Nothing living should ever be treated with contempt. Whatever it is that lives, a man, a tree, or a bird, should be touched gently, because the time is short. Civilization is another word for respect for life...

— Elizabeth Goudge

Nothing mitigated failure except the knowledge that it did not matter.

— Elizabeth Goudge

One is seldom unchanged by the death of those one loves. It gives me a deeper knowledge of them, and so of oneself in regard to them.

— Elizabeth Goudge

Peace.... Henrietta was not quite sure what it was, but she knew it was very important. If one wanted it, Grandfather had told her once, one must not hit back when fate hit hard but must allow the hammer-strokes to batter out a hollow place inside one into which peace, like cool water, could flow.

— Elizabeth Goudge

Peace ... was contingent upon a certain disposition of the soul a disposition to receive the gift that only detachment from self-made possible.

— Elizabeth Goudge

Progress in evil was quick and easy; Apollo was not a chap who hid himself, and he gave every assistance in his power. The growth in goodness was so slow, at times so flat, so dull, and like the White Queen one had to run so fast to stay where one was, let alone progress; and there were few men who dared to say they had found God. It was easy to be a clever sinner, for the race to an earthly visible goal was short to run, so impossibly hard to be a wise saint, with the goal set at so vast a distance from this world and clouded with such uncertainty.

— Elizabeth Goudge

She knew that pleasure, to be pleasure, must come to an end.

— Elizabeth Goudge

She realized with deep respect that this woman had always done what she had to do and faced what she had to face. If many of her fears and burdens would have seemed unreal to another woman, there was nothing unreal about her courage.

— Elizabeth Goudge

So this blessing of loneliness was not really loneliness. Real loneliness was something unendurable. What one wanted when exhausted by the noise and impact of physical bodies was not no people but disembodied people; all those denizens of beloved books who could be taken to one's heart and put away again, in silence, and with no hurt feelings.

— Elizabeth Goudge

The function of the educator is to discover in each individual child the gifts implanted in her by Almighty God and to develop and dedicate them to His service.

— Elizabeth Goudge