Quotes from Gertrud von Le Fort

Not alone is the child born through the mother, but the mother also is born through the child.

Who are you, world, that you should frighten me?

The louder our world today is, the deeper God seems to remain in silence. Silence is the language of eternity; noise passes.

To be a mother, to feel maternally, means to turn especially to the helpless, to incline lovingly and helpfully toward everything on earth that is small and weak. Therefore the principle of motherhood is a dual one. It hinges not only on the birth of the child, but also on fostering and protecting that which has been born.

It is only the city dweller spending his weekends in the country who goes into raptures about nature; the farmer breathes in it. It is only the uncreative critic who is given to much talking about art. For the artist himself, his art is speech sufficient. It is only a motherless time that cries out for a mother, and a deeply unmotherly age that can point to the mother as a demand of the time, for it is precisely the mother who is timeless, the same in all epochs and among all peoples.

We are always hard with ourselves when we refuse God something.

The union of those who are destined to help each other on the way to God is deep and mysterious like nothing else on earth.

Surrender to God is the only absolute power that the creature possesses. Only the handmaid of the Lord is the Queen of Heaven.

If the sign of the woman is "Be it done unto me," which means readiness to conceive or, when expressed in religious terms, the will to be blessed, then there is always distress when the woman no longer wills to conceive, no longer wills to be blessed. (This does not only apply in the biological sense).

Into this threefold prayer the praying woman includes the mysteries of her own motherhood, that through the mystery of the Mother of all mothers they may be uplifted. The earthly mother also has received her child from God; as his gift she has carried it and given it birth. Like Mary, she has presented it to God in the temple, and like her she has found it again in the temple.

And yet, the real and deepest danger to woman did not lie along this line of refusal, but in the opposite direction. The veil is not only the symbol of the bride of man, but also of the Bride of Christ.

The realisation that there is no right on the part of the woman to a child, but only the right of the child to a mother, corresponds to the acceptance of another fact that becomes evident for women today, namely, that there is in the world no woman's right, so called, to a profession or vocation; but the world has a child's right to the woman.

Imprint thyself more deeply upon me, thou image of my King, thou, not I, shalt dwell in my soul, in my heart, in my countenance, on my lips, thou, not I, so long as I live, only thou!

For his redemption, man has nothing to contribute to God other than the readiness of unconditional surrender. The passive acceptance inherent in woman, which ancient philosophy regarded as purely negative, appears in the Christian order of grace as the positively decisive factor. The Marian dogma, reduced to a brief formula, denotes the doctrine of the cooperation of the creature in the work of redemption.

It was for me a constant source of hope and happiness to be able to feel that I could in a way shield Our Lord from the hostility which she really meant for Him, and, as it were, take upon myself the heavy cross which He had to bear on account of this soul; and I hoped, too, that I might thereby, perhaps, be helping towards the salvation of that soul itself.

Gerechtigkeit ist nur in der Hölle, im Himmel ist Gnade, und auf Erden ist das Kreuz.

The resistance of the world to Christ's love is great and reaches very far. Its degrees are many and various, but in essence it is always the same; it is always that mysterious No to an absolute surrender.

For nothing on earth so dulls the soul, or inflicts on it such speedy and sure harm, as when it sees and learns that all the things that ought to be expressed only on bended knee and with the full surrender of oneself, are also being continually expressed without this surrender, and without this bending of the knee.

True obedience requires greatness and inward freedom of soul.