Top 450 Louise Penny Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “The four sayings that lead to wisdom are: ‘I was wrong,’ ‘I’m sorry,’ ‘I don’t know’ and ‘I need help.’”

— Louise Penny

Featured in: Accountability Quotes, Lifelong Learning Quotes, Quotes for Better Decisions, Mistake Quotes, Humility Quotes

2. “Where there is love there is courage, where there is courage there is peace, where there is peace there is God. And when you have God, you have everything.”

— Louise Penny

3. “Life is change. If you aren’t growing and evolving, you’re standing still, and the rest of the world is surging ahead.”

— Louise Penny

4. “No good ever comes from putting up walls. What people mistake for safety is in fact captivity. And few things thrive in captivity.”

— Louise Penny

5. “Is it true? Is it kind? Does it need to be said?”

— Louise Penny

6. “Chief Inspector Gamache’s says there are ’four sentences that lead to wisdom: I don’t know. I need help. I’m sorry. I was wrong.”

— Louise Penny

7. “Fear lives in the head. And courage lives in the heart. The job is to get from one to the other.”

— Louise Penny

8. “Things are strongest where they’re broken.”

— Louise Penny

9. “Or – perhaps – I should just worry about my own behavior and let others be who they are.”

— Louise Penny

10. “Sometimes the only way up is down. Sometimes the only way forward is to back up.”

— Louise Penny

11. “Living our lives was like living in a long house. We entered as babies at one end, and we exited when our time came. And in between we moved through this one, great, long room. Everyone we ever met, and every thought and action lived in that room with us. Until we made peace with the less agreeable parts of our past they’d continue to heckle us from way down the long house. And sometimes the really loud, obnoxious ones told us what to do, directing our actions even years later.”

— Louise Penny

12. “The leaves had fallen from the trees and lay crisp and crackling beneath his feet. Picking one up he marveled, not for the first time, at the perfection of nature where leaves were most beautiful at the very end of their lives.”

— Louise Penny

13. “Foolish people are never harmless. Stupidity accounts for as many crimes as anger and greed.”

— Louise Penny

14. “Patience. Patience. With patience comes choice, and with choice comes power.”

— Louise Penny

15. “Grief took a terrible toll. It was paid at every birthday, every holiday, each Christmas. It was paid when glimpsing the familiar handwriting, or a hat, or a balled-up sock. Or hearing a creak that could have been, should have been, a footstep. Grief took its toll each morning, each evening, every noon hour as those who were left behind struggled forward.”

— Louise Penny

16. “How much more courage it took to be kind than to be cruel.”

— Louise Penny

17. “Ring the bells that still can ring, Forget your perfect offering, There’s a crack in everything, That’s how the light gets in.’ ‘What an extraordinary poem. Ruth Zardo?’ ‘Leonard Cohen. Clara used it in her piece. She wrote it on the wall behind the three of you, like graffiti.”

— Louise Penny

18. “Few things are better in the world than a room full of librarians. I consider them literary heroes. The keepers and defenders of the written word.”

— Louise Penny

19. “It’s about what happens when gullibility and fear meet greed and power.”

— Louise Penny

20. “Better to accept the wretched truth than struggle, twisting to make a wish a reality.”

— Louise Penny

21. “Long dead and buried in another town My mother isn’t finished with me yet.”

— Louise Penny

22. “The night is a strawberry.”

— Louise Penny

23. “Now there will be no more loneliness,” said the minister, as he gave his final blessing on the couple. Go now to your dwelling place to enter into the days of your togetherness. And may your days be good and long upon the earth.”

— Louise Penny

24. “If you don’t know something, ask. You have to be able to admit you don’t know something, otherwise you’ll just get more and more confused, or worse, you’ll jump to a false conclusion. All the mistakes I’ve made have been because I’ve assumed something and then acted as though it was fact.”

— Louise Penny

25. “When someone stabs you it’s not your fault that you feel pain.”

— Louise Penny

26. “Some might argue that Three Pines itself isn’t real, and they’d be right, but limited in their view. The village does not exist, physically. But I think of it as existing in ways that are far more important and powerful. Three Pines is a state of mind. When we choose tolerance over hate. Kindness over cruelty. Goodness over bullying. When we choose to be hopeful, not cynical. Then we live in Three Pines.”

— Louise Penny

27. “Non. He said, ‘Be very, very careful who you let into your life. And learn to make peace with whatever happens. You can’t erase the past. It’s trapped in there with you. But you can make peace with it. If you don’t,’ he said, ’you’ll be at perpetual war.”

— Louise Penny

28. “Do you know the sums that I do?” “I count my blessings.”

— Louise Penny

29. “It’s a shame that creativity and sloth look exactly the same.”

— Louise Penny

30. “A good journalist, as you know, is a great listener. And so’s a good writer. And I got to listen to people for almost 20 years. That serves me well, I hope, when I try to understand how a character might be feeling, or how they might react.”

— Louise Penny

31. “Her notebook, on the table, contained neither rhymes nor reason but held, between the worn pages, the lump in the throat.”

— Louise Penny

32. “Ruth Zardo. A gifted poet. One of the most distinguished in the nation. But that gift had come wrapped in more than a dollop of crazy.”

— Louise Penny

33. “Life is choice. All day, everyday. Who we talk to, where we sit, what we say, how we say it. And our lives become defined by our choices. It’s as simple and as complex as that. And as powerful. so when I’m observing that’s what I’m watching for. The choices people make.”

— Louise Penny

34. “Now here’s a good one: you’re lying on your deathbed. You have one hour to live. Who is it, exactly, you have needed all these years to forgive?”

— Louise Penny

35. “Give bad news swiftly, and spread out the good news. Machiavelli.” Charpentier.”

— Louise Penny

36. “What people mistook for safety was in fact captivity.”

— Louise Penny

37. “Attachment masquerades as Love, Pity as Compassion and Indifference as Equanimity.”

— Louise Penny

38. “Ring the bells that still can ring, Forget your perfect offering, There’s a crack in everything, That’s how the light gets in.”

— Louise Penny

39. “She taught me that life goes on, and that I had a choice. To lament what I no longer had or be grateful for what remained.”

— Louise Penny

40. “You are a man with a protective instinct. To care that deeply is a blessing. But like most blessings, it can also be a curse.”

— Louise Penny

41. “What are you afraid of? I’m afraid of not recognizing Paradise.”

— Louise Penny

42. “But never, ever mistake kindness for weakness.”

— Louise Penny

43. “I think many people love their problems. Gives them all sorts of excuses for not growing up and getting on with life.”

— Louise Penny

44. “I went through a period in my life when I had no friends, when the phone never rang, when I thought I would die from loneliness. I know that the real blessing here isn’t that I have a book published, but that I have so many people to thank.”

— Louise Penny

45. “There was nothing like the pain of the present to cure the pain of the past.”

— Louise Penny

46. “But, like peace, comfort didn’t come from hiding away or running away. Comfort first demanded courage.”

— Louise Penny

47. “If you pretend to know you aren’t going to actually learn.”

— Louise Penny

48. “He had his treasure, but finally all he wanted was his family. And peace.”

— Louise Penny

49. “He was tired of the tyranny of the greater good.”

— Louise Penny

50. “I don’t know. I need help. I was wrong. I’m sorry.” Armond Gamache.”

— Louise Penny