Mary Baker Eddy Quotes

When angels visit us, we do not hear the rustle of wings, nor feel the feathery touch of the breast of a dove; but we know their presence by the love they create in our hearts.

Divine love always has met and always will meet every human need.

jealousy is the grave of affection

Happiness is spiritual, born of truth and love. It is unselfish; therefore it cannot exist alone, but requires all mankind to share it.

Hold thought steadfastly to the enduring, the good, and the true, and you will bring these into your experience proportionately to their occupancy of your thoughts.

To those leaning on the sustaining infinite, today is big with blessings.

To live and let live, without clamor for distinction or recognition; to wait on divine love; to write truth first on the tablet of one's own heart - this is the sanity and perfection of living, and my human ideal.

Reject hatred without hating.

Lulled by stupefying illusions, the world is asleep in the cradle of infancy, dreaming away the hours.

Truth is immortal; error is mortal.

Experience teaches us that we do not always receive the blessings we ask for in prayer.

To those leaning on the sustaining infinite, to-day is big with blessings.

Happiness is spiritual, born of truth and love.

There should be painless progression, attended by life and peace....Mortals will some day assert their freedom in the name of Almighty God....Dropping their present beliefs, they will recognize harmony and as the spiritual reality and discord as the material unreality. Chapter VII pp. 224 and 228 Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures

The mariner will have dominion over the atmosphere and the great deep, over the fish of the sea and the fowls of the air.

evil.

Home is the dearest spot on earth, and it should be the centre, though not the boundary, of the affections.

Mary Baker Eddy: “Home is the dearest spot on earth, and should be the centre, not the boundary, of the affections.

The periods of spiritual ascension are the days and seasons of Mind's creation, in which beauty, sublimity, purity, and holiness — yea, the divine nature — appear in man and the universe never to disappear. -Mary Baker Eddy (SH 509:24)

Give to it the place in our institutions of learning now occupied by scholastic theology and physiology, and it will 142 eradicate sickness and sin in less time than the old systems, devised for subduing them, have required for self-establishment and propagation.

God is Love.” More than this we cannot ask, higher we cannot look, farther we cannot go.

No power can withstand divine Love.

by means of what we now call hypnosis an individual could exercise an influence for better or worse upon the mental condition of his neighbor.

For an hour the organism would be charged with magnetic energy; or, as we should prefer to phrase it today, by monotony and expectation the organism would be made ripe for suggestive therapy.

So what actually goes on with all this religion business? Does it really matter whether you’re a Gnostic, a Christian, a Muslim, a Shi’ite, a Hindu, a Taoist, a Rosicrucian, a Jew, a Witch or a Jehovah’s Witness? Not in the slightest. (Well, it might matter if you’re a Jehovah’s Witness). Does it matter if you follow the teachings of Confucius, Buddha, Ramakrishna or Mary Baker Eddy? Of course not. Does it matter if your ritual object or talisman is a cup, an amulet, a tabernacle, a horseshoe, holy water, a wishbone, a Sanctus bell, a St. Christopher, a baptismal font, a rabbit’s foot, rosary beads, a broomstick or a seven-branched candlestick? No, it’s just something to focus your mind on. The real power is within you. Just as long as it doesn’t become a cop-out. Which it so often does. Why? I’ll tell you. Because Rag, Tag & Bobtail are not willing to take responsibility for their own lives. They need someone to tell them what to do and what to believe. But in reality you don’t need anyone. It’s all there inside you. You grant your own absolution. Hey, it’s your life! You certainly have more control over your ultimate destiny than a priest.

Physician, heal thyself,” runs the adage; but it was characteristic of Mary Baker as of so many mental healers, that the magician who cured thousands could never fully succeed in curing herself.

The physical affirmative should be met by a mental negative.” Nor should the sufferer ever admit to himself that he feels pain, for experience shows that one who pays attention to a pain increases it by autosuggestion.

He now became aware that his amazing influence over his fellow mortals did not arise from the lifeless mineral wherewith he performed his manipulations, but from himself, from the living man; that not the magnet but the magnetizer was the wizard who restored health.

God had told her to take fees for instruction and healing. At first she had not grasped the reason, but then it had become plain to her. By making material sacrifices, the patient strengthens his own faith. The more he has to pay, the more earnestly does he desire to be cured.

The strongest man is always the man of one idea. Devoting to it all his energy, his will, his intelligence, his nervous tension, he often becomes irresistible. Mary Baker was one of these exemplars among monomaniacs, for from 1862 onwards she possessed, or rather was possessed by, one idea and one only.

They are people with a passion for faith, but not intelligent enough to make a faith for themselves. Pure in spirit, but weaklings as a rule, longing for a mediator who will guide them whither they should go, they form the best possible recruits for the support of new religious sects and novel doctrines of one kind or another.

Thou shalt not commit adultery;” in other words, thou shalt not adulterate Life, Truth, or Love, — mentally, morally, or physically. “Thou shalt not steal;” that is, thou shalt not rob man of money, which is but trash, compared with his rights of mind and character. “Thou shalt not kill;” that is, thou shalt not strike at the eternal sense of Life with a malicious aim, but shalt know that by doing thus thine own sense of Life shall be forfeited. “Thou shalt not bear false witness;” that is, thou shalt not utter a lie, either mentally or audibly, nor cause it to be thought. Obedience to these commandments is indispensable to health, happiness, and length of days.

Thunder does not come from a clear sky, nor yet from a cloud until there has been an accumulation of electrical stresses; and in like manner a miracle, if it is to happen, demands a particular predisposition, a peculiar nervous and religious tension of the mind. No one ever experiences a miracle unless he has long and passionately awaited it.

They called on the parents of the girl and filled them with alarm by suggesting that the empress would withdraw the yearly pension of two hundred ducats if their daughter’s sight were restored, and, further, that the young pianist would lose half her attraction on the concert platform if she possessed normal vision. The possibility of having to forgo the yearly income worked like a charm upon Father and Mother Paradies.

Now it would be a shoemaker who, returning home of an evening, wearied by many hours’ work at the machine, wanted as recreation to learn about “higher things” and was glad if anyone would help him to interpret the words of Scripture. Now it would be some withered old woman, dreading the near approach of death, and to whom tidings of immortality brought consolation. For such as these, persons with little intelligence and yet having a passion for the spiritual, the encounter with Mary Baker was a great experience.

Why did this exponent of mental healing use glasses to help her to read, thus correcting “old sight” by earthly means instead of dispelling the error “by mind”? There were other questions no less indiscreet and no less painful. Why did she use a stick to help her to walk? Why did she, the declared enemy of all officially qualified practitioners, consult a dentist and have recourse to such extremely material adjuvants as artificial teeth? Why (perhaps the most crucial question of all) did she at times have morphine administered for the relief of intolerable pain? It was impossible for the founder of Christian Science, the discoverer of an infallible method of healing, to endure the ancient quip: “Physician, heal thyself!” Assuredly,

There is a famous passage in Science and Health which has been spoken of as Mary Baker’s “immortal thesis,” and an alleged distortion of which was the theme of one of the numerous lawsuits in which the founder and the apostles of Christian Science have been involved. In set terms it is here declared that there is neither life, nor truth, nor intelligence, nor substance, in matter. Everything is infinite mind and its everlasting revelation, for God is all in all. Mind is immortal truth, whereas matter is mortal error. Mind is the real and the eternal, whereas matter is the unreal and the temporal. Mind is God and man is his image, wherefore man is not material but mental. Can the reader understand this farrago? If not, all the better.

Should my proposals meet with a rebuff in France, it would be my unhappy fate to leave that country and seek better luck elsewhere. If in the end the whole world proves to be against me, then I can still hope to find a spot on this earth where I may live in peace. Conscious of my own rectitude of purpose, secure from any self-reproach, I am convinced that I shall be able to gather a small company around me, persons I have helped to benefit, and then I shall need no one’s advice, and no one’s interference with what I undertake. If I were to act otherwise, animal magnetism would become no more than a passing fashion. Each would seek to find in it either more, or less, than really exists. It would be used amiss, its utility would become dubious, and it would give rise to a problem whose solution might not be discovered for centuries.

Despite all her exaggerations, despite her defects of character, and despite the hopeless confusion of much of her thought, Mary Baker was unquestionably a woman of genius. She discovered (or rediscovered) some of the fundamental laws of the mind, and turned them to account in her practice. The most important of these is the indisputable fact that every imaginative anticipation of a feeling, such as a pain, tends to transform itself into reality, and that therefore a countersuggestion will often remove that dread of illness which is almost as dangerous as illness itself. “The ills we fear are the only ones that conquer us” — behind such words, however much they may lie open to the onslaught of logical criticism, there lurks a profound truth. Mary Baker was anticipating Coué’s doctrine of autosuggestion when she declared: “The sick hurt themselves when they say that they are sick.” She insisted that the Christian Science practitioner should never accept the patient’s conviction of illness.

has tended to ignore the forces of mental healing, the psychical “will-to-health” — has failed to take into practical account the fact that, besides such medicaments as arsenic and camphor, there are other remedies to stimulate a flagging vitality; purely spiritual remedies, such as courage, self-confidence, faith, vigorous optimism. Much as our reason may revolt against the futility of the teaching of those who want to kill bacilli by “mind,” to counteract syphilitic infection by “truth,” and to nullify the disastrous effect of arteriosclerosis by “God,” we should make a great mistake were we to ignore the energy which this doctrine can furnish to one who believes in it. We should be closing our eyes to the truth were we to deny that Christian Science has achieved wonderful successes, and, by the profundity of its faith, has brought consolation to numberless persons in moments of despair. Perhaps it is but an intoxicant, is but “dope,” giving no more than a transient support to the nerves as does camphor or caffeine, and temporarily arresting the advance of disease. Still, in giving this temporary relief, it shows once more how the power of the mind can come to the help of the body.