Top 500 Madeleine L'Engle Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

102. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

105. “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

106. “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

107. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

113. “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

114. “Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

115. “Be aware that rigidity imprisons.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

116. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

118. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

121. “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

122. “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

123. “We find what we are looking for. If we are looking for life and love and openness and growth, we are likely to find them. If we are looking for witchcraft and evil, we’ll likely find them, and we may get taken over by them.”

— Madeleine L'Engle

124. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

127. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

129. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

132. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

137. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

139. “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

140. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

142. “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

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

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

— Madeleine L'Engle

147. “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

148. “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

149. “Nothing important is completely explicable.”

— 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