Caryll Houselander Quotes

#1. I wanted to shut my mind, that my thoughts might close
on my own peace, I wanted to close
the peace of my love in my heart
like dew in a dark rose."
From "Philip Speaks

Caryll Houselander

#2. Light's glory is to dispel darkness. Christ has illumined you with wisdom and the fire of his presence. It has been sparked and kindled in you. Let it blaze.

Caryll Houselander

#3. Christ asks for a home in your soul, where he can be at rest with you, where he can talk easily to you, where you and he, alone together, can laugh and be silent and be delighted with one another.

Caryll Houselander

#4. People like to give the sort of presents they

Caryll Houselander

#5. We are the mediocre, we are the half givers, we are the half lovers, we are the savourless salt. Break the hard crust of complacency. Quicken in us the sharp grace of desire.

Caryll Houselander

#6. God is everywhere: yes, but how dim faith is, what a remote idea heaven is, in the modern world!

Caryll Houselander

#7. Every ordinary thing in your life is a word of God's love: your home, your work, the clothes you wear, the air you breathe, the food you eat ... the flowers under your feet are the courtesy of God's heart flung down on You! All these things say one thing only: "See how I love you."

Caryll Houselander

#8. In every passerby, everywhere - Christ ... He is in everyone - there can be no outcasts.

Caryll Houselander

#9. The way to begin healing the wounds of the world is to treasure the Infant Christ in us; to be not the castle but the cradle of Christ; and, in rocking that cradle to the rhythm of love, to swing the whole world back into the beat of the Music of Eternal Life.

Caryll Houselander

#10. Powerful to alleviate, to delay, to camouflage, though money is, in the end it lets us down.

Caryll Houselander

#11. Most people know the sheer wonder that goes with falling in love, how not only does everything in heaven and earth become new, but the lover himself becomes new. It is literally like the sap rising in the tree, putting forth new green shoots of life.

Caryll Houselander

#12. Advent is the season of the secret, the secret of the growth of Christ, of divine love growing in silence ... For nine months, Christ grew in his mother's body. By his own will, she formed him from herself, from the simplicity of her daily life.

Caryll Houselander

#13. There is a possessiveness in the idealist's attitude . . . . "You are to be like me. I will shape you, or hammer you, into the shape of my ideal. You must enjoy my pleasures. Your tastes must coincide with mind. You must have only my values. You must be restricted by my limitations

Caryll Houselander

#14. There is no way of learning of God except through the adventure of our own heart.

Caryll Houselander

#15. The sense of the joy in anything is the sense of Christ.

Caryll Houselander

#16. We are united to Him, we are one, and it is when His Passion becomes real to us, through experience and love, that we grow aware of His presence in us.

Caryll Houselander

#17. We are only syllables of the perfect Word.

Caryll Houselander

#18. God speaks silently, God speaks in your heart; if your heart is noisy, chattering, you will not hear.

Caryll Houselander

#19. The love for material things grows like a fungus in the soul and destroys the loveliness of the human heart utterly.

Caryll Houselander

#20. The emotions roused by that most unavoidable of things, food, are astonishing.

Caryll Houselander

#21. We usually judge people by our own reactions fears, and desires. We do not see them as separate people . . . but as part of ourselves and our lives. We attribute to them motives which we would have in the same circumstances.

Caryll Houselander