Top 500 George MacDonald Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

152. “The more people trust in God, the less will they trust their own judgments, or interfere with the ordering of events.”

— George MacDonald

153. “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

154. “There had been a time in Godfrey’s life when, had she stood before him in all her splendor, he would have turned from her, because of her history, with a sad disgust. Was he less pure now? He was more pure, for he was humbler.”

— George MacDonald

155. “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

156. “Never, my little one, hide anything from those that love you. Never let anything that makes itself a nest in your heart, grow into a secret, for then at once it will begin to eat a hole in it.”

— George MacDonald

157. “Of all teachings that which presents a far distant God is the nearest to absurdity. Either there is none, or he is nearer to every one of us than our nearest consciousness of self. An unapproachable divinity is the veriest of monsters, the most horrible of human imaginations.”

— George MacDonald

158. “Thou art beautiful because God created thee, but thou art a slave to sin... wickedness has made you ugly.”

— George MacDonald

159. “There can hardly be a plainer proof of the lowness of our nature, until we have laid hold of the higher nature that belongs to us by birthright, than this, that even a just anger tends to make us unjust and unkind.”

— George MacDonald

160. “But then to every lover of the truth, a true thing is dearer because it is old-fashioned, and dearer because it is new-fashioned: and true music, like true love, like all truth, laughs at the god Fashion, because it knows him to be but an ape.”

— George MacDonald

161. “What is called a good conscience is often but a dull one that gives no trouble when it ought to bark loudest;.”

— George MacDonald

162. “Those that hope little cannot grow much.”

— George MacDonald

163. “It is the vile falsehood and miserable unreality of Christians, their faithlessness to their Master, their love of their own wretched sects, their worldliness and unchristianity, their talking and not doing, that has to answer, I suspect, for the greater part of our present atheism.”

— George MacDonald

164. “Could you not give me some sign, or tell me something about you that never changes, or some other way to know you, or thing to know you by?” – “No, Curdie: that would be to keep you from knowing me. You must know me in quite another way from that. It would not be the least use to you or me either if I were to make you know me in that way. It would be but to know the sign of me – not to know me myself.”

— George MacDonald

165. “Many feelings are simply too good to last – using the phrase not in the unbelieving sense in which it is generally used, but to express the fact that intensity and endurance cannot coexist in the human frame. But the virtue of a mood depends by no means on its immediate presence. Like any other experience, it may be believed in, and, in its absence, which leaves the mind free to contemplate it, works even more good than its presence.”

— George MacDonald

166. “There is no slave but the creature that wills against its Creator.”

— George MacDonald

167. “From the neglect of a real duty, she became the slave of a false one.”

— George MacDonald

168. “We profess to think Jesus the grandest and most glorious of men, yet hardly care to be like him. When we are offered his Spirit, that is, his very nature within us, for the asking, we will hardly take the trouble to ask for it.”

— George MacDonald

169. “Every truth must be accompanied by some corresponding act.”

— George MacDonald

170. “Verily the God that knows how not to reveal himself, must also know how best to reveal himself! If there be a calling child, there must be an answering Father!”

— George MacDonald

171. “Well, perhaps; but I begin to think there are better things than being comfortable.”

— George MacDonald

172. “She could now be sad without losing a jot of hope. Nay, rather, the least approach of sadness would begin at once to wake her hope. She regretted nothing that had come, nothing that had gone. She believed more and more that not anything worth having is ever lost; that even the most evanescent shades of feeling are safe for those who grow after their true nature, toward that for which they were made – in other and higher words, after the will of God.”

— George MacDonald

173. “Now and then, when I look round on my books, they seem to waver as if a wind rippled their solid mass, and another world were about to break through.”

— George MacDonald

174. “Either there is a God, and that God the perfect heart of truth and loveliness, or all poetry and art is but an unsown, unplanted, rootless flower, crowning a somewhat symmetrical heap of stones.”

— George MacDonald

175. “Think not to make me afraid, for I fear nothing in the universe but that which I love the best. – I spake of the eyes of the Lord Jesus. – Then.”

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

177. “There is no inborn longing that shall not be fulfilled. I think that is as certain as the forgiveness of sins.”

— George MacDonald

178. “If those who had set themselves to explain the various theories of Christianity had set themselves instead to do the will of the Master, how different the world would be now!”

— George MacDonald

179. “A man might flatter, or bribe, or coax a tyrant; but there is no refuge from the love of God; that love will, for very love, insist upon the uttermost farthing.”

— George MacDonald

180. “All is loss that comes between us and Christ.”

— George MacDonald

181. “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

182. “I knew that love gives to him that loveth, power over any soul beloved, even if that soul know him not, bringing him inwardly close to that spirit; a power that cannot be but for good; for in proportion as selfishness intrudes, the love ceases, and the power which springs therefrom dies. Yet all love will, one day, meet with its return. All true love will, one day, behold its own image in the eyes of the beloved, and be humbly glad.”

— George MacDonald

183. “One of the grandest things in having rights is, that though they are your rights you may give them up.”

— George MacDonald

184. “It is only by loving a thing that you can make it yours.”

— George MacDonald

185. “Low-sunk life imagines itself weary of life, but it is death, not life, it is weary of.”

— George MacDonald

186. “Our Selves are like some little children who will be happy enough so long as they are left to their own games, but when we begin to interfere with them, and make them presents of too nice playthings, or too many sweet things, they begin at once to fret and spoil.”

— George MacDonald

187. “What can money do to console a man with a headache?”

— George MacDonald

188. “It is a hard thing for a rich man to grow poor; but it is an awful thing for him to grow dishonest, and some kinds of speculation lead a man deep into dishonesty before he thinks what he is about. Poverty will not make a man worthless – he may be of worth a great deal more when he is poor than he was when he was rich; but dishonesty goes very far indeed to make a man of no value – a thing to be thrown out in the dust-hole of the creation, like a bit of broken basin, or dirty rag.”

— George MacDonald

189. “That’s all nonsense,” said Curdie. “I don’t know what you mean.” “Then if you don’t know what I mean, what right have you to call it nonsense?”

— George MacDonald

190. “The world is a fine thing to save, but a wretch to worship.”

— George MacDonald

191. “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

192. “The thing most alien to the true idea of humanity is the notion that our well-being lies in surpassing our fellows. We have to rise above ourselves, not above our neighbors, to take all the good of them not from them, and give them all our good in return. That which cannot be freely shared can never be possessed.”

— George MacDonald

193. “Then first I knew the delight of being lowly; of saying to myself, “I am what I am, nothing more.”

— George MacDonald

194. “Her intercourse with Andrew had as yet failed to open her eyes to the fact that the faith required of us is faith in a person, and not in the truest of statements concerning anything, even concerning him; or to the fact, that faith in the living One, the very essence of it, consists in obedience to Him. A man can obey before he is sure, and except he obey the command he knows to be right, wherever it may come from, he will never be sure. To find the truth, man or woman must be true.”

— George MacDonald

195. “It’s not good at all – mind that, Diamond – to do everything for those you love, and not give them a share in the doing. It’s not kind. It’s making too much of yourself.”

— George MacDonald

196. “It is not where one is, but in what direction he is going.”

— George MacDonald

197. “To say a man might disobey and be none the worse would be to say that no might be yes and light sometimes darkness.”

— George MacDonald

198. “In seeking to improve their conditions, might I not do them harm, and only harm?”

— George MacDonald

199. “Real good-breeding is independent of the forms and refinements of what has assumed to itself the name of society.”

— George MacDonald

200. “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