Top 500 Madeleine L'Engle Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “When the work takes over, then the artist is enabled to get out of the way, not to interfere. When the work takes over, then the artist listens.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

102. “A lot of the shadow self is the home of poetry, story, prayer. My deepest understandings are often released from the part of me of which I am least aware most of the time.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

103. “Beware of pride and arrogance, Charles, for they may betray you.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

104. “I think that all artists, regardless of degree of talent, are a painful, paradoxical combination of certainty and uncertainty, of arrogance and humility, constantly in need of reassurance, and yet with a stubborn streak of faith in their own validity no matter what.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

105. “But unless we are creators, we are not fully alive.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

106. “Unlearning is the choice, conscious or unconscious, of any real artist. And it is the true sign of maturity.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

107. “And sometimes when we listen, we are led into places we do not expect, into adventures we do not always understand.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

108. “When we can play with the unself-conscious concentration of a child, this is: art: prayer: love.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

109. “Art should communicate with as many people as possible.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

110. “All forms of art are consciousness expanders, and I am convinced that they will take us further, and more consciously, than drugs.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

111. “Be aware that rigidity imprisons.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

112. “Anger is not bitterness. Bitterness can go on eating at a man’s heart and mind forever. Anger spends itself in its own time.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

113. “We tend to think things are new because we’ve just discovered them.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

114. “My heart believed even when my mind faltered. I listened to my heart and I wrote “A Wrinkle in Time” as an affirmation that there was indeed light in the darkness with which I was surrounded. I wrote it for God.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

115. “As far as I’m concerned, there is only one absolute: God is love.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

116. “It is possible to suffer and despair an entire lifetime and still not give up the art of laughter.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

117. “One of the many sad results of the Industrial Revolution was that we came to depend more than ever on the intellect, and to ignore the intuition with its symbolic thinking.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

118. “God is over all things, under all things; outside all; within, but not enclosed; without, but not excluded; above, but not raised up; below; but not depressed; wholly above, presiding; wholly without, embracing; wholly within, filling.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

119. “I share Einstein’s affirmation that anyone who is not lost in rapturous awe at the power and glory of the mind behind the universe “is as good as a burnt out candle.””

— Madeleine L'Engle

120. “The written word Should be clean as bone, Clear as light, Firm as stone. Two words are not As good as one. I.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

121. “I have a point of view. You have a point of view. God has view.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

122. “Life... is like a sonnet: You’re given the form, but you have to write the sonnet yourself.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

123. “I saw Eternity the other night, Like a great ring of pure and endless light, All calm, as it was bright, And round beneath it, Time, in hours, days, years, Driven by the spheres, Like a vast shadow moved, in which the world And all her train were hurled.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

124. “All of those who are willing to face the darkness bring the best of themselves to the light, for the world.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

125. “Love of music, of sunsets and sea; a liking for the same kind of people; political opinions that are not radically divergent; a similar stance as we look at the stars and think of the marvelous strangeness of the universe – these are what build a marriage. And it is never to be taken for granted.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

126. “The more a man knows, the less he talks.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

127. “Faith is what makes life bearable, with all its tragedies and ambiguities and sudden, startling joys.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

128. “Conversion for me was not a Damascus Road experience. I slowly moved into an intellectual acceptance of what my intuition had always known.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

129. “One cannot be humble and aware of oneself at the same time.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

130. “Idiot,” Proginoskes said, anxiously rather than crossly. “Love isn’t how you feel. It’s what you do.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

131. “A new year can begin only because the old year ends.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

132. “Thou cannot harm a butterfly, without troubling a star.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

133. “Like and equal are not the same thing at all. – Meg Murray.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

134. “Because it is the nature of love to create, a marriage itself is something which has to be created, so that, together we become a new creature.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

135. “A Wrinkle in Time was almost never published. You can’t name a major publisher who didn’t reject it.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

136. “William James wrote: “Our lives are like islands in the sea, or like trees in the forest, which co-mingle their roots in the darkness underground. Just so, there is a continuum of cosmic consciousness, against which our individuality builds but accidental fences, and into which our several minds plunge as into a mother sea or reservoir.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

137. “If we are not willing to fail we will never accomplish anything. All creative acts involve the risk of failure.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

138. “If we are to be aware of life while we are living it, we must have the courage to relinquish our hard-earned control of ourselves.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

139. “If we knew ahead of time what was going to happen we’d be – we’d be like the people on Camazotz, with no lives of our own, with everything all planned and done for us.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

140. “I would like to travel light on this journey of life, to get rid of the encumbrances I acquire each day.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

141. “We do not love each other without changing each other.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

142. “Ananda: that joy without which the universe will fall apart and collapse.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

143. “Well, the fifth dimension’s a tesseract.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

144. “My dear, I’m seldom sure of anything. Life at best is a precarious business, and we aren’t told that difficult or painful things won’t happen, just that it matters. It matters not just to us but to the entire universe.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

145. “The first people a dictator puts in jail are the writers, the teachers, the librarians – because these people are dangerous. They have enough vocabulary to recognize injustice and to speak out loudly about it. Let us have the courage to go on being dangerous people.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

146. “And this feeling of moving with the earth was somewhat like the feeling of being in the ocean, out in the ocean beyond this rising and falling of the breakers, lying on the moving water, pulsing gently with the swells, and feeling the gentle, inexorable tug of the moon.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

147. “The degree of talent, the size of the gift, is immaterial. All artists must listen, but not all hear great symphonies, see wide canvasses, conceive complex, character-filled novels. No matter, the creative act is the same, and it is an act of faith.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

148. “Nothing important is completely explicable.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

149. “Don’t keep putting your anger off. Until you go through it, you can’t get out of it.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

150. “If there is to be any peace or reason, we have to create it in our own hearts and homes.”

— Madeleine L'Engle