Top 500 George MacDonald Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “Man’s rank is his power to uplift.”

— George MacDonald

202. “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

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

— George MacDonald

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

207. “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

208. “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

209. “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

210. “Bees and butterflies, moths and dragonflies, the flowers and the brooks and the clouds.”

— George MacDonald

211. “We must do the thing we must Before the thing we may; We are unfit for any trust Till we can and do obey.”

— George MacDonald

212. “Were I asked, what is a fairytale? I should reply, Read Undine: that is a fairytale.”

— George MacDonald

213. “They are not the best students who are most dependent on books. What can be got out of them is at best only material; a man must build his house for himself.”

— George MacDonald

214. “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

215. “No; but you came, and found the riddles waiting for you! Indeed you are yourself the only riddle. What you call riddles are truths, and seem riddles because you are not true.”

— George MacDonald

216. “Only he knew that to be left alone is not always to be forsaken.”

— George MacDonald

217. “I am sometimes almost terrified at the scope of the demands made upon me, at the perfection of the self-abandonment required of me; yet outside of such absoluteness can be no salvation.”

— George MacDonald

218. “The darkness knows neither the light nor itself; only the light knows itself and the darkness also. None but God hates evil and understands it.”

— George MacDonald

219. “Why know the name of a thing when the thing itself you do not know? Whose work is it but your own to open your eyes? But indeed the business of the universe is to make such a fool of you that you will know yourself for one, and so begin to be wise!” But.”

— George MacDonald

220. “For that great Love speaks in the most wretched and dirty hearts; only the tone of its voice depends on the echoes of the place in which it sounds.”

— George MacDonald

221. “We are dwellers in a divine universe where no desires are in vain – if only they be large enough.”

— George MacDonald

222. “The ideal flower of hospitality is almost unknown to the rich; it can hardly be grown save in the gardens of the poor; it is one of their beatitudes.”

— George MacDonald

223. “You see this Fairy Land is full of oddities and all sorts of incredibly ridiculous things, which a man is compelled to meet and treat as real existences, although all the time he feels foolish for doing so.”

— George MacDonald

224. “You see when he forgot his Self his mother took care of his Self, and loved and praised his Self. Our own praises poison our Selves, and puff and swell them up, till they lose all shape and beauty, and become like great toadstools. But the praises of father or mother do our Selves good, and comfort them and make them beautiful. They never do them any harm. If they do any harm, it comes of our mixing some of our own praises with them, and that turns them nasty and slimy and poisonous.”

— George MacDonald

225. “Anything big enough to occupy our minds is big enough to hang a prayer on.”

— George MacDonald

226. “I am perplexed at the stupidity of the ordinary religious being. In the most practical of all matters he will talk and speculate and try to feel, but he will not set himself to do.”

— George MacDonald

227. “Nobody can be a real princess – do not imagine you have yet been anything more than a mock one – until she is a princess over herself, that is, until, when she finds herself unwilling to do the thing that is right, she makes herself do it. So long as any mood she is in makes her do the thing she will be sorry for when that mood is over, she is a slave, and not a princess.”

— George MacDonald

228. “Every one, as you ought to know, has a beast-self – and a bird-self, and a stupid fish-self, ay, and a creeping serpent-self too – which it takes a deal of crushing to kill! In truth he has also a tree-self and a crystal-self, and I don’t know how many selves more – all to get into harmony. You can tell what sort a man is by his creature that comes oftenest to the front.”

— George MacDonald

229. “In the windowless tomb of a blind mother, in the dead of the night, under feeble rays of a lamp in an alabaster globe, a girl came into the darkness with a wail.”

— George MacDonald

230. “Heed not thy feeling. Do thy work.”

— George MacDonald

231. “Spiritual Murder It may be an infinitely less evil to murder a man than to refuse to forgive him. The former may be the act of a moment of passion: the latter is the heart’s choice. It is spiritual murder, the worst, to hate, to brood over the feeling that excludes, that, in our microcosm, kills the image, the idea of the hated.”

— George MacDonald

232. “But there are not a few who would be indignant at having their belief in God questioned, who yet seem greatly to fear imagining Him better than He is.”

— George MacDonald

233. “Where there is no choice, we do well to make no difficulty.”

— George MacDonald

234. “To try too hard to make people good is one way to make them worse. The only way to make them good is to be good, remembering well the beam and the mote.”

— George MacDonald

235. “I do not say we are called upon to dispute and defend the truth with logic and argument, but we are called upon to show by our lives that we stand on the side of truth. But when i say truth, I do not mean opinion. To treat opinion as if that were truth is grievously to wrong the truth. The soul that loves the truth and tries to be true will know when to speak and when to be silent.”

— George MacDonald

236. “Humility is essential greatness, the inside of grandeur.”

— George MacDonald

237. “Trust the Oak,” said she; “trust the Oak, and the Elm, and the great Beech. Take care of the Birch, for though she is honest, she is too young not to be changeable. But shun the Ash and the Alder; for the Ash is an ogre, – you will know him by his thick fingers; and the Alder will smother you with her web of hair, if you let her near you at night.”

— George MacDonald

238. “When some pray, they lift heavy thoughts from the ground, only to drop them on it again; others send up their prayers in living shapes, this or that, the nearest likeness to each. All live things were thoughts to begin with, and are fit therefore to be used by those that think. When one says to the great Thinker: – ‘Here is one of thy thoughts: I am thinking it now!’ that is a prayer – a word to the big heart from one of its own little hearts.”

— George MacDonald

239. “Death alone from death can save. Love is death, and so is brave – Love can fill the deepest grave. Love loves on beneath the wave.”

— George MacDonald

240. “The ideal is the only absolute real; and it must become the real in the individual life as well, however impossible they may count it who never tried it.”

— George MacDonald

241. “Let us comfort ourselves in the thought of the Father and the Son. So long as there dwells harmony, so long as the Son loves the Father with all the love the Father can welcome, all is well with the little ones.”

— George MacDonald

242. “Ignorance is no reason with a fool for holding his tongue.”

— George MacDonald

243. “Oh the folly of any mind that would explain God before obeying Him! That would map out the character of God instead of crying, Lord, what wouldst thou have me to do?”

— George MacDonald

244. “Alas! how easily things go wrong!”

— George MacDonald

245. “A fairytale is not an allegory. There may be allegory in it, but it is not an allegory.”

— George MacDonald

246. “The possession of wealth is, as it were, prepayment, and involves an obligation of honor to the doing of correspondent work.”

— George MacDonald

247. “It needs brains to be a real fool.”

— George MacDonald

248. “Love is the opener as well as closer of eyes.”

— George MacDonald

249. “All haste implies weakness.”

— George MacDonald

250. “I must accept my fate! But how was life to be lived in a world of which I had all the laws to learn? There would, however, be adventure! that held consolation; and whether I found my way home or not, I should at least have the rare advantage of knowing two worlds!”

— George MacDonald