Top 100 Elizabeth Goudge Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Nothing is ever finished and done with in this world. You may think a seed was finished and done with when it falls like a dead thing into the earth; but when it puts forth leaves and flowers next spring you see your mistake.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

2. “His hunger for knowledge gave him no rest, it was both his bane and his joy.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

3. “The child in us is always there, you know, and it’s the best part of us, the winged part that travels farthest.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

4. “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.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

5. “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.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

6. “Understanding is a creative act in a dimension we do not see.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

7. “All the best things are seen first of all at a far distance.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

8. “Those who have deeply suffered in some particular way are welded together in an understanding incomprehensible to those who have not so suffered.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

9. “Humanity can be roughly divided into three sorts of people – those who find comfort in literature, those who find comfort in personal adornment, and those who find comfort in food;.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

10. “Acting a part is not always synonymous with lying; it is far often the best way of serving the truth. It is more truthful to act what we should feel if the community is to be well served rather than behave as we actually do feel in our selfish private feelings.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

11. “But a hare, now, that is a different thing altogether. A hare is not a pet but a person. Hares are clever and brave and loving, and they have fairy blood in them. It’s a grand thing to have a hare for a friend.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

12. “Be at peace now and let the tide carry you into calm water. That is all you have to do for the moment. God bless you.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

13. “Don’t waste hate on pink geranium.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

14. “The lovers of life, they are children at heart always in their wonder and delight, but they do not grab.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

15. “Nothing is ever over,” said Jean. “You thread things on your life and think you’ve finished with them, but you haven’t because it’s like beads on a string and they come round again...”

— Elizabeth Goudge

16. “The perfect moment, once lost, is not easily found again.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

17. “Faith given back to us after a night of doubt is a stronger thing, and far more valuable to us than faith that has never been tested.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

18. “In a world where thrushes sing and willow trees are golden in the spring, boredom should have been included among the seven deadly sins.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

19. “Nothing living should ever be treated with contempt. Whatever it is that lives, a man, a tree, or a bird, should be touched gently, because the time is short. Civilization is another word for respect for life...”

— Elizabeth Goudge

20. “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.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

21. “All human beings have their otherness and it is that which cries out to the heart.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

22. “The very old and the very young have something in common that makes it right that they should be left alone together. Dawn and sunset see stars shining in a blue sky; but morning and midday and afternoon do not, poor things.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

23. “He grinned at her, and she grinned at him, and it seemed to Maria that suddenly the sun came out.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

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

— Elizabeth Goudge

25. “To be sorry and glad together is to be perceptive to the richness of life.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

26. “Happy the man who lives long enough to acknowledge his ignorance.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

27. “Could mere loving be a life’s work? Could it be a career like marriage or nursing the sick or going on the stage? Could it be adventure?”

— Elizabeth Goudge

28. “I think God creates what one might call spiritual families, people who may or may not be physically related to each other, but who will travel together the whole of the way. And it’s a long way.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

29. “Love. The only indestructible thing. The only wealth and the only reality. The only survival. At the end of it all there was nothing else.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

30. “Sensible fathers and mothers, when their children marry, go back to the old days and renew their youth.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

31. “Winter, spring and summer did not accommodate themselves to one’s mood as autumn did. They lacked its gentleness.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

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

— Elizabeth Goudge

33. “Love, and nothing else, was eternal. “Love is the Lord by whom we escape death.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

34. “I doubt if we nuns are really as self-sacrificing as we must seem to be to you who live in the world. We don’t give everything for nothing, you know. The mystery plays fair.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

35. “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 struggled there was hope.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

36. “One is seldom unchanged by the death of those one loves. It gives me a deeper knowledge of them, and so of oneself in regard to them.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

37. “Writers and painters have a medium that can foster self-effacements. Actors haven’t. An actor can’t hide himself behind paper or canvas. If you’re not there your art’s not there. That’s why we actors are often such self-centered objects.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

38. “A man is not a different person just because he becomes aware. Oh I know it must seem like metamorphosis when the eyes of a blind man are opened, but he’s the same man. We grow, mercifully, and growth is just awareness of more and more.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

39. “This modern craze for putting the young in positions of authority – headmasters in their thirties, bishops without a gray hair on their heads, generals who scarcely need to use a razor – ever since it took hold the world’s gone steadily downhill.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

40. “She had taken to herself her mother’s fair beauty and as much – and no more – of her father’s intelligence as it was desirable that a pretty child should have, and to them some good fairy had added something else, the best of all gifts, the power of enjoyment, not just animal enjoyment of good health and good spirits but that authentic love of life that sees good days.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

41. “Better to struggle through life with a broken wing than have no wings at all.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

42. “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.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

43. “The end was present in the beginning and the beginning in the end, so that there was neither beginning nor end but only the perfection of the whole. Life had come round full circle, and the aging man that he was admitted it not with weariness but with a welling up within him of refreshment that was like the welling up of youth.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

44. “Everyone needed someone in the world who was like his other hand. You can’t hold much or do much with one hand only. It is with both hands that a man lifts the garnered gold of the wheatsheaf and the brimming bowl of milk, with both hands that he builds his house, with both hand, clasped together, that he prays.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

45. “Imagination comes from yourself and can deceive you, but vision is a gift from outside yourself – like light striking on your closed eyelids and lifting them to see what’s really there.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

46. “Not quite birds, as they were not quite flowers, mysterious and fascinating as are all indeterminate creatures.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

47. “All we are asked to bear we can bear.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

48. “A well-trained dog is like religion, it sets the deserving at their ease and is a terror to evildoers.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

49. “He knocked his pipe out. His paper rustled to the floor and his spectacles slid own his nose. His hands, red and shiny, lay relaxed on his knee. He abandoned himself to the quietness and the warmth of sun and fire. Autumn was a strange paradoxical time of the year. It was the season when he was happiest and yet it was the season when he was most vulnerable and most aware, and that was not always a happiness. Yet he liked autumn.”

— Elizabeth Goudge

50. “She felt for the first time in her life, a sense of likeness with another human creature, and a sense of safety, not so much physical safety as the safety of understanding that comes between those who are two of a sort.”

— Elizabeth Goudge