Top 500 George MacDonald Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “When I look like this into the blue sky, it seems so deep, so peaceful, so full of a mysterious tenderness, that I could lie for centuries and wait for the dawning of the face of God out of the awe-inspiring loving-kindness.”

— George MacDonald

52. “It is not in the nature of politics that the best men should be elected. The best men do not want to govern their fellowmen.”

— George MacDonald

53. “God left the world unfinished for man to work his skill upon. He left the electricity still in the cloud, the oil still in the earth.”

— George MacDonald

54. “God is easy to please, but hard to satisfy.”

— George MacDonald

55. “You doubt because you love truth.”

— George MacDonald

56. “To try to be brave is to be brave.”

— George MacDonald

57. “To have what we want is riches; but to be able to do without is power.”

— George MacDonald

58. “This is and has been the Father’s work from the beginning-to bring us into the home of His heart.”

— George MacDonald

59. “It matters little where a man may be at this moment; the point is whether he is growing.”

— George MacDonald

60. “We are often unable to tell people what they need to know, because they want to know something else, and would therefore only misunderstand what we said.”

— George MacDonald

61. “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.”

— George MacDonald

62. “He who is faithful over a few things is a lord of cities. It does not matter whether you preach in Westminster Abbey or teach a ragged class, so you be faithful. The faithfulness is all.”

— George MacDonald

63. “We die daily. Happy those who daily come to life as well.”

— George MacDonald

64. “Fear is faithlessness.”

— George MacDonald

65. “Not even nothingness preceded life. Nothingness owes its very idea to existence.”

— George MacDonald

66. “A man is enslaved to anything he cannot part with which is less than himself.”

— George MacDonald

67. “When a feeling was there, they felt as if it would never go; when it was gone, they felt as if it had never been; when it returned, they felt as if it had never gone.”

— George MacDonald

68. “I came from God, and I’m going back to God, and I won’t have any gaps of death in the middle of my life.”

— George MacDonald

69. “A voice is in the wind I do not know A meaning on the face of the high hills Whose utterance I cannot comprehend. A something is behind them: that is God.”

— George MacDonald

70. “The first thing a kindness deserves is acceptance, the second, transmission.”

— George MacDonald

71. “It is not the cares of today, but the cares of tomorrow, that weigh a man down.”

— George MacDonald

72. “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

73. “Love makes everything lovely; hate concentrates itself on the one thing hated.”

— George MacDonald

74. “As you grow ready for it, somewhere or other you will find what is needful for you in a book.”

— George MacDonald

75. “Philosophy is really homesickness.”

— George MacDonald

76. “I am an optimistic fatalist. This world and all its beginnings will pass on into something better.”

— George MacDonald

77. “Division has done more to hide Christ from the view of men than all the infidelity that has ever been spoken.”

— George MacDonald

78. “Beauty and sadness always go together.”

— George MacDonald

79. “Any faith in Him, however small, is better than any belief about Him, however great.”

— George MacDonald

80. “All that is not God is death.”

— George MacDonald

81. “The part of the philanthropist is indeed a dangerous one; and the man who would do his neighbour good must first study how not to do him evil, and must begin by pulling the beam out of his own eye.”

— George MacDonald

82. “Instead of automatically blaming the person who does not believe in God, we should ask first if his notion of God is a God that ought to be believed in.”

— George MacDonald

83. “A true friend is forever a friend.”

— George MacDonald

84. “Nothing makes one feel so strong as a call for help.”

— George MacDonald

85. “How strange this fear of death is! We are never frightened at a sunset.”

— George MacDonald

86. “Her face was fair and pretty, with eyes like two bits of night sky, each with a star dissolved in the blue.”

— George MacDonald

87. “We can walk without fear, full of hope and courage and strength to do His will, waiting for the endless good which He is always giving as fast as He can get us able to take it in.”

— George MacDonald

88. “In low theologies, hell is invariably the deepest truth, and the love of God is not so deep as hell.”

— George MacDonald

89. “He who seeks the Father more than anything He can give, is likely to have what he asks, for he is not likely to ask amiss.”

— George MacDonald

90. “In the midst of death we are in life. Life is the only reality; what men call death is but a shadow...”

— George MacDonald

91. “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

92. “Man finds it hard to get what he wants, because he does not want the best; God finds it hard to give, because He would give the best, and man will not take it.”

— George MacDonald

93. “Primarily, God is not bound to punish sin; he is bound to destroy sin. The only vengeance worth having on sin is to make the sinner himself its executioner.”

— George MacDonald

94. “A beast does not know that he is a beast, and the nearer a man gets to being a beast, the less he knows it.”

— George MacDonald

95. “The best preparation for the future is the present well seen to, and the last duty done.”

— George MacDonald

96. “The miracles of Jesus were the ordinary works of his Father, wrought small and swift that we might take them in.”

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

99. “It is by loving and not by being loved that one can come nearest to the soul of another.”

— George MacDonald

100. “We are all very anxious to be understood, and it is very hard not to be. But there is one thing much more necessary.? What is that, grandmother?? To understand other people.? Yes, grandmother. I must be fair – for if I’m not fair to other people, I’m not worth being understood myself. I see.”

— George MacDonald