Indeed, it is not ourselves and other things that we know, but rather God alone, if we rest in the root and ground of blessedness. But when the soul knows that she knows God, then she has knowledge simultaneously of God and of itself.
It is true that here below, in this life, that power by which we know and understand that we see, is nobler and better than that power by which we see, since nature begins her work at the weakest point while God begins his at the point of perfection.
Nature makes a man and a woman from a child, and a chicken from an egg, while God makes the man or woman before the child and the chicken before the egg. Nature first makes the wood warm and then hot, and only then does she generate fire, while God first gives all creatures being and only later, within time and yet timelessly and individually, he gives them all that belong to being.
Eckhart’s sayings, from Simon Parke’s Conversations with Meister Eckhart
