Johannes Tauler Quotes

Every one should find some suitable time, day or night, to sink into his depths, each according to his own fashion. Not every one is able to engage in contemplative prayer.

As a good wine must be kept in a good cask, so a wholesome body is the proper foundation for a well-appointed inner ground.

A good meditation, even when it is interrupted by occasional nodding, is much more beneficial than many outward religious exercises.

In prayerful silence you must look into your own heart. No one can tell you better than yourself what comes between you and God. Ask yourself. Then listen!

Because in the school of the Spirit man learns wisdom through humility, knowledge by forgetting, how to speak by silence, how to live by dying.

The gracious, eternal God permits the spirit to green and bloom and to bring forth the most marvelous fruit, surpassing anything a tongue can express and a heart conceive.

In the school of the spirit, man learns wisdom through humility.

Give yourself entirely to God, enter and hide in the hidden ground of your soul.

God does not lead all His servants by one road, nor in one way, nor at one time; for God is in all things; and that man is not serving God aright, who can only serve Him in his own self-chosen way.

In the kingdom of heaven it is His work that will be crowned, not yours. Anything in you that He has not wrought Himself will count for nothing.

Everything depends on this: a fathomless sinking into a fathomless nothingness.

Judge yourself; if you sincerely and humbly do that, you will not be judged by God.

God in His wisdom has decided that He will reward no works but His own.

If ye keep watch over your hearts, and listen for the Voice of God and learn of Him, in one short hour ye can learn more from Him than ye could learn from Man in a thousand years.

He who desires to become a spiritual man must not be ever taking note of others, and above all of their sins, lest he fall into wrath and bitterness, and a judging spirit towards his neighbours.

God touches and moves, warns and desires all equally, and He wants one quite as much as another. The inequality lies in the way in which His touch, His warnings, and His gifts are received.

Never believe that true prayer consists in mere babbling, reciting so many psalms and vigils, saying your beads while you allow your thoughts to roam.

Let God and all his creation teach you what your sins are.

To discern what weaknesses and faults separate you from God, you must enter into your own inward ground and then confront yourself.

Rid yourself of anything that is not directed toward God.

Judge yourself; if you do that you will not be judged by God, as St. Paul says. But it must be a real sense of your own sinfulness, not an artificial humility.

If you fall seventy times a day, rise seventy times and return to God so that you will not fall too often.

You don't have to leave the world to be holy and grow closer to the Holy One.

If we really want to achieve true prayer, we must turn our backs upon everything temporal, everything external, everything that is not divine.

What matters most is a good and ready will to obey God.

Man must do his part and detach himself from created things.

I never mingled with men, but I came home less of a man than I went out.