainment
of the human soul

Do not malign
a single thing
for God
not only is its maker
but also its design

A ruby
is not lovelier
than a rock,
an angel
not more glorious
than a frog

In God all things are one,
he does not separate;
with me as with a gnat
does He communicate

How short our span!
If you once realized how brief,
you would refrain
from causing any beast or man
the smallest grief, the slightest pain…"*

- Angelus Silesius (1624 – 1677), Catholic mystic and poet
 
“…All the races of the world are humans, and of all men and of each individual there is but one definition, and this is that they are rational. All have understanding and will and free choice, as all are made in the image and likeness of God … All the peoples of the world are humans. All the races of humankind are one. Thus the entire human race is one…No one may be deprived of his liberty nor may any person be enslaved…”

***- Bartolomé de las Casas (c. 1484–1566) Catholic Bishop, abolitionist, Defender of the Native Americans ***

 
“…The earth is but one country and mankind its citizens…Let your vision be world embracing rather than confined to your own self…”

- Baha’u’llah, (1817 – 1892), prophet-founder of the Baha’i Faith
 
“…This celestial city, in its life here on earth, calls to itself citizens of every nation, and forms out of all the peoples one varied society; it is not harassed by differences in customs, laws and institutions, which serve to attainment or the maintenance of peace on earth; it neither rends nor destroys anything but rather guards all and adapts itself to all; however these things may vary among the nations, they are all directed to the same end of peace on earth as long as they do not hinder the exercise of religion, which teaches the worship of the true supreme God…Citizens, peoples and all men, thou, recalling their common origin, shalt not only unite among themselves, but shalt make them brothers…”

***Saint Augustine of Hippo (354 –430), Church Father and Doctor of the Church ***

[as quoted in PACEM, DEI MUNUS PULCHERRIMUM, Encyclical of Pope Benedict XV, 1920]
 
"…France and England are mine, from sea to sea;
So firm is my grip,
No one takes up arms against me.
Mine is Saxony, mine is Guascogne,
Mine are Burgundy and all of Normandy.

Mine the kingdom of Prussia and that of Bohemia,
Hibernia and Roumania, Scotland and Frisia.
Mine is Tuscany and the valley of Spoleto

…

Mine is Campagna, the Roman hills, and the plains of Lombardy;
Mine are Sardinia, Cyprus, Corsica, and Crete,
And unknown kingdoms and numberless subjects beyond the seas -
Medes, Persians, Elamites, Syrians and Mongols,
Georgians, Ethiopians, Indians and Muslims

…

Land, fields full of flowers, trees,
Succulent fruits, livestock - all at my command, all mine.

Lakes, rivers, and oceans teeming with fish,
Air, winds, birds - all pay me joyful homage.
Moon and sun, sky and stars, are but minor treasures:
The treasures that make me burst into song
Lie beyond the sky that you can see.

Since my will is centered in God, who possesses all,
I wing with ease from earth to heaven.
Since I gave my will to God
All things are mine and I am one with them
In love, in ardent charity

…

Spiritual poverty, deepest wisdom, you are slave to nothing,
And in your detachment you possess all things.

God does not dwell in a heart that’s confined,
And a heart is only as big as the love it holds.

Where God enters in, the old world is swept away,
Lover and Beloved are fused in wondrous union.
Love no longer needs the heart,
Nor knowledge the intelligence - our will is His.

To live as myself and yet not I,
My being no longer my being,
This is a paradox
We cannot pretend to understand!

Spiritual poverty is being attached to nothing, wanting nothing,
And possessing all things in the spirit of freedom…"

- Blessed Jacopone Da Todi (c.1230-1306), Italian Catholic mystic
 
Thus was it related by the learned judge Muhammad ibn Ahmad
Rushd al-Andalusí [Averroes]

“It is well known that the Prophets and
Manifestations of the Cause of God were sent to guide the nations, to
refine their characters, and to bring the people nearer to their
Source and Ultimate Goal. They were not sent as historians,
astronomers, philosophers, or natural scientists the Prophets indulged
the people in regard to their historical notions, folk stories, and
scientific principles and spoke to them according to these. They
conversed with them as was appropriate to their audience and hid
realities behind the curtain of allusion.”
 
“…We must recognize the truth in everything. I mean, we must love in God and for God’s sake everything that has being, because God is Truth itself, and without God nothing has being…”

- Saint Catherine of Siena (1347 - 1380), mystic and Doctor of the Church

“…Build yourself an interior cell, a cell of self-knowledge…Make yourself a cell in your own mind from which you need never come out…”

- Saint Catherine of Siena (1347 - 1380), mystic and Doctor of the Church
 
“If you don’t behave as you believe, you will end by believing as you behave.” - Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

Dum Spiro Spero “While I Breathe I Hope” - Cicero
 
“If scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims.” - Dalai Lama XIV
 
“Every great heretic has always exhibited three remarkable characteristics in combination. First he picked some mystical idea belonging to the Church. Second, he used that one mystical idea against all the other mystical ideas. Third (and most singular) he seems generally to have had no notion that his own favourite mystical idea, was a mystical idea, at least in the sense of a mysterious or dubious or dogmatic idea.”

GK Chesteron, Catholic convert
 
“I never look at the masses as my responsibility; I look at the individual. I can only love one person at a time - just one, one, one. So you begin. I began - I picked up one person. Maybe if I didn’t pick up that one person, I wouldn’t have picked up forty-two thousand…The same thing goes for you, the same thing in your family, the same thing in your church, your community. Just begin - one, one, one.”

Mother Teresa of Calcutta
 
“…The soul that is attached to anything however much good there may be in it, will not arrive at the liberty of divine union. For whether it be a strong wire or a slender and delicate thread that holds the bird, it matters not. Until the cord is broken the bird cannot fly…”

***- Saint John of the Cross (1542 – 1591), Catholic mystic and Doctor of the Church ***
 
This is a rather long poem by Saint Ephrem the Syrian but I adore it (translated into English in 1904):

"…There is One Being, who knows Himself and sees Himself.
He dwells in Himself,
And from Himself sets forth.
Glory to His Name.
This is a Being who by His own will is in every place,
Who is invisible and visible,
Manifest and secret.
He is above and below.

Mingling and condescending by His grace among the lower;
Loftier and more exalted, as befits His glory, than the higher.
The swift cannot exceed His swiftness,
Nor the slow outlast His patience.

He is before all and after all,
And in the midst of all.
He is like the sea,
In that all creation moves in Him.
As the waters beset the fish in all their movements,
The Creator is clad with everything which is made,
Both great and small.
And as the fish are hidden in the water,
There is hidden in God height and depth,
Far and near,
And the inhabitants thereof.
And as the water meets the fishes everywhere it goes,
So God meets everyone who walks.
And as the water touches the fish at every turn it makes,
God accompanies and sees every man in all his deeds.

Men cannot move the earth which is their chariot,
Neither does anyone go far from the Just One who is his associate.
The Good One is united to the body,
And light to the eyes.
A man is not able to flee from his soul,
For it is with him.
Nor is a man hid from the Good,
For He besets him.
As the water surrounds the fish and it feels it,
So also do all natures feel God.

He is diffused through the air,
And with thy breath enters into thy midst.
He is mingled with the light,
And enters, when thou seest, into thy eyes.
He is mingled with thy spirit,
And examines thee from within, as to what thou art.
In thy soul He dwells,
And nothing which is in thy heart is hid from Him.
As the mind precedes the body in every place,
So He examines thy soul before thou dost examine it.
And as the thought greatly precedes the deed,
So His thought knows beforehand what thou wilt plan.

Compared with His impalpability,
Thy soul is body and thy spirit flesh.
Soul of thy soul,
Spirit of thy spirit,
Is He who created thee,
Far from all,
And mingled with all,
And manifest above all,
A great wonder and a hidden marvel unfathomable.
He is the Being concerning whose essence no man is able to explain.
This is the Power whose depth is inexpressible.
Among things seen and among things hidden
There is none to be compared to Him.
This is He who created and formed from nothing
Everything which is…"

***- Saint Ephrem the Syrian (ca. 306 – 373), Catholic mystic, Church Father and Doctor of the Church ***
 
Vouthon said:
This is a rather long poem by Saint Ephrem the Syrian but I adore it (translated into English in 1904):

“…There is One Being, who knows Himself and sees Himself.
He dwells in Himself,
…”

***- Saint Ephrem the Syrian (ca. 306 – 373), Catholic mystic, Church Father and Doctor of the Church ***
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I very much like youe quote/signature. It is true. It is on the title page of one of my favorite books.

My signtue says “Idem non idem.” It refers to the near impossibility of accurate translation. So I’m wondering if some of the "in"s might be actually translated as “as?” I’m wondering, because some of the great Catholic Saints can easily be understood as non dualists, something I strongly consider that Master Jesus was, as well.

Love the poem. Thanks!
 
Gaber said:
I very much like youe quote/signature. It is true. It is on the title page of one of my favorite books.

My signtue says “Idem non idem.” It refers to the near impossibility of accurate translation. So I’m wondering if some of the "in"s might be actually translated as “as?” I’m wondering, because some of the great Catholic Saints can easily be understood as non dualists, something I strongly consider that Master Jesus was, as well.

Love the poem. Thanks!
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My dear brother Gaber 👍

Thank you so very much for your reply! I am glad that you love the poem, so do I. Saint Ephrem was a voluminous writer, and he composed many incredible hymns in the Syriac language.

I am also pleased that you like my signature quote from Saint Augustine. It is an incredible saying and yes it is very true. There has only ever been one religion of God throughout history, though in a variety of forms, and ancient pagans and wise men such as Plato, Socrates, Aristotle, the Hindu sages who wrote the Upanishads etc. were all spiritually speaking members of this religion and Christians before Christ since they followed the Logos as known to their conscience. Even now there will be non-Christians who are spiritually members of the Church, the one religion that is now called Christianity or Catholicism.

As concerns the translation, I’m afraid that I really don’t know. This translation by A. S. Duncan Jones in 1904 is the only one that I know of and have seen quoted elsewhere.

Therefore, you might be right - I genuinely don’t know! 😃

I agree with you as to the near impossibility of accurate translation. For example when translating Saint Francis of Assisi’s Canticle of the Sun from Italian, we have the problem of the word per the word is variously translated: for, by and through which subtly changes the meaning. If taken as through then it gives a much more panentheistic interpretation, or rather reveals the immanence of God more than ‘for’ or ‘by’.
 
Vouthon said:
My dear brother Gaber 👍

Thank you so very much for your reply!..

I agree with you as to the near impossibility of accurate translation. For example when translating Saint Francis of Assisi’s Canticle of the Sun from Italian, we have the problem of the word per the word is variously translated: for, by and through which subtly changes the meaning. If taken as through then it gives a much more panentheistic interpretation, or rather reveals the immanence of God more than ‘for’ or ‘by’.
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I am likewise grateful to meet such a one as you on here. Just glancing through, I am sorry to fin that many that I would have had interes in conversing with have been banned. Such a loss for those left here.

Not many use the word “panentheistic.” it is a word I like, and which seems to get folks here somewhat riled up if presented too directly. And that surprises me. I am one of those few who contend that Jesus was actually a teacher of non duality. I don’t know how that lines up with your core understanding, but mine came about of necessity after a rather profound lif changing event.

But that is beside the point for the moment; I am just happy that you have introduced me to yet another Catholic mystic/contemplative who makes sense to me! I am very appreciative.
 
To be deep in the Bible is to cease to be a Roman Catholic-FireSword 😃
 
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