“The knower and the known are one.”

Widely circulated on the Internet, but no actual text to tie it back to Eckhart.
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Meister Eckhart photo
Meister Eckhart 69
German theologian 1260–1328

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“The knower and the known are one. Simple people imagine that they should see God as if he stood there and they here. This is not so. God and I, we are one in knowledge.”

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Circulated on the Internet, this is an amended version of a quote from Eckhart's sermon iusti vivent in aeternum: There are simple people who imagine they are going to see God as if He were standing here and they there. This is not true. God and I are one.
Middle High German: “Sumlîche einveltige liute wænent, sie süln got sehen, als er dâ stande und sie hie. Des enist niht. Got und ich wir sîn ein.”
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Context: This first non-evaluative insight into history does not inevitably lead to relativism, but rather to relationism. Knowledge, as seen in the light of the total conception of ideology, is by no means an illusory experience, for ideology in its relational concept is not at all identical with illusion. Knowledge arising out of our experience in actual life situations, though not absolute, is knowledge none the less. The norms arising out of such actual life situations do not exist in a social vacuum, but are effective as real sanctions for conduct. Relationism signifies merely that all of the elements of meaning in a given situation have reference to one another and derive their significance from this reciprocal interrelationship in a given frame of thought. Such a system of meanings is possible and valid only in a given type of historical existence, to which, for a time, it furnishes appropriate expression. When the social situation changes, the system of norms to which it had previously given birth ceases to be in harmony with it. The same estrangement goes on with reference to knowledge and to the historical perspective. All knowledge is oriented toward some object and is influenced in its approach by the nature of the object with which it is pre-occupied. But the mode of approach to the object to be known is dependent upon the nature of the knower.

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