Elizabeth Goudge Quotes
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The past, she knew, is inviolable, one of the few things in life that cannot be marred by present foolishness, and in it the present may find its peace.
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They gazed at her with awe, feeling to the full that medieval reverence for someone obviously touched in the head.
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They were accustomed to think of the Abbé as one of those men who pass rapidly from point to point, from task to task, so intent on redeeming the time because the days are evil that they have no leisure to pause and enquire if perhaps the bad days have a few good points about them after all.
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The dawn came - not the flaming sky that promises storm, but a golden dawn of infinite promise. The birds came flying up out of the east in wedge-shaped formation, and the mist lifted in soft wreaths of sun-shot silver. Colour came back to the world. The grass glowed with a green so vivid that it seemed pulsing, like flame, from some hidden fire in the earth, the distant woods took on all the amazing deep crimsons and purples of their winter colouring, the banks were studded with their jewels of lichens and bright moss, and above the wet hedges shone with sun-shot orbs of light.
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To know perfect happiness a woman may be a mother, but must be a grandmother.
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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.
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All we are asked to bear we can bear.
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A well-trained dog is like religion, it sets the deserving at their ease and is a terror to evildoers.
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I don't think fear that you share with the whole world warps you. It's personal fears that do that.
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Cowardice more than any other failing demands a ruthless paying of the price from those who give it hospitality.
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Nothing whatsoever, not even the existence of God to His lovers, can be proved, but that every man, if he is to live at all finely, must deliberately adopt certain assertions as true, and those assertions should, for the sake of the enrichment of the human race, always be creative ones. He may, as life goes on, modify his beliefs, but he must never modify them on the side of destruction. It may be difficult, in the face of the problem of human suffering, to believe in God... but if you destroy God you do not solve your problem but merely leave yourself alone with it.... A ghastly loneliness.
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Salvation is a curious process of divine burglary. The first thing to be wrested from one by a God who said 'Thou shalt not steal' is one's good opinion of one's self.
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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.
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The whole universe was stilled as if listening for a voice. For the space of one heartbeat there was peace on earth. For one fraction of a moment there was no deed of violence wrought on earth, no hatred, no fire, no whirlwind, no pain, no fear. Existence rested against the heart of God, then sighed and journeyed again.
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There was a good deal to be said, Hilary decided, for middle age and infirmity. The years in which one demanded much of life were left behind, together with the bitterness of not getting what one wanted. One's values, too, were altered. Gifts that once one took for granted, sunshine and birdsong, freedom from pain, sleep and one's daily bread, seemed now so extraordinarily precious.
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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.
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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.
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Her pain came from inside herself, from her resentment of the contrariness and frustration of life, while his came most often from outside himself, growing inevitably from his compassion. It was a simplification of the difference between them to say that to the selfish comfort comes from the external things, while to the selfless consolation comes interiorly, but that was the way Daphne put it to herself.
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Sarcasm doesn't grow on the same stalk as humility.
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Love still owned him, steered him, drew him to itself.
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The measure of her bitterness was the measure of her failure.
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Fairyland...Paradise...In this place and at this time, Marguerite could know that the one was a parable of the other and both were synonyms for something that had no name.
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In moments of exaltation one expressed sentiments that outstripped one's spiritual capabilities by a vast span; and she knew well that unless God is sought for Himself alone, with a selflessness of which she was at present incapable, He is not to be found.
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He grinned at her, and she grinned at him, and it seemed to Maria that suddenly the sun came out.