Top 84 Ellis Peters Quotes
#1. Ellis Peters's historical detail is very accurate and very minute, and therefore is not only interesting to read but good for an actor to acquire a sense of the period. And the other thing I think is that an actor lives in the land of imagination.
Derek Jacobi
#2. Once, I remember, Father Abbot said that our purpose is justice, and with God lies the privilege of mercy. But even God, when he intends mercy, needs tools to his hand.
Ellis Peters
#3. The ugliness that man can do to man might cast a shadow between you and the certainty of the justice and mercy God can do to him hereafter. It takes half a lifetime to reach the spot where eternity is always visible, and the crude injustice of the hour shrivels out of sight.
Ellis Peters
#4. Too much trust is folly, in an imperfect world.
Ellis Peters
#5. Life goes not in a straight line, lad, but in a circle. The first half we spend venturing as far as the world's end from home and kin and stillness, and the latter half brings us back, by roundabout ways but surely, to that state from which we set out.
Ellis Peters
#6. As roads go, the road home is as good as any.
Ellis Peters
#7. Official justice does not dig deep, but regards what comes readily to the surface, and draws conclusions accordingly.
Ellis Peters
#8. Of all the reports that fly about the world, ill news is the surest of all to arrive!
Ellis Peters
#9. It is a time for quietness and prayer. Death is present with us every day of our lives, it behooves us to take note of its nearness, not as a threat, but as our common experience on the way to grace. There is no more to be said. It is better to accept the will of God, and be silent.
Ellis Peters
#10. You'll never get to be a saint if you deny the bit of the devil in you.
Ellis Peters
#12. Even a saint may take pleasure, in retrospect, in having been once desired
Ellis Peters
#13. Bitter though it may be to many, Cadfael concluded, there is no substitute for truth, in this or any case.
Ellis Peters
#14. I value devotion and fidelity, and doubt if it matters whether the object falls short. What you do and what you are is what matters. Your loyalty is as sacred as mine.
Ellis Peters
#15. Questions are as supple as willow wands, it's easy to brush by them and slip them aside, and no one the worse for it.
Ellis Peters
#17. What you do and what you are is what matters.
Ellis Peters
#18. Well, you can fairly claim the day hasn't been wasted,' owned Cadfael generously, 'if something's been learned.
Ellis Peters
#19. What is done matters, but what is yet to do matters far more. Cadfael, Pg. 255
Ellis Peters
#20. I have always known that the best of the Saracens could out-Christian many of us Christians.
Ellis Peters
#21. the good sense to fortify himself with the things of the flesh for the struggles of the spirit.
Ellis Peters
#22. Cleverness and wisdom are not inevitable yoke-fellows.
Ellis Peters
#24. The mountains of today are the molehills of tomorrow.
Ellis Peters
#25. If ever you do go back, what is it you want of Evesham?"
"Do I know? [ ... ] The silence, it might be ... or the stillness. To have no more running to do ... to have arrived, and have no more need to run. The appetite changes. Now I think it would be a beautiful thing to be still.
Ellis Peters
#26. Truth can be costly, but in the end it never falls short of value for the price paid.
Ellis Peters
#27. One century's saint is the next century's heretic ... and one century's heretic is the next century's saint. It is as well to think long and calmly before affixing either name to any man.
Ellis Peters
#28. All the things of the wild have their proper uses. Only misuse makes them evil.
Ellis Peters
#29. Only I am sure I met no one on the way, because if I had I should have had to master myself, walk like a woman in her senses, even give a greeting. And when you have to, you can.
Ellis Peters
#30. I have been about the world long enough to know that God's plans for us, however infallibly good, may not take the form that we expect and demand.
Ellis Peters
#31. Don't reach for the halo too soon. You have plenty of time to enjoy yourself, even a little maliciously sometimes, before you settle down to being a saint.
Ellis Peters
#32. There is the matter of the girl, niece and heiress to the dead man. She is of great beauty," said Cadfael plainly, asserting his right to recognise and celebrate even the beauty of women, though their enjoyment he had now voluntarily forsworn,
Ellis Peters
#33. The voices of cold reason were talking, as usual, to deaf ears.
Ellis Peters
#34. To have faith in Divine protection is good, but even beter if backed by the pratical assistance heaven has a right to expect from sensible mortals.
Ellis Peters
#36. Truth, like the burgeoning of a bulb under the soil, however deeply sown, will make its way to the light.
Ellis Peters
#37. God, nevertheless, required a little help from men, and what he mostly got was hindrance.
Ellis Peters
#38. Traffic with the world is laid upon us for chastening, and for the testing of our vocation. The grace of God is not endangered by the follies or the wickedness of men.
Ellis Peters
#39. There is no one who cannot be hated, against whatever odds. Nor anyone who cannot be loved, against all reason.
Ellis Peters
#40. Despair is deadly sin, but worse, it is mortal folly.
Ellis Peters
#41. The trouble with me, he thought unhappily, is that I have been about the world long enough to know that God's plans for us, however infallibly good, may not take the form we expect and demand.
Ellis Peters
#42. When harried, we go as far as we dare, and with those we're sure of we dare go very far, knowing where forgiveness is certain.
Ellis Peters
#43. Truth is a hard master, and costly to serve, but it simplifies all problems.
Ellis Peters
#44. Brother Cadfael knew better than to be in a hurry, where souls were concerned. There was plenty of elbow-room in eternity.
Ellis Peters
#45. Every man should be adjudged innocent until there was proof against him, and all the more when very suspect and malicious charges had already been thrown at him, and rang leaden as false coin.
Ellis Peters
#46. Meet every man as you find him, for we're all made the same under habit, robe or rags. Some better made than others, and some better cared for, but on the same pattern, all.
Ellis Peters
#47. It takes a lot to wound a man without illusions.
Ellis Peters
#48. In happiness or unhappiness, living is a duty, and must be done thoroughly.
Ellis Peters
#49. Only people who're positive enough to have friends have enemies. When you're as glum and morose as he was, people just give up and go away.
Ellis Peters
#50. He prayed as he breathed, forming no words and making no specific requests, only holding his heart, like broken birds in cupped hands,
Ellis Peters
#51. The best way to get the sweet out of children and escape the bitter is to have them by proxy.
Ellis Peters
#52. So, wonder! I also wonder about you," said Cadfael mildly. "Do you know any human creatures who are not strangers, one to another?
Ellis Peters
#53. And are you thinking, Hugh, what I am thinking?
Ellis Peters
#54. Innocence is an infinitely fragile thing and thought can sometimes injure, even destroy it. - Pg. 254
Ellis Peters
#57. Men drunk with ambition and power do not ground their weapons, nor stop to recognise the fellow-humanity of those they are about to slay. - Pg. 2
Ellis Peters
#58. Say your prayers, think quietly what you should do, do it, and sleep. There is no man living, neither king nor emperor, can do more or better, or trust in a better harvest.
Ellis Peters
#59. There never was, for all I could ever learn, a time when living was easy and peaceful.
Ellis Peters
#60. The saint is a good Welshwoman, and knows her countrymen. We are not quick in respect to rank or riches, we do not doff and bow and scrape when any man flaunts himself before us. We are blunt and familiar even in praise. What we value we value in the heart, and
Ellis Peters
#61. She was not the audience to which he played, but she was the profound intelligence that heard him. She drew him in with her great bruised eyes, and his music she drank, and it was wine to her thirst.
Ellis Peters
#62. You cannot demand truth, and then select half and throw the inconvenient remainder away.
Ellis Peters
#63. I can't forget things that way. There's only one thing for it, and that's to admit everything and accept everything, and find some way of living that doesn't mean always sitting on top of a chest of grudges, trying to keep the lid from opening.
Ellis Peters
#64. It's a kind of arrogance to be so certain you're past redemption.
Ellis Peters
#65. A man must be prepared to face life, as well as death, there's no escape from either.
Ellis Peters
#66. In every decision there must be some regrets.
Ellis Peters
#67. You may whisper a word or two to God on my behalf at Matins and Lauds, if you'll be so kind. If he turns a deaf ear to you, small use the rest of us wearing out our knee-bones.
Ellis Peters
#68. Youth is no less vulnerable, by the very quality it has of making the heart ache that beholds and has lost it.
Ellis Peters
#69. Nothing is more pleasing and engaging than the sense of having conferred benefits. Not even the gratification of receiving them.
Ellis Peters
#71. Every spring is the only spring, a perpetual astonishment!
Ellis Peters
#72. I go to Prague every year if I can, value my relationships there like gold, and feel myself in a sense Czech, with all their hopes and needs. They are a people I not only love, but admire.
Ellis Peters
#73. Well, a man can but hold fast to what he believes right, and even the opponent he baulks should value him for that.
Ellis Peters
#74. They sell courage of a sort in the taverns. And another sort, though not for sale, a man can find in the confessional. Try the alehouses and the churches, Hugh. In either a man can be quiet and think.
Ellis Peters
#75. Oh, sometimes I like to put the sand of doubt into the oyster of my faith. (Br. Cadfael)
Ellis Peters
#76. The success of a holiday depends on what you find for yourself on the spot, not what you bring with you.
Ellis Peters
#77. The thing about fear," said Cadfael, seriously considering, "is that it is pointless. When need arises, fear is forgotten.
Ellis Peters
#78. If none of us ever fell short, or put a foot astray, everything would be good in this great world, but we stumble and fall, every one. We must deal with what we have. - Cadfael, Pg. 245-6
Ellis Peters
#79. Death, after all, is the common expectation from birth. Neither heroes nor cowards can escape it.
Ellis Peters
#80. God sort all! As doubtless he is doing, now as ever!
Ellis Peters
#81. Here I begin to know that blessedness is what can be snatched out the passing day and put away to think of afterwards.
Ellis Peters
#82. There is in the end no remedy but truth. It is the one course that cannot be evil.
Ellis Peters
#83. Murder is murder,as much a curse to the slayer as to the slain, and cannot be a matter of indifference, whoever the dead may be.
Ellis Peters
#84. I think there are some who live on a knife-edge in the soul, and at times are driven to hurl themselves into the air, at the mercy of heaven or he'll which way to fall.
Ellis Peters
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