Madeleine L'Engle Quotes

Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought.

Men who know themselves are no longer fools. They stand on the threshold of the door of Wisdom.

Just about every science whiz can tell you how he or she took apart the TV or the radio when they were kids just to see how it worked. To see what the world was made of. Well, when I was a kid, I took apart fairy tales to see how they worked. To see what the world was made of.

Consciously or not, we are all on a quest for answers, trying to learn the lessons of life. We grapple with fear and guilt. We search for meaning, love, and power. We try to understand fear, loss, and time. We seek to discover who we are and how we can become truly happy.

Education is what remains when we have forgotten all that we have been taught.

When we come to understand nature, we are touching the most deep and most important parts of ourself.

I am the only person in the world I should like to know thoroughly.

The kitchen is where we deal with the elements of the universe. It is where we come to understand our past and ourselves.

I guess we're all kinda searching for a connection with something that's relevant to our past and speaks to who we are, and maybe helps us make a connection to what we are, and where we come from.

We feel that to reveal embarrassing or private things, we have given someone something, that, like a primitive person fearing that a photographer will steal his soul, we identify our secrets, our past and their blotches, with our identity, that revealing our habits or losses or deeds somehow makes one less of oneself.

A man only understands what is akin to something already existing in himself.

Filming in Africa touched something really deep inside of me, really. It changed my matrix, my insides. My blood even feels kinda different. I don't know how to describe it. It's really kind of Eucharistic. I feel like I ate the place and now it's part of my system, part of my being. I'm not claiming that now I know what it's like to be African, but that now I have a deeper understanding of myself.

We forge gradually our greatest instrument for understanding the world - introspection. We discover that humanity may resemble us very considerably - that the best way of knowing the inwardness of our neighbors is to know ourselves.

Each man deciphers from the ancient alphabets of nature only those secrets that his own deeps possess the power to endow with meaning.

Even as a child, even as my blood-past was drained from me, I understood that if I were strong enough to accept it, I was being offered a second history.

Certainly, if he still has himself, a man of understanding has lost nothing.

It's not finding what's lost, it's understanding what you've found.

The past is one evil less and one memory more.

People who do not understand themselves have a craving for understanding — a thing which is rather surmised and never spoken than known and clothed in words.

I wasn't quite as certain that I knew her soul. When it came right down to it, I wasn't sure she knew me either.

It's in understanding yourself deeply that you can lend yourself to another person's circumstances and another person's experience.

When I was in that danger...I felt like I was shaken awake...after everything she made me feel...I made a decision and went to sleep. Do you know what that's like - trying to go to sleep, and lose yourself in the hopes of burying the worst fears in your life?...I wasn't in love with the past. I was terrified of my own future.

You would be amazed at who people are once you know yourself.

Intimacy starts with a relationship with yourself, an understanding of who you are.

Later, her first intense, serious love affair, yes then she'd lost something more tangible, if undefinable: her heart? her independence? her control of, definition of, self? That first true loss, the furious bafflement of it. And never again quite so assured, confident.