Top 500 George MacDonald Quotes (2026 Update)
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451. “Life and religion are one, or neither is any thing.”

— George MacDonald

452. “If you know you are yourself, you know that you are not somebody else; but do you know that you are yourself? Are you sure you are not your own father? – or, excuse me, your own fool? – Who are you, pray?” I.”

— George MacDonald

453. “Ah, what is it we send up thither, where our thoughts are either a dissonance or a sweetness and a grace?”

— George MacDonald

454. “That which is within a man, not that which lies beyond his vision, is the main factor in what is about to befall him:.”

— George MacDonald

455. “With a fiction it was the same. Mine was the whole story. For I took the place of the character who was most like myself, and his story was mine; until, grown weary with the life of years condensed in an hour, or arrived at my deathbed, or the end of the volume, I would awake, with a sudden bewilderment, to the consciousness of my present life, recognising the walls and roof around me, and finding I joyed or sorrowed only in a book.”

— George MacDonald

456. “Show me the person ready to step from any, let it be the narrowest, sect of Christian Pharisees into a freer and holier air, and I shall look to find in that person the one of that sect who, in the midst of its darkness and selfish worldliness, mistaken for holiness, has been living a life more obedient than the rest.”

— George MacDonald

457. “What distressed me most – more even than my own folly – was the perplexing question – How can beauty and ugliness dwell so near? Even with her altered complexion and face of dislike; disenchanted of the belief that clung around her; known for a living, walking sepulcher, faithless, deluding, traitorous; I felt, notwithstanding all this, that she was beautiful. Upon this I pondered with undiminished perplexity...”

— George MacDonald

458. “God chooses that men should be tried, but let a man beware of tempting his neighbor.”

— George MacDonald

459. “I never heard of her loving anybody but herself, and I do not think she could have managed that if she had not somehow got used to herself.”

— George MacDonald

460. “The very fact that anything can die, implies the existence of something that cannot die; which must either take to itself another form, as when the seed that is sown dies, and arises again; or, in conscious existence, may, perhaps, continue to lead a purely spiritual life.”

— George MacDonald

461. “A devil – “A power that lives against its life.”

— George MacDonald

462. “Possessed by the power of the gorgeous night, she seemed at one and the same moment annihilated and glorified.”

— George MacDonald

463. “He never married. But he wrote a good book.”

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

465. “There is an aching that is worse than any pain.”

— George MacDonald

466. “Suddenly pressing both hands on her heart, she fell to the ground, and the mist rose from her and melted in the air. I ran to her. But she began to writhe in such torture that I stood aghast. A moment more and her legs, hurrying from her body, sped away serpents. From her shoulders fled her arms as in terror, serpents also. Then something flew up from her like a bat, and when I looked again, she was gone.”

— George MacDonald

467. “What a hell of horror, I thought, to wander alone, a bare existence never going out of itself, never widening its life in another life, but, bound with the cords of its poor peculiarities, lying an eternal prisoner in the dungeon of its own being! I.”

— George MacDonald

468. “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

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

— George MacDonald

470. “What distressed me most – more even than my own folly – was the perplexing question, How can beauty and ugliness dwell so near?”

— George MacDonald

471. “I am his, and he shall do with me just as he likes.”

— George MacDonald

472. “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

473. “I was a bookworm then, but when I came to know it, I woke among the butterflies.”

— George MacDonald

474. “Only because uplifted in song, was I able to endure the blaze of the dawn.”

— George MacDonald

475. “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

476. “Remember, then, that whoever does not mean good is always in danger of harm.”

— George MacDonald

477. “Nobody knows what anything is; a man can only learn what a thing means!”

— George MacDonald

478. “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

479. “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

480. “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

481. “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

482. “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

483. “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

484. “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

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

— George MacDonald

486. “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

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

— George MacDonald

488. “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

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

— George MacDonald

490. “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

491. “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

492. “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

493. “But herein is the Bible itself greatly wronged. It nowhere lays claim to be regarded as the Word, the Way, the Truth. The Bible leads us to Jesus, the inexhaustible, the ever unfolding Revelation of God. It is Christ “in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge,” not the Bible, save as leading to Him.”

— George MacDonald

494. “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

495. “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

496. “There are who never learn to see anything except in its relation to themselves, nor that relation except as fancied by themselves; and, this being a withering habit of mind, they keep growing drier, and older, and smaller, and deader, the longer they live – thinking less of other people, and more of themselves and their past experience, all the time as they go on withering.”

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

498. “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

499. “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

500. “A candle is not lighted for itself; neither is a man. The light that serves self only, is no true light; its one virtue is that it will soon go out.”

— George MacDonald