Elizabeth Goudge Quotes
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After almost a lifetime spent in prayer and contemplation she had believed that at least she had her thoughts well disciplined, but as one got older, one’s hard-won control slipped a little and one felt sometimes as though spiritually one were back again in one’s youth, with all the battles to fight again.
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A man may build as he chooses upon his foundations but he cannot change them or forget them, and if at the last the superstructure of his own building falls about his ears he tends to rediscover them at the end as the only rock he has to cling to.
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She had known then that there were things one was more afraid of being without with ease than possessing with pain.
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But no, he did not believe in capricious fortune, but in a carefully woven pattern where every tightly stretched warp thread of pain laid the foundation for a woof thread of joy.
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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.
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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 so struggled there was hope.
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...now her compassion had been pierced and set flowing; it felt as though her life's blood were running away.
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His hunger for knowledge gave him no rest, it was both his bane and his joy.
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It's a poor sort of virtue that has no roots in love. It's why you do or don't do a thing that matters most to my mind. If love of God comes first with you then you deny yourself to keep His commandments, you give away your whole life to Him and glory in what the world calls loss.
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Fear is a lonely thing. Even those who love us best cannot get close to us when we are afraid.
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Those who have deeply suffered in some particular way are welded together in an understanding incomprehensible to those who have not so suffered.
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Though I am able to do nothing else in this life, except only seek, my life seeming to others a vie manquee, yet it will not be so, because what I seek is the goodness of God that waters the dry places. And water overflows from one dry patch to another, and so you cannot be selfish in digging for it.
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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.
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It is when children start to question their happiness that they lose it and grow up.
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Butterflies... not quite birds, as they were not quite flowers, mysterious and fascinating as are all indeterminate creatures.
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There is always something particularly delightful about exceptions to a rule.
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If in this life only we have hope....." By God, that was true, too. This quickening divine power that he had experienced could not be confined to this world, for cruel, sordid, ugly, devilish can be this world, and by the nature of things that power could have neither source nor ending in it; only flow through it, around it, over it, under it, gathering up the gold into its eternal shining and burning the dross in its fire.
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...this blessing of loneliness was not really loneliness. Real loneliness was something unendurable. What one wanted when exhausted by the noise and impact of physical bodies was not no people but disembodied people; all those denizens of beloved books who could be taken to one's heart and put away again, in silence, and with no hurt feelings.
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We cannot change the sort of person that we are.
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One thing however, Nat did for him. He taught him carpentry. He learned to distinguish between the different kinds of wood, to love them and understand their ways. Realizing that the boy had great skill with his hands Nat gave him a few tools for his own and taught him wood carving.... First the books and then the wood. Each was a milestone for him on the way through.
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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.
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In the old days he had clutched life with such violence that the juice of it ran out between his fingers and was lost, but now he would touch it delicately, thankful for the good and accepting the ills with patience.
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He was a convinced but hardworked rationalist, always hard at it re-convincing himself of his convictions.
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Pride takes a lot of breaking.