Elizabeth Goudge Quotes

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

Peace … was contingent upon a certain disposition of the soul, a disposition to receive the gift that only detachment from self made possible.

[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.

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.

There is always something particularly delightful about exceptions to a rule.

Happy the man who lives long enough to acknowledge his ignorance

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.

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

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.

If one’s intellectual equipment was not great, one’s spiritual experience not deep, the result of doing one’s very best could only seem very lightweight in comparison with the effort involved. But perhaps that was not important. The mysterious power that commanded men appeared to him to ask of them only obedience and the maximum of effort and to remain curiously indifferent as to the results.

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, you can no more separate them than you can separate the two sides of a coin.

If you lose your reason, you lose it into the hands of God….It’s the only place where anything is safe. And when you’re dead it’s only what’s there you’ll have. Nothing else.