Madeleine L'Engle Quotes

F. Scott Fitzgerald has an indespensible quote: 'The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at once and still retain the ability to function'. Or, as I like to call it, 'O.J. killed his wife, and the police are corrupt.'

The acceptance of ambiguity implies more than the commonplace understanding that some good things and some bad things happen to us. It means that we know that good and evil are inextricably intermixed in human affairs; that they contain, and sometimes embrace, their opposites; that success may involve failure of a different kind, and failure may be a kind of triumph.

Let's develop theories, patiently and honestly thinking them out, in order to promptly act against them – acting and justifying our actions with new theories that condemn them. Let's cut a path in life and then go immediately against that path. Let's adopt all the poses and gestures of something we aren't and don't even wish to be, and don't even wish to taken for being.

The concept of logical thinking is selection and this is brought about by the processes of acceptance and rejection. Rejection is the basis of logical thinking.

I'm really interested in the idea of anomynity and familiarity. And sunglasses, you know, are so indicatitve of that. I mean, they're worn by some people to hide themselves. But they're also a fashion statement, meant to be noticed. So there's a dichotomy there.

Darkness as well as light. Or do I mean darkness, another kind of light? Lucifer would say so, and I have a weakness for fallen angels.

To understand possible means to understand impossible.

I know nothing, because I know too much, and understand not nearly enough and never will.

Science is a way of thinking that helps you not to fool yourself.

The more reasonable a student was in mathematics, the more unreasonable she was in the affairs of real life, concerning which fewtrustworthy postulates have yet been ascertained.

We're terrified of shocks but we're so fascinated by it at the same time. We're terrified of spiders and reptiles and all of that but at the same time you're fascinated by them - you want to go to the zoo and go behind the glass and look at all these creepy crawlies! It's the same thing with the supernatural. I think we're very frightened by it.

Sometimes the concept you're questioning makes more sense to ask just the second one and not the first one.

But I try not to think with my gut. If I'm serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble.

Faith means making a virtue out of not thinking. It's nothing to brag about. And those who preach faith, and enable and elevate it are intellectual slaveholders, keeping mankind in a bondage to fantasy and nonsense that has spawned and justified so much lunacy and destruction.

What is simple is wrong, and what is complicated cannot be understood.

Philosophy unravels the knots in our thinking; hence its results must be simple, but its activity is as complicated as the knots that it unravels.

Speak what you think today in hard words and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today.

A truly open mind means forcing our imaginations to conform to the evidence of reality, and not vice versa.

I mean the opposite of what I say./You've got it now? No, it's the other way.

Why do I want to believe what I believe?... Science, to put it somewhat vulgarly, is a technique to keep yourself from kidding yourself.

Logic is the kingdom of the unexpected. To think logically means to be continually amazed.

You know very well that I no longer think. I am far too intelligent for that.

The measure of your enlightenment is the degree to which you are comfortable with paradox, contradiction, and ambiguity.

If you will take my advice you will think little of Socrates, and a great deal more of truth.

I'll just take amusement at being a paradox.