Patient Teaching
Never discourage anyone … who continually makes progress, no matter how slowly.
— Plato
On Discipline
The secret of discipline is motivation. When a man is sufficiently motivated, discipline will take care of itself.
— Sir Alexander Paterson
On Love and Forgiveness
The highest respect you can show people is to let them take responsibility for their own actions. Love has this power, the power to let people be responsible for hurting us. … When we really love people with respect, we let them be accountable for what they do to us. And then we face the crisis of forgiving.
— Lewis B. Smedes, in Forgive and Forget: Healing the Hurts We Don’t Deserve
On Confession and Forgiveness
The marvelous thing about sacramental confession is that when absolution is given by the priest as God’s representative, the offense is wiped away. We are not to dwell on it any more, but to go on afresh with our lives, knowing ourselves forgiven, restored, loved. My tendency has often been to go back and dwell on my mistakes, but my confessor … taught me not to go back and play in the garbage. Let it go. Get on with your life, understanding that God has wiped out the sin. And what God has wiped out we may not take up again, otherwise, it becomes an idol.
— Madeleine L’Engle, in Penguins and Golden Calves
(emphasis mine)
On Self-Worship
We do not have to act out everything we feel; that is idolatry of our own selves and does not lead to any kind of deep happiness.
— Madeleine L’Engle, in Penguins and Golden Calves
Power = Idolatry
When we wield power over other people, are we not becoming idolatrous as we take over the prerogatives of God?
— Madeleine L’Engle, in Penguins and Golden Calves
On Pain
Our souls do not grow if we insulate ourselves from pain.
— Madeleine L’Engle, in Penguins and Golden Calves
Why Are the Sects Growing?
The sects and fundamentalists are growing because they offer black-and-white answers to all the unanswerable questions. The frightened person is given all the rules and assured that the few people who keep the rules and accept the answers to the unanswerable questions will be saved, and everybody else will be damned. The damnation of others seems to be a large part of the pleasure of accepting the answers to the unanswerable questions.
— Madeleine L’Engle, in Penguins and Golden Calves
Effective Discipline
Discipline doesn’t work unless it’s founded on the kind of security that comes from knowing you’re loved.
— Madeleine L’Engle, A Live Coal in the Sea
On Doing Good
He who would do good to another must do it in minute particulars. General good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite, and flatterer, for Art and Science cannot exist but in minutely organized particulars.
— William Blake