Top 500 George MacDonald Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Forgiveness is the giving and so the receiving of life. the latter may be an impulse of a moment of heat; whereas the former is a cold and deliberate choice of the heart.”

— George MacDonald

152. “As cold as everything looks in winter, the sun has not forsaken us. He has only drawn away for a little, for good reasons, one of which is that we may learn that we cannot do without him.”

— George MacDonald

153. “I believe that no hell will be lacking which would help the just mercy of God to redeem his children.”

— George MacDonald

154. “The direst foe of courage is the fear itself, not the object of it; and the man who can overcome his own terror is a hero and more.”

— George MacDonald

155. “There are women who fly their falcons at any game, little birds and all.”

— George MacDonald

156. “In the hearts of witches, love and hate lie close together and often tumble over each other.”

— George MacDonald

157. “You’ve got to save your own soul first, and then the souls of your neighbors if they will let you; and for that reason you must cultivate, not a spirit of criticism, but the talents that attract people to the hearing of the Word.”

— George MacDonald

158. “I repent me of the ignorance wherein I ever said that God made man out of nothing: there is no nothing out of which to make anything; God is all in all, and he made us out of himself.”

— George MacDonald

159. “The time for speaking seldom arrives, the time for being never departs.”

— George MacDonald

160. “It is simply absurd to say you believe, or even want to believe, in Him, if you do not do anything He tells you.”

— George MacDonald

161. “I am so tried by the things said about God. I understand God’s patience with the wicked, but I do wonder how he can be so patient with the pious!”

— George MacDonald

162. “Trust to God to weave your thread into the great web, though the pattern shows it not yet.”

— George MacDonald

163. “Yet I know that good is coming to me – that good is always coming; though few have at all times the simplicity and the courage to believe it. What we call evil, is the only and best shape, which, for the person and his condition at the time, could be assumed by the best good. And so, FAREWELL.”

— George MacDonald

164. “The holy spirit of the Spring Is working silently.”

— George MacDonald

165. “Things come to the poor that can’t get in at the door of the rich. Their money somehow blocks it up. It is a great privilege to be poor – one that no man covets, and brat a very few have sought to retain, but one that yet many have learned to prize.”

— George MacDonald

166. “With every morn my life afresh must break The crust of self, gathered about me fresh.”

— George MacDonald

167. “Better to have the poet’s heart than brain, Feeling than song.”

— George MacDonald

168. “Joy cannot unfold the deepest truths. Cometh white-robed Sorrow, stooping and wan, and flingeth wide the door she must not enter.”

— George MacDonald

169. “That is why hardships, troubles, disappointments, and all kinds of pain and suffering, are sent to so many of us. We are so full of ourselves, and feel so grand, that we should never come to know what poor creatures we are, never begin to do better, but for the knock-down blows that the loving God gives us. We do not like them, but he does not spare us for that. A Rough Shaking, ch.”

— George MacDonald

170. “But is it not rather that art rescues nature from the weary and sated regards of our senses, and the degrading injustice of our anxious everyday life, and, appealing to the imagination, which dwells apart, reveals Nature in some degree as she really is, and as she represents herself to the eye of the child, whose everyday life, fearless and unambitious, meets the true import of the wonder-teeming world around him, and rejoices therein without questioning?”

— George MacDonald

171. “Whose work is it but your own to open your eyes? But indeed the business of the universe is to make such a fool out of you that you will know yourself for one, and begin to be wise.”

— George MacDonald

172. “Of all things let us avoid the false refuge of a weary collapse, a hopeless yielding to things as they are. It is the life in us that is discontented: we need more of what is discontented, not more of the cause of its discontent.”

— George MacDonald

173. “If we do not die to ourselves, we cannot live to God, andhe that does not live to God, is dead.”

— George MacDonald

174. “Annihilation itself is no death to evil. Only good where evil was, is evil dead. An evil thing must live with its evil until it chooses to be good. That alone is the slaying of evil.”

— George MacDonald

175. “My prayers, my God, flow from what I am not; I think thy answers make me what I am.”

— George MacDonald

176. “People must not choose their neighbors; they must take the neighbors that God sends them. The neighbor is just the person who is next to you at the moment, the person with whom any business has brought you into contact.”

— George MacDonald

177. “Our life is no dream; but it ought to become one, and perhaps will.”

— George MacDonald

178. “God hides nothing. His very work from the beginning is revelation – a casting aside of veil after veil, a showing unto men of truth after truth. On and on from fact Divine He advances, until at length in His Son Jesus He unveils His very face.”

— George MacDonald

179. “A man may sink by such slow degrees that, long after he is a devil, he may go on being a good churchman or a good dissenter and thinking himself a good Christian.”

— George MacDonald

180. “All the days of my appointed time will I wait till my change come.”

— George MacDonald

181. “You will be dead so long as you refuse to die.”

— George MacDonald

182. “A man must learn to love his children, not because they are his, but because they are children, else his love will be scarcely a better thing at last than the party-spirit of the faithful politician.”

— George MacDonald

183. “The next hour, the next moment, is as much beyond our grasp and as much in God’s care, as that a hundred years away. Care for the next minute is just as foolish as care for the morrow, or for a day in the next thousand years – in neither can we do anything, in both God is doing everything. Those claims only of the morrow which have to be prepared today are of the duty of today: the moment which coincides with work to be done, is the moment to be minded; the next is nowhere till God has made it.”

— George MacDonald

184. “But words are vain; reject them all – They utter but a feeble part: Hear thou the depths from which they call, The voiceless longing of my heart.”

— George MacDonald

185. “A man is as free as he chooses to make himself, never an atom freer.”

— George MacDonald

186. “I saw thee ne’er before; I see thee never more; But love, and help, and pain, beautiful one, Have made thee mine, till all my years are done.”

— George MacDonald

187. “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.”

— George MacDonald

188. “For essential beauty is infinite, and, as the soul of Nature needs an endless succession of varied forms to embody her loveliness, countless faces of beauty springing forth, not any two the same, at every one of her heart-throbs, so the individual form needs an infinite change of its environments, to enable it to uncover all the phases of its loveliness.”

— George MacDonald

189. “No story ever really ends, and I think I know why.”

— George MacDonald

190. “Why should my love be powerless to help another?”

— George MacDonald

191. “For each, God has a different response. With every man He has a secret – the secret of a new name. In every man there is a loneliness, an inner chamber of peculiar life into which God only can enter. I say not it is the innermost chamber.”

— George MacDonald

192. “Two people may be at the same spot in manners and behaviour, and yet one may be getting better, and the other worse, which is the greatest of differences that could possibly exist between them.”

— George MacDonald

193. “But for money and the need of it, there would not be half the friendship in the world. It is powerful for good if divinely used. Give it plenty of air and it is sweet as the hawthorn; shut it up and it cankers and breeds worms.”

— George MacDonald

194. “That man is perfect in faith who can come to God in the utter dearth of his feelings and desires, without a glow or an aspiration, with the weight of low thoughts, failures, neglects, and wandering forgetfulness, and say to Him, “Thou art my refuge.”

— George MacDonald

195. “His marriage was of infinitely more salvation to the laird than if it had set him free from all his worldly embarrassments, for it set him growing again – and that is the only final path out of oppression.”

— George MacDonald

196. “My soul was like a summer evening, after a heavy fall of rain, when the drops are yet glistening on the trees in the last rays of the down-going sun, and the wind of the twilight has begun to blow.”

— George MacDonald

197. “Ere long, I learned that it was not myself, but only my shadow, that I had lost. I learned that it is better, a thousand-fold, for a proud man to fall and be humbled, than to hold up his head in his pride and fancied innocence. I learned that he that will be a hero, will barely be a man; that he that will be nothing but a doer of his work, is sure of his manhood.”

— George MacDonald

198. “There is no cheating in nature and the simple unsought feelings of the soul. There must be a truth involved in it, though we may but in part lay hold of the meaning.”

— George MacDonald

199. “She would wonder what had hurt her when she found her face wet with tears, and then would wonder how she could have been hurt without knowing it.”

— George MacDonald

200. “Then I remembered that night is the fairies’ day, and the moon their sun; and I thought – Everything sleeps and dreams now: when the night comes, it will be different.”

— George MacDonald