Jakob böhme quotes

— Jakob Bohme

Love is higher than the Highest. — Jakob Bohme

For it is the young tree grown out of the old root which shall illuminate what the old tree has been in its wonders. — Jakob Bohme

The soul shall mightily rule in all hidden secrets: but it must not let in the devil.

The liver is the mother of the blood. His faith is a desire after God and Goodness, which he wrappeth up in a sure hope, trusting to the words of the promise, and liveth and dieth therein; though as to the true man, he never dieth.”

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Jakob Böhme, Dialogues on the Supersensual Life

“The Soul here saith "I have nothing, for I am utterly stripped and naked of every Thing; I can do nothing, for I have no manner of power, but am as water poured out; I am nothing, for all that I am is no more than an Image of Being, and only God is to me I AM; and so, sitting down in my own Nothingness, I give glory to the Eternal Being, and will nothing of myself, that so God may will all in me, being unto me my God and All Things." Herein now it is that so very few find this most precious treasure in the Soul, though every one would so fain have it”

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Jakob Böhme, The Signature of All Things — Chapter VIII(1650s)

“Every Root, as it is in the Earth, may be known by the Signature for what it is food or profitable, even such a Form also has the Earth, and it is discerned in the leaves and Stalks which Planet is Lord in the Property, much more in the Flower; for of what Taste the Herb and Root is, even such an Hunger is in it, and such a Cure lies therein, for it has such a Salt.

— Jakob Bohme

The perfect state, the summum bonum, is Play. And it is impossible that these [Pg 40] two should stand together, or subsist in one person; the one driving out the other by a necessity of nature. So shall thy light break forth as the morning; and after the redness thereof is passed, the Sun Himself, which thou waitest for, shall arise unto thee, and under His most healing wings thou shalt greatly rejoice; ascending and descending in His bright and salutiferous beams.

Despite his family responsibilities and trade, his interior life became increasingly dominated by visions and revelations.

Career, Persecution, and Writings

Early Works and Opposition

Böhme wrote his first major work, Aurora, or The Rising of the Dawn, in 1612. The like we are to consider of the inchoative poisonful Mercury in the Devil, and in Man, and in the Serpent also; how an Oil corrupts, and yet the Essence or Being of God is not hereby at all corrupted, but enters into itself, viz.”

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Jakob Böhme, The Signature of All Things — Chapter XV(1650s)

“And though he does some Thing that is good, yet he does it not from his own Self-Will, but the Will resigned in God compels him that he must do what his Self would not willingly do: And now if he does it, he does it as an Instrument of the resigned Will, not from his own Desire, but from God's Will, which guides the resigned Will in the Desire as an Instrument.”

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Jakob Böhme, Dialogues on the Supersensual Life

“I bid thee not, Child, to do harm to anyone, thereby to create to thyself any misery or unquietness.

— Jakob Bohme

When thou art quiet and silent, then art thou as God was before nature and creature; thou art that which God then wats; thou art that whereof he made thy nature and creature: Then thou hearest and seest even with that wherewith God himself saw and heard in thee, before every thine own willing or thine own seeing began.

— Jakob Bohme

Christ hath instituted Baptism as a bath, to wash away the anger, and hath put into us the Noble Stone, viz. — Jakob Bohme

A Christian is of no sect. It was a complex, symbolic exploration of God, creation, and the struggle between light and darkness.

Local clergy, particularly Pastor Gregor Richter of Görlitz, accused him of heresy and forced him to stop writing.

in the Spirit. — Jakob Bohme

The heart in man signifieth the heat or the element of fire, and it is also the heat; for the heat in the whole body hath its original in the heart. Wherefore seek the Fountain of Light, waiting in the deep ground of thy soul for the rising there of the Sun of Righteousness, whereby the Light of Nature in thee, with the properties thereof, will be made to shine seven times brighter than ordinary.”

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Jakob Böhme, The Signature of All Things — Chapter VII(1650s)

“Eternity and Time; and how the Eternity dwells in the Time, but yet only in itself; but yet so nigh to the Time, as Fire and Light which are in one another, and yet make two Kingdoms; or as Darkness and Light dwell in each other, and the one is not the other.

It maketh all pleasant and friendly in every creature; it maketh the vegetables of the earth fragrant and of good taste, affording fair, yellow, white and ruddy colours. In play, life expresses itself in its fullness. It appeareth only through the Manifestation of God”

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Jakob Böhme, The Signature of All Things — Chapter IX(1650s)

“For if my Will is a Nothing, then he is in me what he pleases, and then I know not myself any more, but him; and if he will that I shall be something, then let him effect it; but if he wills it not, then I am dead in him, and he lives in me as he pleases, and so then if I be a Nothing, then I am at the End, in the Essence out of which my Father Adam was created; for out of Nothing God has created all Things.”

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Jakob Böhme, Dialogues on the Supersensual Life

“All is confusion if thou hast no more than the dim Light of Nature, or unsanctified and unregenerated Reason to guide thee by, and if only the Eye of Time be opened in thee, which cannot pierce beyond its own limit.

— Jakob Bohme

For according to the outward man, we are in this world, and according to the inward man, we are in the inward world.... — Jakob Bohme

As the science of every thing is in the formed Word, so also is God's will therein: That same expressed Word is in the angels, angelical; in the devils, diabolical; in man, human; in beasts, bestial.

— Jakob Bohme

The sour quality is set opposite to the bitter and the sweet, and is a good temper to all, a refreshing and cooling when the bitter and the sweet qualities are too much elevated or too preponderant. — Jakob Bohme

If Love dwelt not in Trouble, it could have nothing to love.

— Jakob Bohme

A Cherubim or leader of a kingdom of angels is the fountain or heart of his whole kingdom, and is made out of all the powers out of which his angels are made, and is the most powerful and the brightest of them all. But because the World, as the World, loveth all deceit and vanity, and walketh in false and treacherous ways, thence, if thou hast a mind to act a clean contrary part to the ways thereof, without any exception or reserve whatsoever, walk thou only in the right way, which is called [Pg 79] the Way of Light, as that of the World is properly the Way of Darkness.”

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Jakob Böhme, Dialogues on the Supersensual Life

“The virtue of Love is nothing and all, or that Nothing visible out of which All Things proceed.