Truth is something so noble that if God could turn aside from it, I could keep the truth and let God go.
Meister EckhartRead
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.
Interpretation
Focus on your character rather than solely on your actions, as true righteousness comes from being good within.
This quote emphasizes the importance of inner character over external actions. Meister Eckhart argues that true holiness and righteousness stem from who we are as individuals rather than merely the deeds we perform. By cultivating goodness within ourselves, our actions naturally reflect that inner quality, making them righteous. It is a reminder that our integrity and virtue are the true measures of our worth, not just our accomplishments or behavior in isolation.
In practice
In a motivational speech about self-improvement.
Truth is something so noble that if God could turn aside from it, I could keep the truth and let God go.
...Where and when God finds you ready, he must act and overflow into you, just as when the air is clear and pure, the sun must overflow into it and cannot refrain from doing that.
What good is it to me that Mary gave birth to the son of God fourteen hundred years ago, and I do not also give birth to the Son of God in my time and in my culture? We are all meant to be mothers of God. God is always needing to be born.
In this breaking-through, I receive that God and I are one. Then I am what I was, and then I neither diminish nor increase, for I am then an immovable cause that moves all things.
Apprehend God in all things, for God is in all things. Every single creature is full of God and is a book about God. Every creature is a word of God.
If you love yourself, you love everybody else as you do yourself. As long as you love another person less than you love yourself, you will not really 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.
Never open the door to a lesser evil, for other and greater ones invariably slink in after it.
It's in the act of making things that we figure out who we are.
We're receiving information from all the planes of our consciousness all the time, but we don't acknowledge their existence; we treat the information as static, as noise.
Always be yourself, express yourself, have faith in yourself, do not go out and look for a successful personality and duplicate it.
Progress would not have been the rarity it is if the early food had not been the late poison.
I think that if you live long enough, you realize that so much of what happens in life is out of your control, but how you respond to it is in your control. That's what I try to remember.
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