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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

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Elizabeth Goudge
Age: 83 †
Born: 1900
Born: April 24
Died: 1984
Died: April 1
Author
Novelist
Writer
Wells
Somerset
Elizabeth de Beauchamp Goudge
Elisabeth Goudge
Men
Word
Bird
Time
Whatever
Compassion
Gently
Life
Lives
Civilization
Novelists
Living
Short
Contempt
Another
Tree
Touched
Nature
Respect
Gentle
Ever
Humanity
Environmental
Nothing
Animal
Treated

More quotes by Elizabeth Goudge

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All the best things are seen first of all at a far distance.
Elizabeth Goudge
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Nothing is ever finished and done with in this world. You may think a seed was finished and done with when it falls like a dead thing into the earth but when it puts forth leaves and flowers next spring you see your mistake.
Elizabeth Goudge
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All human beings have their otherness and it is that which cries out to the heart.
Elizabeth Goudge
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autumn days have a holiness that spring lacks ... They are like old serene saints for whom death has lost its terror.
Elizabeth Goudge
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She long ago accepted the fact that happiness is like, swallows in spring. It may come and nest under your eaves or it may not. You cannot command it.
Elizabeth Goudge
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One was born a certain sort of person, and though by ceasless struggle one might become as nice as that sort of person ever is, one could never become as nice as a nicer sort of person.
Elizabeth Goudge
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The perfect moment, once lost, is not easily found again.
Elizabeth Goudge
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In my opinion, too much attention to weather makes for instability of character.
Elizabeth Goudge
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The lovers of life, they are children at heart always in their wonder and delight, but they do not grab.
Elizabeth Goudge
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There's much that goes to the makin' of a man or woman into somethin' better than a brute beast, but there's three things in chief, an' they're the places where life sets us down, an' the folks life knocks us up against, an' -- not the things ye get, but the things ye don't get.
Elizabeth Goudge
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Not quite birds, as they were not quite flowers, mysterious and fascinating as are all indeterminate creatures.
Elizabeth Goudge
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Imagination comes from yourself and can deceive you, but vision is a gift from outside yourself - like light striking on your closed eyelids and lifting them to see what's really there.
Elizabeth Goudge
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I doubt if we nuns are really as self-sacrificing as we must seem to be to you who live in the world. We don't give everything for nothing, you know. The mystery plays fair.
Elizabeth Goudge
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In a world where thrushes sing and willow trees are golden in the spring, boredom should have been included among the seven deadly sins.
Elizabeth Goudge
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I've never been one for religion, but yet I've never been what ye could call an unbeliever. What I say is, nothin' don't seem impossible once you've clapped eyes on a whale.
Elizabeth Goudge
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Sensible fathers and mothers, when their children marry, go back to the old days and renew their youth.
Elizabeth Goudge
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This modern craze for putting the young in positions of authority - headmasters in their thirties, bishops without a gray hair on their heads, generals who scarcely need to use a razor - ever since it took hold the world's gone steadily downhill.
Elizabeth Goudge
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Our home, our special country, is for all of us the place where we find liberation a very difficult word ... that tries to describe something that can't be described but is the only thing worth having.
Elizabeth Goudge
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Happy the man who lives long enough to acknowledge his ignorance
Elizabeth Goudge
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I have known him nearly all my life, and I am going to marry him, so that there won't ever be a time when I shan't know him.
Elizabeth Goudge