Top 500 Madeleine L'Engle Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “There is nothing so secular that it cannot be sacred, and that is one of the deepest messages of the Incarnation.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

52. “Humility is throwing oneself away in complete concentration on something or someone else.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

53. “For the things that are seen are temporal, but things that are unseen are eternal.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

54. “It was a dark and stormy night.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

55. “Those who believe they believe in God, but without passion in the heart, without anguish of mind, without uncertainty, without doubt, and even at times without despair, believe only in the idea of God, and not in God himself.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

56. “The unending paradox is that we do learn through pain.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

57. “Great art transcends its culture and touches on that which is eternal.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

58. “Wild nights are my glory!”

— Madeleine L'Engle

59. “Only a fool is not afraid.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

60. “People are more than just the way they look.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

61. “Stories are able to help us to become more whole, to become Named. And Naming is one of the impulses behind all art; to give a name to the cosmos, we see despite all the chaos.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

62. “It’s hard to let go anything we love. We live in a world which teaches us to clutch. But when we clutch we’re left with a fistful of ashes.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

63. “To love is to be vulnerable; and it is only in vulnerability and risk – not safety and security – that we overcome darkness.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

64. “In art we are once again able to do all the things we have forgotten; we are able to walk on water; we speak to the angels who call us; we move, unfettered, among the stars.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

65. “Just because we don’t understand doesn’t mean that the explanation doesn’t exist.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

66. “When we make ourselves vulnerable, we do open ourselves to pain, sometimes excruciating pain. The more people we love, the more we are liable to be hurt, and not only by the people we love, but for the people we love.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

67. “Love isn’t how you feel. It’s what you do.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

68. “The deeper and richer a personality is, the more full it is of paradox and contradiction. It is only a shallow character who offers us no problems of contrast.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

69. “Detachment and involvement: the artist must have both. The link between them is compassion. It has taken me over fifty years to get a glimmer of what this means.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

70. “Darkness was and darkness was good. As with light. Light and Darkness dancing together, born together, born of each other, neither preceding, neither following, both fully being, in joyful rhythm.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

71. “Experiment is the mother of knowledge.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

72. “It’s a good thing to have all the props pulled out from under us occasionally. It gives us some sense of what is rock under our feet, and what is sand.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

73. “The beginning of our happiness lies in the understanding that life without wonder is not worth living. What we lack is not a will to believe but a will to wonder.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

74. “You mean you’re comparing our lives to a sonnet? A strict form, but freedom within it? Yes. Mrs. Whatsit said. You’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself. What you say is completely up to you.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

75. “Why does anybody tell a story? It does indeed have something to do with faith. Faith that the universe has meaning, that our little human lives are not irrelevant, that what we choose or say or do matters, matters cosmically.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

76. “To be born is to start the journey towards death.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

77. “When I am constantly running there is no time for being. When there is no time for being there is no time for listening.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

78. “I wish that we worried more about asking the right questions instead of being so hung up on finding answers.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

79. “A mystic is a person who sees the facts as inadequate.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

80. “Reading is a creative activity. You have to visualize the characters, you have to hear what the voices sound like.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

81. “Man has a viewpoint, but God has the view.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

82. “Inspiration more often comes during the work than before it, because the largest part of the job of an artist is to listen to the work.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

83. “We turn to stories and pictures and music because they show us who and what and why we are.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

84. “Everything we do, our entire interior monologue, is prayer.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

85. “All that is required for the triumph of evil is that good men remain silent and do nothing.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

86. “We do learn and develop when we are exposed to those who are greater than we are. Perhaps this is the chief way we mature.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

87. “In the act of creativity, the artist lets go the self-control which he normally clings to and is open to riding the wind.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

88. “The world has been abnormal for so long that we’ve forgotten what it’s like to live in a peaceful and reasonable climate. If there is to be any peace or reason, we have to create it in our own hearts and homes.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

89. “The growth of love is not a straight line, but a series of hills and valleys.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

90. “Easter is always the answer to “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me!””

— Madeleine L'Engle

91. “We can’t take any credit for our talents. It’s how we use them that counts.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

92. “Qui plussait, plus se tait. French, you know. The more a man knows, the less he talks.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

93. “You see, though we travel together, we travel alone.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

94. “If you aren’t unhappy sometimes you don’t know how to be happy.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

95. “Art is not a mirror but an icon. It takes the chaos in which we live and shows us structure and pattern, not the structure of conformity which imprisons but the structure which liberates, sets us free to become growing, mature human beings.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

96. “To be a witness means to live in such a way that one’s life would not make sense if God did not exist.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

97. “We turn to stories and pictures and music because they show us who and what and why we are, and what our relationship is to life and death, what is essential, and what, despite the arbitrariness of falling beams, will not burn.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

98. “To pray is to listen, to move through my own chattering to God, to that place where I can be silent and listen to what God may have to say.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

99. “Integrity, like humility, is a quality which vanishes the moment we are conscious of it in ourselves. We see it only in others.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

100. “Because we fail to listen to each other’s stories, we are becoming a fragmented human race.”

— Madeleine L'Engle