Angelus Silesius: Quotes about God

“Naught ever can be known in God: One and Alone Is He.
To know Him, Knower must be one with Known.”

“Here I still flow in God as a small stream of time,
There I shall be a sea of blessedness sublime”

“If you know how to launch your ship into God's sea
Oh, what a blessed fate, submerged in it to be”

“A Loaf holds many grains of corn
And many myriad drops the Sea:
So is God's Oneness Multitude
And that great Multitude are we.”

“God, being a great abyss, to men his depth reveals
Who climb the highest peak of the eternal hills”

“Never in endless time will ring a sound as sweetly
As when a human heart in God is tuned completely.”

“Where is my dwelling place? Where I can never stand. Where is my final goal, toward which I should ascend?
It is beyond all place. What should my quest then be? I must, transcending God, into the desert flee”

“Saints do not die. It is their lot,
To die while on this earth to all that God is not.”

“God is an utter Nothingness,
Beyond the touch of Time and Place:
The more thou graspest after Him,
The more he fleeth thy embrace.”

“In schools throughout the world God's but described to you.
Within the spirit's school one sees and loves him too.”

“Three days: Today, Tomorrow and Yesterday, I know,
Yet if the past were cancelled within the here and now
And then the future hidden, I could regain that Day
Which I, before I was, had lived in God's own way.”

“If neither love nor pain
Will ever touch thy heart,
Then only God's in thee,
And then in God thou art”

“Even before I was me, I was God in God;
And I can be once again, as soon as I am dead to myself”

“God is a flowing well which constantly may pour
Into his whole Creation, and yet be as before.”

“So high above all things that be.
Is God uplifted, man can dare.
No utterance: he prayeth best.
When Silence is his sum of prayer”

“God far exceeds all words that we can here express
In silence He is heard, in silence worshiped best”

“I know God couldn't live a moment without me; if I should disappear, He would die, destitute”

“The nearest way to God
Leads through love's open door;
The path of knowledge is
Too slow for evermore”

“If thou dost love a Something, Man,
Thou lovest naught that doth abide.
God is not This nor That—do thou
Leave Somethings utterly aside”