Elizabeth Goudge Quotes

73 Sourced Quotes

Butterflies... not quite birds, as they were not quite flowers, mysterious and fascinating as are all indeterminate creatures.

Elizabeth Goudge
Most of the basic truths of life sound absurd at first hearing.

Elizabeth Goudge
All we are asked to bear we can bear. That is a law of the spiritual life. The only hindrance to the working of this law, as of all benign laws, is fear.

Elizabeth Goudge
Only at the very center of pain or joy was one wholly wretched, wholly joyful. There was only one hour of the night in which sunset or dawn was not present to the mind in memory or hope, only one hour of the day when the sun seemed neither rising nor declining, and the intensity of those hours dulled and blinded.

Elizabeth Goudge
Could you understand the meaning of light if there were no darkness to point the contrast? Day and night, life and death, love and hatred; since none of these things can have any being at all apart from the existence of the other; only the indolence of human nature finds it so hard to pierce through to the other side.

Elizabeth Goudge
The whole universe was stilled as if listening for a voice. For the space of one heartbeat there was peace on earth. For one fraction of a moment there was no deed of violence wrought on earth, no hatred, no fire, no whirlwind, no pain, no fear. Existence rested against the heart of God, then sighed and journeyed again.

Elizabeth Goudge
In my opinion, too much attention to weather makes for instability of character.

Elizabeth Goudge
Humanity can be roughly divided into three sorts of people — those who find comfort in literature, those who find comfort in personal adornment, and those who find comfort in food.

Elizabeth Goudge
One is seldom unchanged by the death of those one loves. It gives me a deeper knowledge of them, and so of oneself in regard to them.

Elizabeth Goudge
To be sorry and glad together is to be perceptive to the richness of life.

Elizabeth Goudge
Acting a part is not always synonymous with lying; it is far more often the best way of serving the truth. It is more truthful to act what we should feel if the community is to be well served rather than behave as we actually do feel in our selfish private feelings.

Elizabeth Goudge
This modern craze for putting the young in positions of authority — headmasters in their thirties, bishops without a gray hair on their heads, generals who scarcely need to use a razor — ever since it took hold the world's gone steadily downhill.

Elizabeth Goudge
Imagination comes from yourself and can deceive you, but vision is a gift from outside yourself — like light striking on your closed eyelids and lifting them to see what's really there.

Elizabeth Goudge
I doubt if we nuns are really as self-sacrificing as we must seem to be to you who live in the world. We don't give everything for nothing, you know. The mystery plays fair.

Elizabeth Goudge
What is the scent of water?" "Renewal. The goodness of God coming down like dew.

Elizabeth Goudge
You felt that your life was not an isolated thing, but existed in all other lives, as all other lives existed within yours. There wasn't anything anywhere to which you could say, 'We don't need each other.'

Elizabeth Goudge
Sensible fathers and mothers, when their children marry, go back to the old days and renew their youth.

Elizabeth Goudge
It was not the size of things that mattered but their perfection, it was not what one had that was important, but what one made.

Elizabeth Goudge
Being ill makes you feel what well people call sentimental, but what you feel is nonetheless genuine whatever they call it.

Elizabeth Goudge
Presently there was taking place in his mind that undirected, haphazard activity which he was accustomed to describe to himself inaccurately as 'thought.'

Elizabeth Goudge
Wiggins was not one of those emotional dogs who let themselves go with quivering whiskers, hot nose, and dribbling tongue.

Elizabeth Goudge
To know perfect happiness a woman may be a mother, but must be a grandmother.

Elizabeth Goudge
Jean was visited by one of her rare moments of happiness, one of those moments when the goodness of God was so real to her that it was like taste and scent; the rough strong taste of honey in the comb and the scent of water. Her thoughts of God had a homeliness that at times seemed shocking, in spite of their power, which could rescue her from terror or evil with an ease that astonished her.

Elizabeth Goudge
She realized with deep respect that this woman had always done what she had to do and faced what she had to face. If many of her fears and burdens would have seemed unreal to another woman, there was nothing unreal about her courage.

Elizabeth Goudge
Nothing living should ever be treated with contempt. Whatever it is that lives, a man, a tree, or a bird, should be touched gently, because the time is short. Civilization is another word for respect for life.

Elizabeth Goudge