Evelyn Underhill

All artists are of necessity in some measure contemplative.

— Evelyn Underhill

It looks impossible until you do it, and then you find it is possible.

— Evelyn Underhill

Love makes the whole difference between an execution and a martyrdom.

— Evelyn Underhill

God is much in the difficult home problems as in the times of quiet and prayer.

— Evelyn Underhill

Try to arrange things so that you can have a reasonable bit of quiet every day.

— Evelyn Underhill

“Prayer, then, begins by an intellectual adjustment.”

— Evelyn Underhill

All things are perceived in the light of charity, and hence under the aspect of beauty; for beauty is simply reality seen…

— Evelyn Underhill

I have an idea heaven will be both absolutely happy and absolutely dark, to protect us from the blaze of God.

— Evelyn Underhill

God is acting on your soul all the time, whether you have spiritual sensations or not.

— Evelyn Underhill

The determined fixing of our will upon God, and pressing toward him steadily and without deflection; this is the very center and…

— Evelyn Underhill

The direction and constancy of the will is what really matters, & intellect & feeling are only important in so far as…

— Evelyn Underhill

No metaphysician has yet shaken the ordinary individual's belief in his own existence. The uncertainties only begin for most of us when…

— Evelyn Underhill

When you let intution have its way with you, you open up new levels of the world. Such opening-up is the most…

— Evelyn Underhill

Love is creative. It does not flow along the easy paths, spending itself in the attractive. It cuts new channels, goes where…

— Evelyn Underhill

The life, beauty and meaning of the whole created order, from the tomtit to the Milky Way, refers back to the Absolute…

— Evelyn Underhill

When you put aside your preconceived ideas, your self-centered scale of values, and let intuition have its way with you, you open…

— Evelyn Underhill

The Christian is the person who sees every time and every situation, however dreary and repetitive, as God sees it - a…

— Evelyn Underhill

though humility and acknowledgement of one's real failings is good, the gratuitous eating of worms not put before us by God does…

— Evelyn Underhill

“True contemplation can only thrive when defended from two opposite exaggerations: quietism on the one hand, and spiritual fuss upon the other.…

— Evelyn Underhill

Faith is not a refuge from reality. It is a demand that we face reality ... The true subject matter of religion…

— Evelyn Underhill

We mostly spend [our] lives conjugating three verbs: to Want, to Have, and to Do... forgetting that none of these verbs have…

— Evelyn Underhill

As the genuine religious impulse becomes dominant, adoration more and more takes charge. 'I come to seek God because I need Him',…

— Evelyn Underhill

Do not entertain the notion that you ought to advance in your prayer. If you do, you will only find you have…

— Evelyn Underhill

In mysticism that love of truth which we saw as the beginning of all philosophy leaves the merely intellectual sphere, and takes…

— Evelyn Underhill

If God were small enough to be understood, He would not be big enough to be worshipped.

— Evelyn Underhill

The direction and constancy of the will is what really matters, and intellect and feeling are only important insofar as they contribute…

— Evelyn Underhill

We have descended into the garden and caught three hundred slugs. How I love the mixture of the beautiful and the squalid…

— Evelyn Underhill

I have just been given a very engaging Persian kitten... and his opinion is that I have been given to him.

— Evelyn Underhill

The London streets are paths of loveliness; the very omnibuses look like colored archangels, their laps filled full of little trustful souls.

— Evelyn Underhill

“He goes because he must, as Galahad went towards the Grail: knowing that for those who can live it, this alone is…

— Evelyn Underhill

Never forget that the key to the situation lies in the will and not in the imagination.

— Evelyn Underhill

In prayer the soul comes nearest the experience of absolute love: in belief it ascends by means of symbols towards absolute truth.

— Evelyn Underhill

Spiritual reading is a regular, essential part of the life of prayer, and particularly is it the support of adoring prayer.

— Evelyn Underhill

The first question here, then, is not "What is best for my soul?" nor is it even "What is most useful to…

— Evelyn Underhill

Towards my husband, I often fail to show interest in his affairs and amusements, not rousing myself to respond when I'm tired…

— Evelyn Underhill

Every minute you are thinking of evil, you might have been thinking of good instead. Refuse to pander to a morbid interest…

— Evelyn Underhill