Top 500 George MacDonald Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved.”

— George MacDonald

Featured in: Quotes About Trust

2. “To give truth to him who loves it not is but to give him more plentiful material for misinterpretation.”

— George MacDonald

3. “I would rather be what God chose to make me than the most glorious creature that I could think of; for to have been thought about, born in God’s thought, and then made by God, is the dearest, grandest and most precious thing in all thinking.”

— George MacDonald

4. “The Son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like His.”

— George MacDonald

5. “Obedience is the key to every door.”

— George MacDonald

6. “Attitudes are more important than facts.”

— George MacDonald

7. “Never tell a child ‘you have a soul.’ Teach him, you are a soul; you have a body.”

— George MacDonald

8. “In whatever man does without God, he must fail miserably, or succeed more miserably.”

— George MacDonald

9. “Do not measure God’s mind by your own.”

— George MacDonald

10. “I want to help you grow as beautiful as God meant you to be when he thought of you first.”

— George MacDonald

11. “If we knew as much about heaven as God does, we would clap our hands every time a Christian dies.”

— George MacDonald

12. “No man ever sank under the burden of the day. It is when tomorrow’s burden is added to the burden of today that the weight is more than a man can bear.”

— George MacDonald

13. “Half of the misery in the world comes from trying to look, instead of trying to be, what one is not.”

— George MacDonald

14. “A man’s real belief is that which he lives by. What a man believes is the thing he does, not the thing he thinks.”

— George MacDonald

15. “All things are possible with God, but all things are not easy.”

— George MacDonald

16. “I dare not say with Paul that I am the slave of Christ, but my highest aspiration and desire is to be the slave of Christ.”

— George MacDonald

17. “Timely service, like timely gifts, is doubled in value.”

— George MacDonald

18. “Past tears are present strength.”

— George MacDonald

19. “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

20. “A perfect faith would lift us absolutely above fear.”

— George MacDonald

21. “Good souls many will one day be horrified at the things they now believe of God.”

— George MacDonald

22. “Where did you come from, baby dear? Out of the everywhere and into here.”

— George MacDonald

23. “And so all growth that is not towards God Is growing towards decay.”

— George MacDonald

24. “When I can no more stir my soul to move, and life is but the ashes of a fire; when I can but remember that my heart once used to live and love, long and aspire- O, be thou then the first, the one thou art; be thou the calling, before all answering love, and in me wake hope, fear, boundless desire.”

— George MacDonald

25. “The love of our neighbor is the only door out of the dungeon of self.”

— George MacDonald

26. “If God were not only to hear our prayers, as he does ever and always, but to answer them as we want them answered, he would not be God our Saviour but the ministering genius of our destruction.”

— George MacDonald

27. “Seeing is not believing – it is only seeing.”

— George MacDonald

28. “This is a wise, sane Christian faith: that a man commit himself, his life, and his hopes to God; that God undertakes the special protection of that man; that therefore that man ought not to be afraid of anything.”

— George MacDonald

29. “The kingdom of heaven is not come even when God’s will is our law; it is fully come when God’s will is our will.”

— George MacDonald

30. “Forgiveness unleashes joy. It brings peace. It washes the slate clean. It sets all the highest values of love in motion.”

— George MacDonald

31. “I find that doing of the will of God leaves me no time for disputing about His plans.”

— George MacDonald

32. “The principle part of faith is patience.”

— George MacDonald

33. “Never be discouraged because good things get on so slowly here; and never fail daily to do that good which lies next to your hand.”

— George MacDonald

34. “Beauty and sadness always go together. Nature thought beauty too rich to go forth Upon the earth without a meet alloy.”

— George MacDonald

35. “You must learn to be strong in the dark as well as in the day, else you will always be only half brave.”

— George MacDonald

Featured in: Strong Quotes

36. “No, there is no escape. There is no heaven with a little of hell in it – no plan to retain this or that of the devil in our hearts or our pockets. Out Satan must go, every hair and feather!”

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

38. “Alas, how easily things go wrong! A sigh too much, a kiss too long And there follows a mist and a weeping rain And life is never the same again.”

— George MacDonald

39. “Love loves unto purity. Love has ever in view the absolute loveliness of that which it beholds. Therefore all that is not beautiful in the beloved, all that comes between and is not of love’s kind, must be destroyed. And our God is a consuming fire.”

— George MacDonald

40. “It is the heart that is not sure of its God that is afraid to laugh in His presence.”

— George MacDonald

41. “All love will, one day, meet with its return. All true love will, one day, behold its own image in the eyes of the beloved, and be humbly glad.”

— George MacDonald

42. “It is our best work that God wants, not the dregs of our exhaustion. I think he must prefer quality to quantity.”

— George MacDonald

43. “Work is not always required. There is such a thing as sacred idleness.”

— George MacDonald

44. “Age is not all decay; it is the ripening, the swelling, of the fresh life within, that withers and bursts the husk.”

— George MacDonald

45. “Come, then, affliction, if my Father wills, and be my frowning friend. A friend that frowns is better than a smiling enemy.”

— George MacDonald

46. “All those evil doctrines about God that work misery and madness have their origin in the brains of the wise and prudent, not in the hearts of children.”

— George MacDonald

47. “God is Love. Love is the deepest depth, the essence of his nature, at the root of all his being.”

— George MacDonald

48. “The mind of the many is not the mind of God.”

— George MacDonald

49. “The whole trouble is that we won’t let God help us.”

— George MacDonald

50. “Friends, if we be honest with ourselves, we shall be honest with each other.”

— George MacDonald