Elizabeth Goudge Quotes

73 Sourced Quotes

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

Elizabeth Goudge
Nothing is ever finished and done with in this world. You might think a seed was finished and done with when it falls like a dead thing into the earth; but when it puts forth leaves and flowers next spring you see your mistake.

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
If you believe in God omnipresent, then you must believe everything that comes into your life, person or event, must have something of God in it to be experienced and loved; not hated.

Elizabeth Goudge
Most of us tend to belittle all suffering except our own.... I think it's fear. We don't want to come too near in case we're sucked in and have to share it.

Elizabeth Goudge
Civilization... is another word for respect for life. One can't have too much respect for a loveliness that's brittle as spun glass.

Elizabeth Goudge
These black times go as they come and we do not know how they come or why they go.

Elizabeth Goudge
The child in us is always there, you know, and it's the best part of us, the winged part that travels farthest.

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
Water, wind and birdsong were the echoes in this quiet place of a great chiming symphony that was surging around the world. Knee-deep in grasses and moon daisies, Stella stood and listened, swaying a little as the flowers and trees were swaying, her spirit voice singing loudly, though her lips were still, and every pulse in her body beating its hammer strokes in time to the song.

Elizabeth Goudge
A well-trained dog is like religion, it sets the deserving at their ease and is a terror to evildoers.

Elizabeth Goudge
The bad things of life were very transitory. It was the good things, the ribbed sand, the wind blowing over the white-capped waves, the sunshine and the stars, that were so tough and durable.

Elizabeth Goudge
He had not known, until his child had been born, that a love as complete and exquisite and perfect as that which he felt for her could exist upon this earth.

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

Elizabeth Goudge
Because of course she had known she must go. She always did the thing because in obedience lay the integrity that God asked of her. If anyone had asked her what she meant by integrity she would not have been able to tell them but she had seen it once like a picture in her mind, a root going down into the earth and drinking deeply there. No one was really alive without that root.

Elizabeth Goudge
All the best things are seen first of all at a far distance.

Elizabeth Goudge
The years stretched before her, a long and dusty way, yet if she could walk humbly along it she might find that life, unfolding slowly, keeps its best secrets till the end.

Elizabeth Goudge
He had discovered that the choice between self-love or love of something other than self offers no escape from suffering either way, it is merely a choice between two woundings, of the pride or of the heart.

Elizabeth Goudge
There always comes, I think, a sort of peak in suffering at which either you win over your pain or your pain wins over you, according as to whether you can, or cannot, call up that extra ounce of endurance that helps you to break through the circle of yourself and do the hitherto impossible. That extra ounce carries you through 'le dernier quart d' heure.' Psychologist have a name for it, I believe. Christians call it the Grace of God.

Elizabeth Goudge
She would not rest until existence was for her a sucked orange. When there was no drop of juice left, then she would fling away the rind and die content.

Elizabeth Goudge
Autumn days have a holiness that spring lacks... They are like old serene saints for whom death has lost its terror.

Elizabeth Goudge
For she had discovered that as well as the evil web there was another. This too bound spirits together, but not in a tangle, it was a patterned web and one could see the silver pattern when the sun shone upon it. It seemed much frailer than the dark tangle, that had a hideous strength, but it might not be so always, not in the final reckoning.

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
The perfect moment, once lost, is not easily found again.

Elizabeth Goudge
It is when a man has to soak his biscuits in his tea that he knows he's old.

Elizabeth Goudge
Our home, our special country, is for all of us the place where we find liberation; a very difficult word... that tries to describe something that can't be described but is the only thing worth having.

Elizabeth Goudge
Happy the man who lives long enough to acknowledge his ignorance.

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