Top 500 George MacDonald Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “The seed dies into a new life, and so does man.”

— George MacDonald

102. “In moments of doubt I cry, ‘Could God Himself create such lovely things as I dreamed?’ ‘Whence then came thy dream?’ answers Hope.”

— George MacDonald

103. “As many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God.”

— George MacDonald

104. “There is this difference between the growth of some human beings and that of others: in the one case it is a continuous dying, in the other a continuous resurrection.”

— George MacDonald

105. “The best thing you can do for your fellow, next to rousing his conscience, is – not to give him things to think about, but to wake things up that are in him; or say, to make him think things for himself.”

— George MacDonald

106. “It may be infinitely worse to refuse to forgive than to murder, because.”

— George MacDonald

107. “If instead of a gem, or even a flower, we should cast the gift of a loving thought into the heart of a friend, that would be giving as the angels give.”

— George MacDonald

108. “God Himself – His thoughts, His will, His love, His judgments are men’s home. To think His thoughts, to choose His will, to judge His judgments, and thus to know that He is in us, with us, is to be at home.”

— George MacDonald

109. “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.”

— George MacDonald

110. “It is when people do wrong things wilfully that they are the more likely to do them again.”

— George MacDonald

111. “Many a thief is a better man than many a clergyman, and miles nearer to the gate of the kingdom.”

— George MacDonald

112. “As Christ is the blossom of humanity, so the blossom of every man is Christ perfected in him.”

— George MacDonald

113. “Work is not always required of a man. There is such a thing as a sacred idleness, the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected.”

— George MacDonald

114. “The birds, the poets of the animal creation – what though they never get beyond the lyrical! – awoke to utter their own joy, and awake like joy in others of God’s children.”

— George MacDonald

115. “Christ died to save us, not from suffering, but from ourselves; not from injustice, far less from justice, 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

116. “The first thing in all progress is to leave something behind.”

— George MacDonald

117. “God is the God of the animals in a far lovelier way, I suspect, than many of us dare to think, but he will not be the God of a man by making a good beast of him.”

— George MacDonald

118. “Oh, I believe that there is no away; that no love, no life, goes ever from us; it goes as He went, that it may come again, deeper and closer and surer, and be with us always, even to the end of the world.”

— George MacDonald

119. “The greatest forces lie in the region of the uncomprehended.”

— George MacDonald

120. “Many a life has been injured by the constant expectation of death. It is life we have to do with, not death. The best preparation for the night is to work diligently while the day lasts. The best preparation for death is life.”

— George MacDonald

121. “When we are out of sympathy with the young, then I think our work in this world is over.”

— George MacDonald

122. “Few delights can equal the presence of one whom we trust utterly.”

— George MacDonald

123. “But more impressive than the facts and figures as to height, width, age, etc., are the entrancing beauty and tranquility that pervade the forest, the feelings of peace, awe and reverence that it inspires.”

— George MacDonald

124. “No man has the mind of Christ, except him who makes it his business to obey him.”

— George MacDonald

125. “To cease to wonder is to fall plumb-down from the childlike to the commonplace – the most undivine of all moods intellectual. Our nature can never be at home among things that are not wonderful to us.”

— George MacDonald

126. “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

127. “Faith is obedience, not compliance.”

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

129. “And why should the good of anyone depend on the prayer of another? I can only answer with the return question, ‘Why should my love be powerless to help another?”

— George MacDonald

130. “One chief cause of the amount of unbelief in the world is tha tthose who have seen something of the glory of Christ set themselves to theorize concerning him rather than to obey him.”

— George MacDonald

131. “Doubt may be a poor encouragement to do anything, but it is a bad reason for doing nothing.”

— George MacDonald

132. “Her heart – like every heart, if only its fallen sides were cleared away – was an inexhaustible fountain of love: she loved everything she saw.”

— George MacDonald

133. “When we understand the outside of things, we think we have them. Yet the Lord puts his things in subdefined, suggestive shapes, yielding no satisfactory meaning to the mere intellect, but unfolding themselves to the conscience and heart.”

— George MacDonald

134. “I watched her departure, as one watches a sunset. She went like a radiance through the dark wood, which was henceforth bright to me, from simply knowing that such a creature was in it.”

— George MacDonald

135. “The Bible is to me the most precious thing in the world just because it tells me the story of Jesus.”

— George MacDonald

136. “To love righteousness is to make it grow, not to avenge it. Throughout his life on earth, Jesus resisted every impulse to work more rapidly for a lower good.”

— George MacDonald

137. “Our moon,” he answered, “is not like yours-the old cinder of a burnt-out world; her beams embalm the dead, not corrupt them.”

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

139. “There is one kind of religion in which the more devoted a man is, the fewer proselytes he makes: the worship of himself.”

— George MacDonald

140. “Cleverness is cheap. It is faith that He praises.”

— George MacDonald

141. “All that is not God is death.”

— George MacDonald

142. “I firmly believe people have hitherto been a great deal too much taken up about doctrine and far too little about practice. The word “doctrine,” as used in the Bible, means teaching of duty, not theory.”

— George MacDonald

143. “Foolish is the man, and there are many such men, who would rid himself or his fellows of discomfort by setting the world right, by waging war on the evils around him, while he neglects that integral part of the world where lies his business, his first business, namely, his own character and conduct.”

— George MacDonald

144. “Light unshared is darkness. To be light indeed, it must shine out. It is of the very essence of light, that it is for others.”

— George MacDonald

145. “I know my Easts and Tom Brown, you see, and they’re never happy unless their morality is being tried in the furnace and they can feel they are doing the right Christian thing and never mind the consequences to anyone else.”

— George MacDonald

146. “There are things that must be done in faith, else they never have being.”

— George MacDonald

147. “Where did you get your eyes so blue? Out of the sky as I came through.”

— George MacDonald

148. “In Giving, a man receives more than he gives; and the more is in proportion to the worth of the thing given.”

— George MacDonald

149. “A Baby Sermon- The lighting and thunder, they go and they come: But the stars and the stillness are always at home.”

— George MacDonald

150. “It Was a lovely spring morning, and the sun was shining gloriously. I knew that the rain of the last night must be glittering on the grass and the young leaves; and I heard the birds singing as if they knew far more than mere human beings, and believed a great deal more than they knew. Nobody will persuade me that the birds don’t mean it; that they sing from any thing else than gladness of heart.”

— George MacDonald