Top 500 George MacDonald Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “Really he was not an interesting man: short, broad, stout, red-faced, with an immense amount of mental inertia, discharging itself in constant lingual activity about little nothings.”

— George MacDonald

452. “Now I knew that life and truth were one; that life mere and pure is in itself bliss; that where being is not bliss, it is not life, but life-in-death. Every inspiration of the dark wind that blew where it listed went out a sigh of thanksgiving. At last I was! I lived, and nothing could touch my life! My darling walked beside me, and we were on our way home to see the Father!”

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

454. “Nothing that could be got from the heart of the earth could have been put to better purposes than the silver the king’s miners got for him. There were people in the country who, when it came into their hands, degraded it by locking it up in a chest, and then it grew diseased and was called mammon, and bred all sorts of quarrels; but when first it left the king’s hands it never made any but friends, and the air of the world kept it clean.”

— George MacDonald

455. “She did not even trouble herself much to show Godfrey her gratitude. We may spoil gratitude as we offer it, by insisting on its recognition. To receive honestly is the best thanks for a good thing.”

— George MacDonald

456. “To be kind neither hurts nor compromises.”

— George MacDonald

457. “Nobody who has not been tried knows how difficult it is; but whoever has come out well of it – and those who do not overcome never do come out of it – always looks back with horror, not on what she has come through, but on the very idea of the possibility of having failed and being still the same miserable creature as before.”

— George MacDonald

458. “You ought to have principles of your own, Mr Walton.” “I hope I have. And one of them is, not to make mountains of molehills; for a molehill is not a mountain. A man ought to have too much to do in obeying his conscience and keeping his soul’s garments clean, to mind whether he wears black or white when telling his flock that God loves them, and that they will never be happy till they believe it.”

— George MacDonald

459. “She began to learn that nothing is dead, that there cannot be a physical abstraction, that nothing exists for the sake of the laws of its phenomena.”

— George MacDonald

460. “As in all sweetest music, a tinge of sadness was in every note. Nor do we know how much of the pleasures even of life we owe to the intermingled sorrows. Joy cannot unfold the deepest truths, although deepest truth must be deepest joy. Cometh white-robed Sorrow, stooping and wan, and flingeth wide the doors she may not enter. Almost we linger with Sorrow for very love.”

— George MacDonald

461. “Where is the good of planning upon an “if?” To trust is to get ready, uncle says. Trust is better than foresight.”

— George MacDonald

462. “I may love him, I may love him, for he is a man, and I am only a beech-tree.”

— George MacDonald

463. “Mary was one who possessed power over her own spirit – rare gift, given to none but those who do something toward the taking of it. She was able in no small measure to order her own thoughts. Without any theory of self-rule, she yet ruled her Self. She was not one to slip about in the saddle, or let go the reins for a kick and a plunge or two. There was the thing that should be, and the thing that should not be; the thing that was reasonable, and the thing that was absurd.”

— George MacDonald

464. “No one can say he is himself, until first he knows that he is, and then what himself is. In fact, nobody is himself, and himself is nobody.”

— George MacDonald

465. “Never was there a more injurous mistake than to say it was thebusiness only of the clergy to care for souls.”

— George MacDonald

466. “Ye’re a scholar – that’s easy to see, for a’ ye’re sae plain spoken. It dis a body’s hert guid to hear a man ‘at un’erstan’s things say them plain oot i’ the tongue his mither taucht him. Sic a ane ‘ill gang straucht till’s makker, an’ fin’ a’thing there hame-like. Lord, I wuss minnisters wad speyk like ither fowk!”

— George MacDonald

467. “She was in utter darkness once more. But when we are following the light, even its extinction is a guide.”

— George MacDonald

468. “When I am out of sight, he may think of me again and want to see me – as Job said his maker would.” “I don’t remember,” said Barbara. “Tell me.” “He says to God – I was reading it the other day – ‘I wish you would hide me in the grave till you’ve done being angry with me! Then you would want to see again the creature you had made; you would call me, and I would answer!’ God’s not like that, of course, but my father might be.”

— George MacDonald

469. “The causing of the little ones to offend hangs a fearful woe about the neck of the causer.”

— George MacDonald

470. “We are not made for law, we are made for love.”

— George MacDonald

471. “Hundreds of hopeless waves rushed constantly shorewards, falling exhausted upon a beach of great loose stones, that seemed to stretch miles and miles in both directions. There was nothing for the eye but mingling shades of gray; nothing for the ear but the rush of the coming, the roar of the breaking, and the moan of the retreating wave.”

— George MacDonald

472. “I do not care to argue that I did not fall when Adam fell; for I have fallen many a time, and there is a shadow on my soul which I or another may call a curse; I cannot get rid of a something that always intrudes between my heart and the blue of every sky.”

— George MacDonald

473. “The library, although duly considered in many alterations of the house and additions to it, had nevertheless, like an encroaching state, absorbed one room after another until it occupied the greater part of the ground floor.”

— George MacDonald

474. “He had come to think that so long as a man wants to do right he may go where he can: when he can go no further, then it is not the way.”

— George MacDonald

475. “That’s right, grannie! And the rich have to look down on the poor.” “No, my dear. I did not say that. The rich have to be KIND to the poor.”

— George MacDonald

476. “The imagination of man is made in the image of the imagination of God. Everything of man must have been of God first; and it will help much towards our understanding of the imagination and its functions in man if we first succeed in regarding aright the imagination of God, in which the imagination of man lives and moves and has its being.”

— George MacDonald

477. “If a man keeps the law, I know he is a lover of his neighbour. But he is not a lover because he keeps the law: he keeps the law because he is a lover. No heart will be content with the law for love. The law cannot fulfil love.”

— George MacDonald

478. “Death alone from death can save. Love is death, and so is brave – Love can fill the deepest grave. Love loves on beneath the wave.”

— George MacDonald

479. “Impossibilities “I thank thee, Lord, for forgiving me, but I prefer staying in the darkness: forgive me that too.” – “No; that cannot be. The one thing that cannot be forgiven is the sin of choosing to be evil, of refusing deliverance. It is impossible to forgive that. It would be to take part in it.”

— George MacDonald

480. “As soon as a man begins to make excuses, the time has come when he might be doing that from which he excuses himself.”

— George MacDonald

481. “To be fit to receive his word implies being of his kind. No matter how his image may have been defaced in me: the thing defaced is his image, remains his defaced image – an image yet that can hear his word.”

— George MacDonald

482. “I maun hae buiks. I wad get the newspapers whiles, but no aften, for they’re a sair loss o’ precious time. Ye see they tell ye things afore they’re sure, an’ ye hae to spen’ yer time the day readin’ what ye’ll hae to spen’ yer time the morn readin’ oot again; an’ ye may as weel bide till the thing’s sattled a wee.”

— George MacDonald

483. “The truth Fear tells is not much better than her lies.”

— George MacDonald

484. “Is that all the philosophy you have gained in one-and-twenty years?” said she. “Form is much, but size is nothing.”

— George MacDonald

485. “It seemed quite natural that the little lady should be there; for many things we never could believe, have only to happen, and then there is nothing strange about them.”

— George MacDonald

486. “Would it not be better to reject it altogether if it not be fit to be believed heart and soul?”

— George MacDonald

487. “No man knows it when he is making an idiot of himself.”

— George MacDonald

488. “Do you think Jesus came to deliver us from the punishment of our sins? He would not have moved a step for that. The terrible thing is to be bad, and all punishment is to help to deliver us from it, nor will it cease till we have given up being bad. God will have us good; and Jesus works out the will of his father.”

— George MacDonald

489. “Let us then arise and live – arise even in the darkest moments of spiritual stupidity, when hope itself sees nothing to hope for. Let us go at once to the Life. Let us comfort ourselves in the thought of the Father and the Son.”

— George MacDonald

490. “Perhaps his only vice was self-satisfaction – which few will admit to be a vice; remonstrance never reached him; to himself he was ever in the right, judging himself only by his sentiments and vague intents, never by his actions; that these had little correspondence never struck him; it had never even struck him that they ought to correspond.”

— George MacDonald

491. “It is always the way. Until a man knows God, he seeks to obey him by doing things he neither commands nor cares about;.”

— George MacDonald

492. “Christ is our righteousness, not that we should escape punishment, still less escape being righteous, but as the live potent creator of righteousness in us, so that we, with our wills receiving His spirit, shall like Him resist unto blood, striving against sin.”

— George MacDonald

493. “Twilight-kind, oppressing the heart as with a condensed atmosphere of dreamy undefined love and longing.”

— George MacDonald

494. “These love self, not life, and self is but the shadow of life. When it is taken for life itself, and set as the man’s center, it becomes a live death in the man, a devil he worships as his God: the worm of the death eternal he clasps to his bosom as his one joy.”

— George MacDonald

495. “Not for a moment had I been afraid. It is true that whoever would cross the threshold of any world, must leave fear behind him; but, for myself, I could claim no part in its absence. No conscious courage was operant in me; simply, I was not afraid. I neither knew why I was not afraid, nor wherefore I might have been afraid. I feared not even fear – which of all dangers is the most dangerous.”

— George MacDonald

496. “The things that come out of a man are they that defile him, and to get rid of them a man must go into himself, be a convict, and scrub the floor of his cell.”

— George MacDonald

497. “That is, we are responsible only for our actions, not for their results. Trust first in God, then in John Day.”

— George MacDonald

498. “Chained is the Spring. The night-wind bold Blows over the hard earth; Time is not more confused and cold, Nor keeps more wintry mirth. “Yet blow, and roll the world about; Blow, Time – blow, winter’s Wind! Through chinks of Time, heaven peepeth out, And Spring the frost behind.”

— George MacDonald

499. “Better to sit at the waters’ birth, Than a sea of waves to win; To live in the love that floweth forth, Than the love that cometh in. Be thy heart a well of love, my child, Flowing, and free, and sure; For a cistern of love, though undefiled, Keeps not the spirit pure.”

— George MacDonald

500. “I can but pray the Father o’ a’ to haud his e’e upon her, an’ his airms aboot her, an’ keep aff the hardenin’ o’ the hert ’at despises coonsel!”

— George MacDonald