Top 80 Ellis Peters Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The mountains of today are the molehills of tomorrow.”

— Ellis Peters

2. “Brother Cadfael knew better than to be in a hurry, where souls were concerned. There was plenty of elbow-room in eternity.”

— Ellis Peters

3. “Truth can be costly, but in the end it never falls short of value for the price paid.”

— Ellis Peters

4. “It is a time for quietness and prayer. Death is present with us every day of our lives, it behooves us to take note of its nearness, not as a threat, but as our common experience on the way to grace. There is no more to be said. It is better to accept the will of God, and be silent.”

— Ellis Peters

5. “I have been about the world long enough to know that God’s plans for us, however infallibly good, may not take the form that we expect and demand.”

— Ellis Peters

6. “Death, after all, is the common expectation from birth. Neither heroes nor cowards can escape it.”

— Ellis Peters

7. “A man must be prepared to face life, as well as death, there’s no escape from either.”

— Ellis Peters

8. “What are wits for unless a man uses them?”

— Ellis Peters

9. “You’ll never get to be a saint if you deny the bit of the devil in you.”

— Ellis Peters

10. “It takes a lot to wound a man without illusions.”

— Ellis Peters

11. “You cannot demand truth, and then select half and throw the inconvenient remainder away.”

— Ellis Peters

12. “They sell courage of a sort in the taverns. And another sort, though not for sale, a man can find in the confessional. Try the alehouses and the churches, Hugh. In either a man can be quiet and think.”

— Ellis Peters

13. “Say your prayers, think quietly what you should do, do it, and sleep. There is no man living, neither king nor emperor, can do more or better, or trust in a better harvest.”

— Ellis Peters

14. “Even grief has its arrogance.” “Then you have learned, my son, that vengeance belongs only to God?” “More than that, Father,” said Luc. “I have learned that in God’s hands vengeance is safe. However long delayed, however strangely manifested, the reckoning is sure.”

— Ellis Peters

15. “Truth, like the burgeoning of a bulb under the soil, however deeply sown, will make its way to the light.”

— Ellis Peters

16. “Of all the reports that fly about the world, ill news is the surest of all to arrive!”

— Ellis Peters

17. “In happiness or unhappiness, living is a duty, and must be done thoroughly.”

— Ellis Peters

18. “There is no profit in ifs. We go on from where we stand, we answer for our own evil, and leave to God our good.”

— Ellis Peters

19. “Never let it shake your faith that there is a balance hereafter. What you see is only a broken piece from a perfect whole.”

— Ellis Peters

20. “Life goes not in a straight line, lad, but in a circle. The first half we spend venturing as far as the world’s end from home and kin and stillness, and the latter half brings us back, by roundabout ways but surely, to that state from which we set out.”

— Ellis Peters

21. “Every spring is the only spring, a perpetual astonishment.”

— Ellis Peters

22. “The voices of cold reason were talking, as usual, to deaf ears.”

— Ellis Peters

23. “Truth is a hard master, and costly to serve, but it simplifies all problems.”

— Ellis Peters

24. “Youth is no less vulnerable, by the very quality it has of making the heart ache that beholds and has lost it.”

— Ellis Peters

25. “Despair is deadly sin, but worse, it is mortal folly.”

— Ellis Peters

26. “Nothing is more pleasing and engaging than the sense of having conferred benefits. Not even the gratification of receiving them.”

— Ellis Peters

27. “To have faith in Divine protection is good, but even beter if backed by the pratical assistance heaven has a right to expect from sensible mortals.”

— Ellis Peters

28. “I think there are some who live on a knife-edge in the soul, and at times are driven to hurl themselves into the air, at the mercy of heaven or he’ll which way to fall.”

— Ellis Peters

29. “There is in the end no remedy but truth. It is the one course that cannot be evil.”

— Ellis Peters

30. “When harried, we go as far as we dare, and with those we’re sure of we dare go very far, knowing where forgiveness is certain.”

— Ellis Peters

31. “All the things of the wild have their proper uses. Only misuse makes them evil.”

— Ellis Peters

32. “Too much trust is folly, in an imperfect world.”

— Ellis Peters

33. “Bitter though it may be to many, Cadfael concluded, there is no substitute for truth, in this or any case.”

— Ellis Peters

34. “Questions are as supple as willow wands, it’s easy to brush by them and slip them aside, and no one the worse for it.”

— Ellis Peters

35. “Meet every man as you find him, for we’re all made the same under habit, robe or rags. Some better made than others, and some better cared for, but on the same pattern, all.”

— Ellis Peters

36. “The ugliness that man can do to man might cast a shadow between you and the certainty of the justice and mercy God can do to him hereafter. It takes half a lifetime to reach the spot where eternity is always visible, and the crude injustice of the hour shrivels out of sight.”

— Ellis Peters

37. “There is no one who cannot be hated, against whatever odds. Nor anyone who cannot be loved, against all reason.”

— Ellis Peters

38. “Only people who’re positive enough to have friends have enemies. When you’re as glum and morose as he was, people just give up and go away.”

— Ellis Peters

39. “I go to Prague every year if I can, value my relationships there like gold, and feel myself in a sense Czech, with all their hopes and needs. They are a people I not only love, but admire.”

— Ellis Peters

40. “The saint is a good Welshwoman, and knows her countrymen. We are not quick in respect to rank or riches, we do not doff and bow and scrape when any man flaunts himself before us. We are blunt and familiar even in praise. What we value we value in the heart, and.”

— Ellis Peters

41. “Here I begin to know that blessedness is what can be snatched out the passing day and put away to think of afterwards.”

— Ellis Peters

42. “When a dutiful brother came to relieve him, he went to his bed, and slept as soon as he lay down. He had the gift. There was no profit in laying awake fretting for what would, in any case, have to be faced on awaking, and he had long ago sloughed off the unprofitable. It took too much out of a man, of what would be needed hereafter.”

— Ellis Peters

43. “It’s a kind of arrogance to be so certain you’re past redemption.”

— Ellis Peters

44. “Where there is no certainty the mind must turn to the light and not the shadow.”

— Ellis Peters

45. “The best way to get the sweet out of children and escape the bitter is to have them by proxy.”

— Ellis Peters

46. “So, wonder! I also wonder about you,” said Cadfael mildly. “Do you know any human creatures who are not strangers, one to another?”

— Ellis Peters

47. “Integrity expects integrity.”

— Ellis Peters

48. “What you do and what you are is what matters.”

— Ellis Peters

49. “Well, you can fairly claim the day hasn’t been wasted,′ owned Cadfael generously, ’if something’s been learned.”

— Ellis Peters

50. “There never was, for all I could ever learn, a time when living was easy and peaceful.”

— Ellis Peters