Angelus Silesius citations

“All Heaven is within thee, Man,
And all of Hell within thy heart:
What thou dost choose and will to have,
That hast thou wheresoe'er thou art.”

“Christ could be born a thousand times in Bethlehem – but all in vain until He is born in me.”

“Christ was born a man for me,
for me he died -
Unless I become God
through Him,
His birth is mocked
His death denied”

“Though Jesus Christ in Bethlehem
A thousand times his Mother bore,
Is he not born again in thee
Then art thou lost for evermore.”

“The Thought and Deed of Deity
Are of such richness and extent
That It remaineth to Itself
An Undiscovered Continent.”

“I say it speeds thee not
That Christ rose from the grave,
So long as thou art still
To death and sin a slave.”

“The rose is without 'why'; it blooms simply because it blooms. It pays no attention to itself, nor does it ask whether anyone sees it.”

“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”

“Two eyes our souls possess:
While one is turned on time,
The other seeth things
Eternal and 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.”

“Thou laughest that a child cries o'er its broken doll;—
The things o'er which thou mournest—are they not playthings all?”

“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.”

“How fleeting is this world
yet it survives.
It is ourselves that fade from it
and our ephemeral lives.”

“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”

“Travel within thyself!
The Stone Philosophers with wisest arts Have vainly sought,
cannot be found By travelling in foreign parts.”

“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”

“No thought for the hereafter have the wise,
for on this very earth they live in paradise”

“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”