Top 50 Catherine Marshall Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I learned that true forgiveness includes total self-acceptance. And out of acceptance wounds are healed and happiness is possible again.”

— Catherine Marshall

2. “Once we recognize our need for Jesus, then the building of our faith begins. It is a daily, moment-by-moment life of absolute dependence upon Him for everything.”

— Catherine Marshall

3. “God is the only one who can make the valley of trouble a door of hope.”

— Catherine Marshall

4. “The purpose of all prayer is to find God’s will and to make that our prayer.”

— Catherine Marshall

5. “Our prayers must not be efforts to bend God to our will but to yield ourselves to His.”

— Catherine Marshall

6. “Often God has to shut a door in our face, so that He can subsequently open the door through which He wants us to go.”

— Catherine Marshall

7. “Lord, what are you trying to teach me?”

— Catherine Marshall

8. “God’s way of dealing with us is to throw us into situations over our depth, then supply us with the necessary ability to swim.”

— Catherine Marshall

9. “A Christian has no business being satisfied with mediocrity. He’s supposed to reach for the stars. Why not? He’s not on his own anymore. He has God’s help now.”

— Catherine Marshall

10. “Of course you’ll encounter trouble. But behold a God of power who can take any evil and turn it into a door of hope.”

— Catherine Marshall

11. “The search for God begins at the point of need.”

— Catherine Marshall

12. “The cross stands as the final symbol that no evil exists that God cannot turn into a blessing. He is the living Alchemist who can take the dregs from the slag-heaps of life – disappointment, frustration, sorrow, disease, death, economic loss, heartache – and transform the dregs into gold.”

— Catherine Marshall

13. “No matter how little you have, you can always give some of it away.”

— Catherine Marshall

14. “Acceptance says, True, this is my situation at the moment. I’ll look unblinkingly at the reality of it. But I’ll also open my hands to accept willingly whatever a loving Father sends me.”

— Catherine Marshall

15. “Those who never rebelled against God or at some point in their lives shaken their fists in the face of heaven, have never encountered God at all.”

— Catherine Marshall

16. “God insists that we ask, not because He needs to know our situation, but because we need the spiritual discipline of asking.”

— Catherine Marshall

17. “The unfolding of our friendship with the Father will be a never-ending revelation strretching on into eternity.”

— Catherine Marshall

18. “I still don’t understand anything- exept that somehow I know that You are love. And that in my heart has been so great a love for Christy as I did not know could exist on this earth. You, God, must be responsible. You must have put it there. So what do I do with it now?”

— Catherine Marshall

19. “The only time I ever find my dealings with God less than clear-cut is when I’m not being honest with Him. The fuzziness is always on my side, not His.”

— Catherine Marshall

20. “I might have felt unimportant pitted against the awesome might of the mountains. I did not. Rather, on that mountain top I found something important that I had never known before: an awareness of a vital connection between me and the Authority behind all this beauty.”

— Catherine Marshall

21. “Truth could never be wholly contained in words.”

— Catherine Marshall

22. “Quietly, Miss Alice was demonstrating this God of love and beauty too – in small ways and in large. For a few, the concept that life did not have to be all starkness and misery was slowly taking root. Tentatively, timidly – -constantly encouraged by Miss Alice – some of the women were at last reaching out for light and beauty and joy.”

— Catherine Marshall

23. “One can believe in the divinity of Jesus Christ and feel no personal loyalty to Him at all – indeed, pay no attention whatever to His commandments and His will for one’s life.”

— Catherine Marshall

24. “To know God as He really is-in His essential nature and character-is to arrive at a citadel of peace that circumstances may storm, but can never capture.”

— Catherine Marshall

25. “The secret of her calm seemed to be that she was not trying to prove anything. She was – that was all. And her stance toward life seemed to say: God is – and that is enough.”

— Catherine Marshall

26. “Proofs of the week’s paper were spread out on what I grandly called my desk. This was a rickety wooden table against the side wall outside the Editor’s office.”

— Catherine Marshall

27. “Whence comes this idea that if what we are doing is fun, it can’t be God’s will? The God who made giraffes, a baby’s fingernails, a puppy’s tail, a crooknecked squash, the bobwhite’s call, and a young girl’s giggle, has a sense of humor. Make no mistake about that.”

— Catherine Marshall

28. “So once I shut down my privilege of disliking anyone I choose and holding myself aloof if I could manage it, greater understanding, growing compassion came to me.”

— Catherine Marshall

29. “My father always told us that if we will let God, He can use even our disappointements, even our annoyances to bring us a blessing. There’s a practical way to start the process too: by thanking HIm for whatever happens, no matter how disagreeable it seems.”

— Catherine Marshall

30. “When you heart is ablaze with the love of God, when you love other people – especially the ripsnorting sinners – so much that you dare to tell them about Jesus with no apologies, then never fear, there will be results.”

— Catherine Marshall

31. “So many people never pause long enough to make up their minds about basic issues of life and death. It’s quite possible to go through your whole life, making the mechanical motions of living, adopting as your own sets of ideas you’ve come to any conslusion for yourself as to what life is all about.”

— Catherine Marshall

32. “There are precious things you can’t pack and take with you, like the all-pervasive fragrance of honeysuckle.”

— Catherine Marshall

33. “There’s always the danger that the extreme feminist will end up quite unfulfilled as a girl.”

— Catherine Marshall

34. “Despite disappointments, the Christian is obligated to pray for the sick because we are bidden to do so and because the crumb of our caring is but a morsel broken from the whole loaf of the Father’s infinite and tender love.”

— Catherine Marshall

35. “One can believe intellectually in the efficacy of prayer and never do any praying.”

— Catherine Marshall

36. “I learned that true forgiveness includes total acceptance.”

— Catherine Marshall

37. “The house, it’s already been a-settin’ here for a hundred years. It’ll be right here tomorrow. It’s today I must be livin’.”

— Catherine Marshall

38. “Why should a child’s future be shaped by where they are born?”

— Catherine Marshall

39. “Dear God,′ I said inside myself, ’when I came here, maybe I was partly running off from home for fun and freedom and adventure. But I have a notion that You had something else in mind in letting me come. Anyway if You can use me here in this Cove, well, here I am.”

— Catherine Marshall

40. “Have you ever thought that the only ugl things in this Cove are man’s fault, while the beautiful things are God’s work? Look at those mountains.”

— Catherine Marshall

41. “In my journal I logged this comment: “On the day that I was officially a grown woman, I felt anything but feminine rather, befouled from the sweat of hard physical labor and the stinking mud. I wanted nothing so much as to sleep for a week.”

— Catherine Marshall

42. “Always their men would be fighters, quick to take offense, slow to forgive. To their children and to their children’s children they would hand down their love of race, their personal loyalties, their stubbornnesses, their distrust of governments, their servility to no man. These are their strengths and their weaknesses, their glory – and sometimes, Christy, their damnation.”

— Catherine Marshall

43. “Fixin’ onything is man’s work,” came Opal’s firm answer. Tearin’ down or killin’, that thar’s easy. Any addle-pated fool kin pull the trigger of a rifle-gun or fling a rock. It’s fixin’ that’s hard, takes a heap more doin’.”

— Catherine Marshall

44. “Poverty is a scandal of our times because it CAN be changed.”

— Catherine Marshall

45. “I sat there thinking about how all real music has to be born in the human spirit. Well, these ballads surely had been. There was something childlike and basic about them, an absence of sham or pretense.”

— Catherine Marshall

46. “We don’t have to accept blandness in life. God, who is the author of creativity, is ready to make a dull life adventuresome the moment we allow his Holy Spirit to go to work inside us.”

— Catherine Marshall

47. “I might never have realized who I really was or have gotten answers to the relentless questions that had driven me to the Cove without those quiet hours spent with Fairlight in the mountains. I do not know why it is that an intimate contact with wildlife and a personal observation of nature helps so much in this self-discovery. But that it is so, I have seen in other people’s lives as well as my own... even a few bricks and macadam are a shield between us and the wisdom that nature has to give.”

— Catherine Marshall

48. “Did people always have to wait for pestilence or war or tragedy to be shocked into forgetting about themselves?”

— Catherine Marshall

49. “A holiday would be a poor thing indeed without a great deal of game playing!”

— Catherine Marshall

50. “Don’t need no more of this world’s goods. Some folks gits plumb mesmerized when paper money is shook afore their eyes.”

— Catherine Marshall