John Ruysbroeck

You are as holy as you wish to be.

— John Ruysbroeck

Our work is the love of God. Our satisfaction lies in submission to the Divine Embrace

— John Ruysbroeck

We behold that which we are, and we are that which we behold.

— John Ruysbroeck

God being a common good, and His boundless love being common to all, He gives His grace...to all men, Pagan and Jew, good or evil...Thus God is a common light and a common splendour, enlightening heaven and earth, and every man, each according to his need and worth.

— John Ruysbroeck

All our ways end in superessential Being

— John Ruysbroeck

Even as God is common to all, the sun shines upon all trees

— John Ruysbroeck

In Eternity all creatures are God in God

— John Ruysbroeck

My words are strange, but those who love will understand.

— John Ruysbroeck

Knowledge of ourselves teaches us whence we come, where we are, and whither we are going. We come from God, and we are in exile.

— John Ruysbroeck

Unity is this: that a man feel himself to be gathered together with all his powers in the unity of his heart. Unity brings inward peace and restfulness of heart. Unity of heart is a bond which draws together body and soul, heart and senses, and all the outward and inward powers and encloses them in the union of love.

— John Ruysbroeck

God in the depths of us receives God who comes to us: it is God contemplating God.

— John Ruysbroeck

The image of God is found essentially and personally in all mankind. Each possesses it whole, entire and undivided, and all together not more than one alone. In this way we are all one, intimately united in our eternal image, which is the image of God and the source in us of all our life.

— John Ruysbroeck

When love has carried us above and beyond all things, Into the Divine Dark, We receive in peace the Incomprehensible Light, Enfolding us and penetrating us. What is this Light, If it be not a contemplation of the Infinite, And an intuition of Eternity?

— John Ruysbroeck

How great is the difference between The hidden child and the secret friend! For the friend makes only loving, Living but measured ascents toward God. But the child presses on to lose its own life upon the summits, in that simplicity which knoweth not itself.

— John Ruysbroeck

The indrawing attraction drags us out of ourselves, And calls us to be melted away and naughted in the Unity. And in this indrawing attraction we feel that God wills that we should be His, And for this we must abnegate ourselves and let our beatitude be accomplished in Him. But when He attracts us by flowing out towards us, He gives us over to ourselves and makes us free, And sets us in Time.

— John Ruysbroeck

God contemplates Himself and all things in an Eternal Now that has neither beginning nor end.

— John Ruysbroeck

God loves without limit and this puts a loving person most securely at peace.

— John Ruysbroeck

In the deeps of his ground he knows and feels nothing, in soul or body, but a singular radiance with sensible well-being and all pervading savour.

— John Ruysbroeck

This possession is a simple and abysmal tasting of all good and of eternal life; and in this tasting we are swallowed up above reason and without reason, in the deep Quiet of the Godhead, which is never moved...And therefrom follows the last point that can be put into words, that is, when the spirit beholds a Darkness into which it cannot enter with the reason. And there it feels itself dead and lost to itself, and one with God without difference and without distinction.

— John Ruysbroeck

God is a flowing and ebbing sea which ceaselessly flows out into all his beloved according to their needs and merits and which flows back with all those upon whom he has bestowed his gifts in heaven and on earth, together with all they possess or are capable of.

— John Ruysbroeck

This is that Wayless Being which all fervent interior spirits have chosen above all things, that dark stillness in which all lovers lose their way. If we could prepare ourselves through virtue in the ways I have shown, we would at once strip ourselves of our bodies and flow into the wild waves of the Sea, from which no creature could ever draw us back.

— John Ruysbroeck

The grace of God is to God himself as sunlight is to the sun — a means and a way leading us to the latter. It therefore shines within us in a simple, one-fold way and makes us deiform, that is, like God. This likeness constantly sinks away, dying in God and becoming and remaining one with him, for charity makes us become one with God and causes us to remain living in union with him.

— John Ruysbroeck

This brightness is so great that the loving contemplative, in his ground wherein he rests, sees and feels nothing but an incomprehensible Light; and through that Simple Nudity which enfolds all things, he finds himself and feels himself to be that same Light by which he sees and nothing else. . . . Blessed are the eyes which are thus seeing, for they possess eternal life.

— John Ruysbroeck

Spiritual inebriation is this: that a man receives more sensible joy and sweetness than his heart can either contain or desire.

— John Ruysbroeck

To comprehend and to understand God above all similitudes, as He is in Himself, is to be God with God, without intermediary, and without any otherness that can become a hindrance or an intermediary. Whosoever wishes to understand this must have died to himself, and must live in God, and must turn his gaze to the eternal light in the ground of his spirit, where the Hidden Truth reveals Itself without means.

— John Ruysbroeck

The incomprehensible richness and loftiness of the Divine Nature, its outpouring generosity toward all in common, fills a man with wonder.

— John Ruysbroeck

Compassion is a wound in the heart whence flows a common love to all mankind and which cannot be healed so long as any suffering lives in man.

— John Ruysbroeck

The inner lover of God, who possesses God in enjoyable rest, and himself in devoted, working love, and his entire life in virtues with justice, this inner person then comes, by means of these three points and the hidden revelation of God, into a God contemplating life, at least the lover who is pious and just, whom God in His freedom wishes to choose and to elevate to a superessential contemplation in divine light and according to the way of God.

— John Ruysbroeck

In this embrace, in the essential unity of God, are all inner spirits one with God in loving transport, and they are the selfsame one that the essence itself is in itself. And in this sublime unity of the divine nature, the heavenly Father is the origin and the beginning of every work that is done in heaven and on earth

— John Ruysbroeck

Now, if the spirit is to contemplate God with God, without intermediary, in this divine light, three things are necessary for a person.

— John Ruysbroeck

The first is that he must be well-ordered from without in all virtues and unhindered within, just as empty of all outward works as though he were not working. For if he is busy within by any work of virtue, then he is assailed by images. As long as that is going on in him, he cannot contemplate.

— John Ruysbroeck

Secondly, he must cleave to God within by devoted intention and love, just like a kindled, blazing fire that can no longer be extinguished. During the time that he feels himself to be in this state, he can contemplate.

— John Ruysbroeck

Thirdly, he must have lost himself in a waylessness and in a darkness in which all contemplatives wander around in enjoyment and can no longer find themselves in a creaturely way. In the abyss of this darkness in which the loving spirit has died to itself, there begin the revelation of God and eternal life. For in this darkness there shines and is born an incomprehensible light which is the Son of God, in whom one contemplates eternal life. And in this light one becomes seeing.

— John Ruysbroeck

And this divine light is granted in the simple being of the spirit, where the spirit receives the brightness –which is God Himself- above all gifts and above all creaturely activity, in the empty void of the spirit in which it has lost itself through enjoyable love and receives the brightness of God without intermediary. And without cease, it becomes the very brightness which it receives.

— John Ruysbroeck

See, this hidden brightness in which one contemplates everything that one desires according to the way of emptiness of spirit, this brightness is so great that the loving contemplative neither sees nor feels anything in his ground in which he rests except an incomprehensible light. And according to the simple bareness which encompasses all things, he finds and feels himself to be that very light by which he sees, and nothing else.

— John Ruysbroeck

In this return in love in the divine ground every divine way and activity and all the attributes of the persons are swallowed up in the rich compass of the essential unity. All the divine means and all conditions, and all living images which are reflected in the mirror of truth, lapse in the onefold and ineffable waylessness beyond reason. Here there is nothing but eternal rest in the fruitive embrace of outpouring love.

— John Ruysbroeck

There is a distinction and differentiation, And of all created things

— John Ruysbroeck

And the Light floweth forth in similitude, Which is bare and turned within.

— John Ruysbroeck

Even though the eagle, Fail and falter in the same.

— John Ruysbroeck

The Love of God is a consuming Fire, Eternally fulfilled.

— John Ruysbroeck

As much as is iron, so much is fire; In love.

— John Ruysbroeck

The Will of God, which is free - indeed freedom itself - takes from us the spirit of fear and makes us free, disengaged from and emptied of self, and of every fear that might oppress us in time or eternity.

— John Ruysbroeck

To die to sin is to live to God, to be emptied of self and detached from all that pleases or displeases, leads to the Kingdom of God; heart and desire must close to things of earth to open to God and things eternal, if we desire to taste and see that the Lord is sweet

— John Ruysbroeck

Finally, and beyond all else, ravished out of self into the Glory of God, without limit, incomprehensible, immense, we are to enjoy Him for ever and ever

— John Ruysbroeck

The interior life must be filled with grace and charity, without dissimulation, of direct intention, rich in virtue, the memory exempt from cares and solicitude, freed and detatched, entirely delivered of every image; the heart set free, open and up lifted above the Heavens; the intelligence empty and stripped of all consideration but God.

— John Ruysbroeck

Such is the citadel of loving Souls where all pure intellects are united, in one simple Purity. This is the habitation of God in us, where none can operate but God alone; its Purity is eternal, there is neither time nor space, past nor future, always present and ready to be revealed to those pure intelligences raised to it.

— John Ruysbroeck

But yet another thing is necessary, Purity of spirit; for an intelligence in repose without images, an intuition in the light of God, and a spirit elevated in Purity to the Face of God, these three qualities united constitute the true contemplative life, where none can err; for the pure spirit expands ceaselessly and follows rapidly in purified love, the enlightened intelligence towards its Cause.

— John Ruysbroeck

Then are we ravished out of self by purified Love, even to the Face of God, freed and emptied of every event and illusion. This is the contemplative life of highest price.

— John Ruysbroeck