Top 500 Madeleine L'Engle Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 3 of 10

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

107. “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

108. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

110. “Be aware that rigidity imprisons.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

113. “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

114. “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

115. “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

116. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

118. “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

119. “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

120. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

123. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

131. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

133. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

135. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

138. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

140. “Nothing important is completely explicable.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

141. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

143. “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

144. “Great art always transcends its culture, while lesser art merely reflects it.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

145. “Love. That was what she had that IT did not have.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

147. “So the challenge I face with children is the redemption of adulthood. We must make it evident that maturity is the fulfillment of childhood and adolescence, not a diminishing; that it is an affirmation of life, not a denial; that it is entering fully into our essential selves.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

148. “It takes too much energy to be against something unless it’s really important.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

149. “There is in God, some say, a deep but dazzling darkness.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

150. “I knew that the moment I started worrying about whether or not I was good enough for the job, I wouldn’t be able to do it.”

— Madeleine L'Engle