Top 100 Elizabeth Goudge Quotes
#1. 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
#2. Lovely phrases had lit candles in her mind, one after the other, till she felt intoxicated with the brightness.
Elizabeth Goudge
#3. Is a man less of a man, because he's learned to hold his tongue?
Elizabeth Goudge
#4. Loneliness made or ruined a man. It frightened him so that he must either sing and build in the face of the dark, like a bird or a beaver, or hide from it like a beast in his den. There were perhaps always only the two ways to go, God or the jungle.
Elizabeth Goudge
#5. Faith given back to us after a night of doubt is a stronger thing, and far more valuable to us than faith that has never been tested.
Elizabeth Goudge
#6. The function of the educator is to discover in each individual child the gifts implanted in her by Almighty God and to develop and dedicate them to His service.
Elizabeth Goudge
#8. To know perfect happiness a woman may be a mother, but must be a grandmother.
Elizabeth Goudge
#9. It's not your business to decide if a woman you love should, or should not, marry you. It's her business. Tell her all about yourself and leave the decision to her. God knows it's trouble enough having to make one's own decisions in life without having to make other people's too.
Elizabeth Goudge
#10. It seemed to them dreadfully dangerous to put it into words like that, for lately the things they didn't want to happen were the things that happened and the logic of this was that if you pretended not to want what you really wanted dreadfully you would be more likely to get it.
Elizabeth Goudge
#11. We're all too apt to think that things are as we feel them to be, forgetting that they have an objective value apart from what we feel about them. An embittered mind colors the world black for its owner yet that does not alter the fact that the world is a treasure house of beauty and love.
Elizabeth Goudge
#12. Now her compassion had been pierced and set flowing; it felt as though her life's blood were running away.
Elizabeth Goudge
#13. There were still children in the world, and while there were children, men and women would not abandon the struggle to make safe homes to put them in, and while they struggled there was hope.
Elizabeth Goudge
#14. Given belief in God, a good digestion and a mind in working order life's still a thing to be grateful for.
Elizabeth Goudge
#15. When he had first come to Mr. Peabody he had not wanted to look back. He had felt like someone just awake after a nightmare, and afraid to think about it lest it catch him again, but now the evil had receded so far that he liked to set it as a backcloth to the procession of his shining days.
Elizabeth Goudge
#16. Nothing mitigated failure except the knowledge that it did not matter.
Elizabeth Goudge
#17. What we are made to do we seldom do well, what we do of our own choice we make a success of for very pride.
Elizabeth Goudge
#18. Bringing up children, she thought, was like pouring ginger beer into a tumbler. All went well up to a certain point, and then it all frothed over the top.
Elizabeth Goudge
#19. 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
#20. Love, and nothing else, was eternal. Love is the Lord by whom we escape death.
Elizabeth Goudge
#21. When the demon was muscling for action she was like the princess in the fairy tale from whose mouth toads fell. The small part of her which remained outside the dominion of her temper stood aghast but inefficient as one after the other the reptiles showered forth.
Elizabeth Goudge
#22. Those who have deeply suffered in some particular way are welded together in an understanding incomprehensible to those who have not so suffered.
Elizabeth Goudge
#23. Someone once said to me,said Marguerite, that our home, our special country, is where we find liberation. I suppose she meant that it is where our souls find it easiest to escape from self, and it seem to me that it is that way with us when what is about us echoes the best that we are.
Elizabeth Goudge
#24. 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
#25. Peace ... Henrietta was not quite sure what it was but she knew it was very important. If one wanted it, Grandfather had told her once, one must not hit back when fate hit hard but must allow the hammer-strokes to batter out a hollow place inside one into which peace, like cool water, could flow.
Elizabeth Goudge
#26. The God who had thrust him through in the darkness with probings of dread and shame was the same God who now held out the sword and shield.
Elizabeth Goudge
#27. To be sorry and glad together is to be perceptive to the richness of life.
Elizabeth Goudge
#28. Are you quite sure that you want to hear it?" he asked. "Sometimes, Maria, a story that one hears starts one off doing things that one would not have had to do if one had not heard it.
Elizabeth Goudge
#29. In what he suffered, as in all true suffering and in true joy, there was the quality of eternity. He could not believe it would ever end.
Elizabeth Goudge
#30. Love. The only indestructible thing. The only wealth and the only reality. The only survival. At the end of it all there was nothing else.
Elizabeth Goudge
#31. What is the scent of water?"
"Renewal. The goodness of God coming down like dew.
Elizabeth Goudge
#32. Writers and painters have a medium that can foster self-effacements. Actors haven't. An actor can't hide himself behind paper or canvas. If you're not there your art's not there. That's why we actors are often such self-centered objects.
Elizabeth Goudge
#33. Accustomed like the white blackbird to the loneliness of eccentricity yet never quite reconciled to it, they found in each other's oddness a most comforting compatibility.
Elizabeth Goudge
#34. ...To search for colours, fumble for words,
Strive to catch in earthly song
The echo of greater music,
To fail with heartbreak and give
The heartbreaks to each other with our love,
Can this be why we live?
Elizabeth Goudge
#35. Your God is a trinity. There are three necessary prayers and they have three words each. They are these, 'Lord, have mercy. Thee I adore. Into Thy hands.' Not difficult to remember. If in times of distress you hold to these, you will do well.
Elizabeth Goudge
#36. There's much that goes to the makin' of a man or woman into somethin' better than a brute beast, but there's three things in chief, an' they're the places where life sets us down, an' the folks life knocks us up against, an'
not the things ye get, but the things ye don't get.
Elizabeth Goudge
#37. Peace ... was contingent upon a certain disposition of the soul, a disposition to receive the gift that only detachment from self made possible.
Elizabeth Goudge
#39. [I]f 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
#40. Is independence so bad for one?" asked Daphne.
"Nothing worse," said Harriet. "It gives you a wonderful conceit of yourself.
Elizabeth Goudge
#41. Cleanliness', chuckled Sir Benjamin, noting his great niece's delighted smile as her eyes rested upon him, 'comes next to godliness, eh, Maria?
Elizabeth Goudge
#42. The very old and the very young have something in common that makes it right that they should be left alone together. Dawn and sunset see stars shining in a blue sky; but morning and midday and afternoon do not, poor things.
Elizabeth Goudge
#43. In a world where thrushes sing and willow trees are golden in the spring, boredom should have been included among the seven deadly sins.
Elizabeth Goudge
#44. Perhaps faith is hard to come by when your're alone, Harriet," he said. "Until now I've been alone."
"We're never alone," said Harriet. "That's the mistake so many make. There'd be less fear if folk knew how little alone they are.
Elizabeth Goudge
#45. 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
#46. I don't think fear that you share with the whole world warps you. It's personal fears that do that.
Elizabeth Goudge
#47. There are some people who don't realize what it is they are doing to others until they are paid back in their own coin. But those are not the worst. The worst are those whose unkindness is calculated.
Elizabeth Goudge
#48. In times of storm and tempest, of indecision and desolation, a book already known and loved makes better reading than something new and untried ... nothing is so warming and companionable.
Elizabeth Goudge
#49. 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
#50. I have known him nearly all my life, and I am going to marry him, so that there won't ever be a time when I shan't know him.
Elizabeth Goudge
#51. All the best things are seen first of all at a far distance.
Elizabeth Goudge
#52. Since she had had to lead this shut-in invalid life she had found illness involved suffering almost as much from the tyranny of painful thoughts as from physical pain
Elizabeth Goudge
#54. She lived too close to despair to have any strength left for self-knowledge. She might have been able to acknowledge herself unloved but to know herself unloving was beyond her strength.
Elizabeth Goudge
#55. 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
#56. He sat for a long time and thought to himself that he wished he knew how to pray, yet he knew, untaught, how by abandonment of himself to let the quietness take hold of him.
Elizabeth Goudge
#57. In a city the multiplicity of threads forced a whirling confusion on the loom but here the simple pattern and the slow weaving made purpose more discernible.
Elizabeth Goudge
#58. Autumn days have a holiness that spring lacks ... They are like old serene saints for whom death has lost its terror.
Elizabeth Goudge
#59. Most of the basic truths of life sound absurd at first hearing.
Elizabeth Goudge
#60. Genius creates from the heart and when the artifact is broken so is the heart.
Elizabeth Goudge
#61. It is when children start to question their happiness that they lose it and grow up.
Elizabeth Goudge
#62. Give me the benefit of your assistance during those ablutions that neccessarily, though unfortunatly, invariably follow the excercise of the culinary art.
Elizabeth Goudge
#63. There is always something particularly delightful about exceptions to a rule.
Elizabeth Goudge
#64. Those who break the law should be loved more and not less for their sin, for if we do not forgive then is sin added to sin and the end is death.
Elizabeth Goudge
#65. I don't think there's anything more tiring ... than expecting people who don't turn up ...
Elizabeth Goudge
#66. Must we go in?" asked Margary.
"Yes," said Mary. "We are only given times like these so that we can go back again. Come along." And she parted the trailing branches of the willow and led the way out.
Elizabeth Goudge
#68. Most of us tend to belittle all suffering except our own," said Mary. "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
#69. 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
#70. Understanding is a creative act in a dimension we do not see.
Elizabeth Goudge
#71. She knew that pleasure, to be pleasure, must come to an end.
Elizabeth Goudge
#72. Better to struggle through life with a broken wing than have no wings at all.
Elizabeth Goudge
#73. She felt for the first time in her life, a sense of likeness with another human creature, and a sense of safety, not so much physical safety as the safety of understanding that comes between those who are two of a sort.
Elizabeth Goudge
#74. Be at peace now and let the tide carry you into calm water. That is all you have to do for the moment. God bless you.
Elizabeth Goudge
#75. 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
#76. Insufficient nourishment in the early morning leads to pessimism and doubts.
Elizabeth Goudge
#77. The scent of a flower is a very close and intimate thing, she thought. It can seem to be a part of your body and blood.
Elizabeth Goudge
#78. But a hare, now, that is a different thing altogether. A hare is not a pet but a person. Hares are clever and brave and loving, and they have fairy blood in them. It's a grand thing to have a hare for a friend.
Elizabeth Goudge
#79. Being ill makes you feel what well people call sentimental, but what you feel is nonetheless genuine whatever they call it.
Elizabeth Goudge
#80. One was born a certain sort of person, and though by ceasless struggle one might become as nice as that sort of person ever is, one could never become as nice as a nicer sort of person.
Elizabeth Goudge
#81. What is the distinguishing mark of an aristocrat?' she asked him suddenly.
'Reverence,' he replied.
Elizabeth Goudge
#82. 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
#83. And the written words were footsteps, feet running hard to another person.
Elizabeth Goudge
#84. 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
#85. I can only grow to what I will be from what I am, and where I am, so discontent is quite useless. Much more sensible to accept the one and love the other.
Elizabeth Goudge
#86. Ferranti's thoughts had been his. As before he had understood his remorse so now he understood the mental chains that had imprisoned him. The poor wretch could not move. Misery had become apathy and apathy had brought the inevitable paralysis of the will.
Elizabeth Goudge
#87. Happy the man who lives long enough to acknowledge his ignorance
Elizabeth Goudge
#88. 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
#89. She had long accepted the fact that happiness is like swallows in Spring. It may come and nest under your eaves or it may not. You cannot command it. When you expect to be happy you are not, when you don't expect to be happy there's suddenly Easter in your soul, though it be midwinter.
Elizabeth Goudge
#90. Illness was admirable training in the creative art of grateful acceptance. Pain accepted was just pain, and heavy, but Harriet believed that pain gladly accepted took wings, went somewhere and did something.
Elizabeth Goudge
#91. I don't fly to the classics for comfort, as Giles does. I'm too frivolous. Worthy people always read the classics when things are difficult.
Elizabeth Goudge
#92. 'Many waters cannot quench love' was said of divine, not human, love, which the Dean knew was not always tough enough to survive the indifference of misery. That was one of the chief reasons why he struggled to do away with misery.
Elizabeth Goudge
#93. He grinned at her, and she grinned at him, and it seemed to Maria that suddenly the sun came out.
Elizabeth Goudge
#94. A well-trained dog is like religion, it sets the deserving at their ease and is a terror to evildoers.
Elizabeth Goudge
#95. He strolled to the front door and stood watching, letting the picture of Felicity grave itself so deeply on his mind that when with the passing of time it would seem to other people that she had grown old and lost her beauty it would not seem so to him.
Elizabeth Goudge
#96. Nothing is ever finished and done with in this world. You may 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
#97. Cowardice more than any other failing demands a ruthless paying of the price from those who give it hospitality.
Elizabeth Goudge
#98. Fear is a lonely thing. Even those who love us best cannot get close to us when we are afraid.
Elizabeth Goudge
#99. Acting a part is not always synonymous with lying; it is far 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
#100. He felt him transfixed, captured, nailed by his vow to the hard wood of the impossible thing he had to do.
Elizabeth Goudge
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