Madeleine L'Engle Quotes

'Tis folly to be wise.

The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.

Turin is a city which entices a writer towards vigor, linearity, style. It encourages logic, and through logic it opens the way towards madness.

We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand.

Philosophy is a slow process of logic and logical discourse: A bringing B bringing C and so forth. In mysticism you can jump from A to Z. But the ultimate objective is the same. It's knowledge. It's truth.

A great thing is a great book; but a greater thing than all is the talk of a great man.

The words of genius have a wider meaning than the thought that prompted them.

Books fall open, you fall in. When you climb out again, you're a bit larger than you used to be.

Man tends to think that he is a creator, that he is like God. This is especially true of intellectuals, and in the last century, intellectuals tended to forget that they were like everyone else. Writing this book was a description of man going from a state of God back to a state of man, back to being a normal person.

I have never written a book that didn't teach me far more than it taught my reader.

The highest knowledge is to know that we are surrounded by mystery.

Franz Kafka is an idea person. His books begin and end in ideas. Ideas have always been important to me in my writing. To the point that I have to be careful that they don't take over.

I'm confused, and brilliant books help me to be less so.

Any fool may write a most valuable book by chance, if he will only tell us what he heard and saw with veracity.

The shelves of books we haven't written, like those of books we haven't read, stretches out into the darkness of the universal library's farthest space. We are always at the beginning of the beginning of the letter A.

Those who know it do not speak about it. Those who speak about it do not know it.

Mystic: a person who is puzzled before the obvious, but who understands the non-existent.

We cannot understand. The best is perhaps what we understand least.

But I don't really write to honor the past. I write to investigate, to try to figure out what happened and why it happened, knowing I'll never really know. I think all the writers that I admire have this same desire, the desire to bring order out of chaos.

I find the more you analyze, the less you really know.

I believe in order that I may understand.

Men of the world who value the Way all turn to books. But books are nothing more than words. Words have value; what is of value in words is meaning. Meaning has something it is pursuing, but the thing that it is pursuing cannot be put into words and handed down. The world values words and hands down books but, though the world values them, I do not think them worth valuing. What the world takes to be values is not real value.

Books light the fire-whether it's a book that's already written, or an empty journal that needs to be filled in.

A man of science doesn't discover in order to know, he wants to know in order to discover.