George MacDonald Quotes

“Whose work is it but your own to open your eyes? But indeed the business of the universe is to make such a fool out of you that you will know yourself for one, and begin to be wise.”

— George MacDonald

“If both Church and fairy-tale belong to humanity, they may occasionally cross circles, without injury to either.”

— George MacDonald

“My spirits rose as I went deeper; into the forest; but I could not regain my former elasticity of mind. I found cheerfulness to be like life itself - not to be created by any argument. Afterwards I learned, that the best way to manage some kinds of pain fill thoughts, is to dare them to do their worst; to let them lie and gnaw at your heart till they are tired; and you find you still have a residue of life they cannot kill. So, better and worse, I went on, till I came to a little clearing in the forest.”

— George MacDonald

“For that great Love speaks in the most wretched and dirty hearts; only the tone of its voice depends on the echoes of the place in which it sounds.”

— George MacDonald

“God's finger can touch nothing but to mold it into loveliness.”

— George MacDonald

“I am ready,' I replied.
'How do you know you can do it?'
'Because you require it,' I answered.”

— George MacDonald

“I looked, and saw: before her, cast from an unseen heavenly mirror, stood the reflection of herself, and beside it a form of splendent beauty. She trembled, and sank again on the floor helpless. She knew the one that God had intended her to be, the other that she had made herself.”

— George MacDonald

“Many feelings are simply too good to last
using the phrase not in the unbelieving sense in which it is generally used, but to express the fact that intensity and endurance cannot coexist in the human frame. But the virtue of a mood depends by no means on its immediate presence. Like any other experience, it may be believed in, and, in its absence, which leaves the mind free to contemplate it, works even more good than its presence”

— George MacDonald

“That's a poet.'
'I thought you said it was a bo-at.'
'Stupid pet! Don't you know what a poet it?'
'Why, a thing to sail on the water in.'
'Well, perhaps you're not so far wrong. Some poets do carry people over the sea ... '
...
'A poet is a man who is glad of something, and tries to make other people glad of it too.”

— George MacDonald

“It is just the old way
that of obedience. If you have ever seen the Lord, if only from afar
if you have any vaguest suspicion that the Jew Jesus, who professed to have come from God, was a better man, a different man
one of your first duties must be to open your ears to His words and see whether they seem to you to be true. Then, if they do, to obey them with your whole strength and might. This is the way of life, which will lead a man out of its miseries into life indeed.”

— George MacDonald

The ruin of a man's teaching comes of his followers, such as having never touched the foundation he has laid, build upon it wood, hay, and stubble, fit only to be burnt. Therefore, if only to avoid his worst foes, his admirers, a man should avoid system. The more correct a system the worse will it be misunderstood; its professed admirers will take both its errors and their misconceptions of its truths, and hold them forth as its essence.

— George MacDonald

Now he learned what law and order and truth are, what consent and harmony mean; how the individual may find his own end in a higher end, where law and freedom mean the same thing, and the purest certainty exists without the slightest constraint.

— George MacDonald

I need a God; and if there be none how did I come to need one?

— George MacDonald

“I would I were in the kingdom of heaven if it be as you and Mr. Graham take it for!" said Clementina.
"You must be in it, my lady, or you couldn't wish it to be such as it is."
"Can one be in it and yet seem to himself to be out of it. Malcolm?"
"So many are out of it that seem to be in it, my lady, that one might well imagine it the other way around with some.”

— George MacDonald

“No gift unrecognized as coming from God is at its own best: therefore many things that God would gladly give us, things even that we need because we are, must wait until we ask for them, that we may know whence they come: when in all gifts we find Him, then in Him we shall find all things.”

— George MacDonald

It is not at all a fit place for you," said Clementina.
"Gently, my lady. It is a greater than thou that sets the bounds of my habitation. Perhaps He may give me a palace one day. But the Father has decreed for His children that they shall know the thing that is neither their ideal nor His. All in His time, my lady. He has much to teach us.

— George MacDonald

“His marriage was of infinitely more salvation to the laird than if it had set him free from all his worldly embarrassments, for it set him growing again-and that is the only final path out of oppression.”

— George MacDonald

“By this edition of HAMLET I hope to help the student of Shakspere to understand the play-and first of all Hamlet himself, whose spiritual and moral nature are the real material of the tragedy, to”

— George MacDonald

Who knows what harm may be done to a man by hurrying a spiritual process in him?

— George MacDonald

“What a folly is it now," he instantly resumed, leaving the general and attacking a particular, "to think to make people good by promises and threats
promises of a heaven that would bore the dullest among them to death, and threats of a hell the very idea of which, if only half conceived, would be enough to paralyse every nerve of healthy action in the human system!”

— George MacDonald

“These wedding guests could have done without wine, surely without more wine and better wine. But the Father looks with no esteem upon a bare existence, and is ever working, even by suffering, to render life more rich and plentiful. His gifts are to the overflowing of the cup; but when the cup would overflow, he deepens its hollow, and widens its brim. Our Lord is profuse like his Father, yea, will, at his own sternest cost, be lavish to his brethren. He will give them wine indeed. But even they who know whence the good wine comes, and joyously thank the giver, shall one day cry out, like the praiseful ruler of the feast to him who gave it not, Thou hast kept the good wine until now.”

— George MacDonald

“Those who are content with what they are, have the less concern about what they seem.”

— George MacDonald

“The year's fruit must fall that the next year's may come, and the winter is the only way to the spring.”

— George MacDonald

“It was a glorious morning. The wind had fallen quite, and the sun was shining as if he would say, "Keep up your hearts; I am up here still. I have not forgotten you. By and by you shall see more of me." But Nature lay dead, with a great white sheet cast over face and form. Not dead?-Just as much dead as ever was man, save for the inner death with which he kills himself, and which she cannot die. It is only to the eyes of his neighbours that the just man dies: to himself, and to those on the other side, he does not die, but is born instead: "He that liveth and believeth in me shall never die." But the poor old lord felt the approaching dank and cold of the sepulchre as the end of all things to him-if indeed he would be permitted to lie there, and not have to get up and go to worse quarters still.”

— George MacDonald

“The days glided by. The fervid Summer slid away round the shoulder of the world, and made room for her dignified matron sister; my lady Autumn swept her frayed and discoloured train out of the great hall-door of the world, and old brother Winter, who so assiduously waits upon the house, and cleans its innermost recesses, was creeping around it, biding his time, but eager to get to his work.”

— George MacDonald

The minister was an honest man so far as he knew himself and honesty, and did not relish this form of submission. But he did not ask himself where was the difference between accepting the word of man and accepting man's explanation of the word of God!

— George MacDonald

I took the guinea, and put it in my purse.

— George MacDonald

“But in after days Cosmo repented of having so completely dropped the old gentleman's acquaintance; he was under obligation to him; and if a man will have to do only with the perfect, he must needs cut himself first, and go out of the world.”

— George MacDonald

“There are souls innumerable in the world, as dry as the Sahara desert-souls which, when they look most gay and summer-like, are only flaunting the flowers gathered from other people's gardens, stuck without roots into their own unproducing soil. Oh, the dreariness, the sandy sadness of such poor arid souls! They are hungry, and eat husks; they are thirsty, and drink hot wine; their sleep is a stupor, and their life, if not an unrest, then a yielded decay. Only when praised or admired do they feel as if they lived! But Joan was not yet of such. She had had too much discomfort to have entered yet into their number. There was water not yet far from the surface of her consciousness.”

— George MacDonald

“It is not the hysterical alone for whom the great dash of cold water is good.
All who dream life, instead of living it,
require some similar shock.”

— George MacDonald

“The destructible must be burned out of it, or begin to be burned out of it, before it can partake of eternal life. When that is all burnt away and gone, then it has eternal life. Or rather, when the fire of eternal life has possessed a man, then the destructible is gone utterly, and he is pure. Many a man's work must be burned, that by that very burning he may be saved-so as by fire.”

— George MacDonald

“Forgiveness is the giving, and so the receiving, of life.”

— George MacDonald

“On Good Friday Jesus died But rose again at Eastertide ... Lord, teach us to understand that your Son died to save us not from suffering but from ourselves, not from injustice ... but from being unjust. He died that we might live - but live as he lives, by dying as he died who died to himself.”

— George MacDonald

“Endurance must conquer, where force could not reach.”

— George MacDonald

“Man's rank is his power to uplift.”

— George MacDonald

“In joy or sorrow, feebleness or might,
Peace or commotion, be thou, Father, my delight.”

— George MacDonald

Free will is not the liberty to do whatever one likes, but the power of doing whatever one sees ought to be done, even in the very face of otherwise overwhelming impulse. There lies freedom, indeed.

— George MacDonald

One of the good things that come of a true marriage is, that there is one face on which changes come without your seeing them; or rather there is one face which you can still see the same, through all the shadows which years have gathered upon it.

— George MacDonald

“I am an emptiness for Thee to fill; my soul a cavern for Thy sea”

— George MacDonald

“Except the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ Jesus make a man sick of his opinions, he may hold them to doomsday for me; for no opinion, I repeat is Christianity, and no preaching of any plan of salvation is the preaching of the glorious gospel of the living God.”

— George MacDonald

“Faith is that which, knowing the Lord's will, goes and does it; or, not knowing it, stands and waits, content in ignorance as in knowledge, because God wills - neither pressing into the hidden future, nor careless of the knowledge which opens the path of action”

— George MacDonald

“As no scripture is of private interpretation, so is there no feeling in a human heart which exists in that heart alone - which is not, in some form or degree, in every human heart ...”

— George MacDonald

“All is loss that comes between us and Christ.”

— George MacDonald

Truth is truth, whether from the lips of Jesus or Balaam.

— George MacDonald

“Which of us is other than a secret to all but God!”

— George MacDonald

“I believe in fate, never in chance.”

— George MacDonald

“No one is likely to remember what is entirely uninteresting to him.”

— George MacDonald

Things come to the poor that can't get in at the door of the rich. Their money somehow blocks it up. It is a great privilege to be poor
one that no man covets, and brat a very few have sought to retain, but one that yet many have learned to prize.

— George MacDonald

“No man can make haste to be rich without going against the will of God, in which case it is the one frightful thing to be successful.”

— George MacDonald

“Truth is a very different thing from fact; it is the loving contact of the soul with spiritual fact, vital and potent. It does not work in the soul independently of all faculty or qualification there for setting it forth or defending it. Truth in the inward parts is a power, not an opinion.”

— George MacDonald