This is a curated selection of Bernadette Roberts quotes (primarily sourced from publicly available videos, and personally curated by me on my own lifelong learning journey). This page is intended as a learning resource for educational purposes and only meant to offer an overview/introduction. Short quotes aren’t a substitute for source material, so if this page sparks your interest, explore more deeply by checking out Bernadette Roberts’ books (Amazon).
Page Contents:
- Christ & God Quotes
- Religion & Spirituality Quotes
- Spiritual Journey Quotes
- Ego & Self Quotes
- Unitive State & No Self Quotes
25 Bernadette Roberts Quotes on God, Self, Oneness, & More
Bernadette Roberts Quotes on Christ & God
“Consider the man Jesus … He never knew Christianity, he never read the New Testament, he never knew the Trinity, he never knew Christ.” — Bernadette Roberts
“As St. Paul said, ‘Christ increases, we decrease.’ As we become more full of God, the more diminished the self is … The only thing that is one with God is our own deepest center … God is the deepest center of our self, so we can say our true self is God.” — Bernadette Roberts
“Reformation is what we can do. Transformation is what only God can do … When the dust settles, everything will be as it should be—not according as we made ourselves, but now as God has transformed us.” — Bernadette Roberts
“Nothing can take God away from us, and nothing can add anything to us … Nothing that the world can give us can add to God, and there’s nothing that the world can take away from us because the only thing that matters is God.” — Bernadette Roberts
“We come into the world unknowing—we don’t really know how we got here—and we return to God knowing.” — Bernadette Roberts
Bernadette Roberts Quotes on Religion & Spirituality
“The concern is not with an academic or intellectual understanding of our religions, rather, our focus is the experiential path of the individual as it reflects the key revelation of our enduring religions … Everyone, regardless of their religion or belief system can come to know the furthest reaches of God’s revelations, know them long before they become known (accepted or rejected) by a particular group.” — Bernadette Roberts
“While revelation is first and foremost experiential, religion is usually the intellectual medium that conveys and passes it on. However, where revelation is passed on solely by way of intellectual concepts – with its endless diversity of interpretations – it soon becomes obscured and corrupted. Only through repeated experience is a revelation continuously verified and perpetuated.” — Bernadette Roberts
“On an experiential level it enables us to integrate, understand and appreciate various religions in a way not possible on a purely intellectual level. Solely from a scholarly or cultural perspective, our profound religious truths often appear incompatible or contradictory, whereas, encountered on an experiential level in the process of the journey, different religions can be understood as the progressive stages of God’s on-going revelation.” — Bernadette Roberts
“‘Revelation’ is God’s disclosure of Himself to man. Thus ‘God’ is ‘That’ which is revealed – can only be revealed. This gratuitous revelation is the essence and foundation of man’s ‘religions’. Without this, I hold no authentic ‘religion’ is possible.” — Bernadette Roberts
“Where there is no revelation I hold there is also no true religion, but instead, mere philosophy, speculation and myth. Without revelation no certitude is possible, not even the certitude God exists. We might add, ‘That’ which is revealed never identifies Itself by the term ‘God’ or says anything at all. The term ‘God’ is man’s term for ‘That’ beyond which nothing exists. My use of the term ‘revelation’ is restricted to a firsthand ‘seeing’ or ‘knowing’ God.” — Bernadette Roberts
Bernadette Roberts Quotes on the Spiritual Journey
“When a contemplative says they ‘see’ something, they also mean they ‘know’ it … In many ways, our journey is like constantly being able to see in the dark … There’s a lot of things we don’t see—and really shouldn’t see, are not prepared to see—until the journey is over and done with.” — Bernadette Roberts
“The journey is irreversible. Once there is no ego, you never go back to a previous state … The process of transformation really begins with no ego.” — Bernadette Roberts
“If there’s any deeper aspect of yourself that you can penetrate or bump up against or anything else, then you haven’t gone far enough.” — Bernadette Roberts
“One of the paradoxes of the journey is that to ultimately get out of self we have to go through self—and that means we go inward … This whole journey is an inward journey until we come to the unitive state at which time we can’t go any deeper. The inward journey is finished. But, then the whole journey turns around and goes outward—there is a thrust from the center outward.” — Bernadette Roberts
“In the process of letting go, of learning to trust God, the psyche is becoming integrated around a new center—becoming whole and well-balanced.” — Bernadette Roberts
Bernadette Roberts Quotes on Ego, Self, & Consciousness
“Man’s real uniquenesses, his essence, is self or consciousness … When God reveals himself to man, he’s not going to reveal himself to our senses. God is not going to be something that we see, and hear, and touch—rather God reveals himself to consciousness because that is our uniqueness.” — Bernadette Roberts
“Self is first and foremost an experience; it is not an idea in our heads. Before we can have any idea of self, it must first be an experiential reality … Self is man’s most immediate experience. Everything else is mediated experience. The most unmediated experience is self; all other experiences are mediated through self.” — Bernadette Roberts
“Many people refer to the ego as the ‘false self’, but there’s nothing false about it. It is real, and it is important. It’s our dynamic energy center. The ego is that in man which goes in pursuit of God, his highest good … The ego is only known when it’s gone. It’s known in retrospect.” — Bernadette Roberts
“Self cannot be known so long as we are living it or are it. The totality of self is only known once it is gone, in its absence. We know it by what is not there anymore—what is not functioning, what is absent … You know by its absence what self was, and consequently you know what it is.” — Bernadette Roberts
“Consciousness is three things at once: the experiencer, the experience, and the experienced … The empty center is two things at once: it is no ego self, and it is the positive presence of God.” — Bernadette Roberts
Bernadette Roberts Quotes on the Unitive State & No Self
“Nobody outside ourselves can ever verify that we are in that unitive state or we are not.” — Bernadette Roberts
“In the unitive state, we are enjoying our oneness with God—very profound joy.” — Bernadette Roberts
“In the unitive state, it’s a union of wills.” — Bernadette Roberts
“The sense of our own being is replaced by a sense of God’s being. It’s as if we now recognize that at the center of our being is God’s being.” — Bernadette Roberts
“We can only talk about a center if we have a circumference. We can only talk about God in ourselves, or God imminent, because it is relative. It’s relative to something outside: God is inside because we are outside you might say. So, consciousness is responsible for our whole sense of interiority—of an inside, of an imminent—and also of an outside, or a transcendent.” — Bernadette Roberts
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