Henry Suso

"Be steadfast and never rest content until you have obtained the now of eternity as your present possession in this life, so far as this is possible to human infirmity."

"In a detached person nothing merely temporal is born in possessiveness. His eyes are opened. He becomes fully aware and, receiving his blessed existence and life, is one with Him; for all things are here one in the One."

"It is hidden for everything that is not God, except for those with whom he wants to share Himself."

"Eternity is life that is beyond time but includes within itself all time but without a before or after. And whoever is taken into the Eternal Nothing possesses all in all and has no before or after. Indeed a person taken within today would not have been there for a shorter period from the point of view of eternity than someone who had been taken within a thousand years ago."

"After this the disciple turned again in all seriousness to eternal Truth and asked for the power to discern by outward appearance a person who was truly detached. He asked thus. Eternal Truth, how do such people act in relation to various things? Answer: They withdraw from themselves, and all things withdraw along with this. Question: How do they conduct themselves with respect to time? Answer: They exist in an ever-present now, free of selfish intentions, and they seek to act perfectly in the smallest thing as in the greatest."

"No one can explain this to another just with words. One knows it by experiencing it."

"Here in this region beyond thought the human spirit actively soars."

"In this wild mountain region of the where beyond God there is an abyss full of play and feeling for all pure spirits."

"Now these people who are taken within, because of their boundless immanent oneness with God, see themselves as always and eternally existing"

"Question: Paul says that no law is made for the just. Answer: Just persons, by becoming so, conduct themselves more submissively than other people because they understand from within, in the source, what is proper outwardly for everyone, and they view all things accordingly. The reason that they are unfettered is that they do (freely) out of an attitude of detachment what ordinary people do under compulsion."

"Question: Is not the person who has been transported to interior detachment freed from external exercises? Answer: One sees few people reach the condition you describe without their strength being wasted. The efforts of those who really achieve it affect them to the marrow. And so, when they realise what is to be done and left undone, they continue to practise the usual exercises, performing them more or less frequently as their strength and the occasion permit. Question: Where do the pangs of conscience and other anxieties of seemingly good people come from, as well as the unrestrained latitude (of conscience) in other people? Answer: Both types are focusing their attention on their own image but in different ways; the one group spiritually, the other bodily."

"One thing you must know: Just as there is no comparison between actually hearing the sound of harp-strings sweetly plucked and listening to someone talking about it, so too there is no comparison between words which are received in pure grace, issuing from a living heart, spoken by living lips, and those self-same words committed to dry parchment — especially words in German. For these somehow grow chill, losing their vitality like roses cut. For the enchanting melody which, more than anything else, moves human hearts, then fades away, so that the words are received now into the dryness of dry hearts. No harp-strings were ever so sweet but, when stretched across dry timber, they fall silent. An unloving heart can no more understand a love-filled speaker than a German an Italian. Therefore, an eager enquirer should hasten to the out-flowing streams of these sweet teachings so that she may see and observe them at their source in all its living and wondrous beauty – that is, the in-flowing of present grace which is able to restore dead hearts to life."