Top 500 George MacDonald Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 5 of 10

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

— George MacDonald

202. “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

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

— George MacDonald

204. “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

205. “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

206. “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

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

209. “Jesus Christ is the very God I want. I want a father like him, like the father of him who came as our big brother to take us home. No other than the God exactly like Christ can be the true God. Cast away from you that doctrine of devils, that Jesus died to save us from our father. There is no safety, no good of any kind but with the father, his father and our father, his God and our God.”

— George MacDonald

210. “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

211. “My prayers, my God, flow from what I am not; I think thy answers make me what I am. Like weary waves thought follows upon thought, But the still depth beneath is all thine own, And there thou mov’st in paths to us unknown.”

— George MacDonald

212. “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

213. “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

214. “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

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

— George MacDonald

216. “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

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

— George MacDonald

218. “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

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

— George MacDonald

220. “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

221. “I don’t know how to thank you.? Then I will tell you. There is only one way I care for. Do better, and grow better, and be better.”

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

224. “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

225. “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

226. “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

227. “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

228. “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

229. “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

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

— George MacDonald

231. “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

232. “I rose as from the death that wipes out the sadness of life, and then dies itself in the new morrow.”

— George MacDonald

233. “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

234. “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

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

— George MacDonald

236. “All haste implies weakness.”

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

238. “Not to be believed does not at all agree with princesses: for a real princess cannot tell a lie. So all the afternoon she did not speak a word. Only when the nurse spoke to her, she answered her, for a real princess is never rude – even when she does well to be offended.”

— George MacDonald

239. “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

240. “A man is in bondage to whatever he cannot part with that is less than himself.”

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

— George MacDonald

243. “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

244. “And her life will perhaps be the richer, for holding now within it the memory of what came, but could not stay.”

— George MacDonald

245. “Will is not unfrequently weakness.”

— George MacDonald

246. “What a man is lies as certainly upon his countenance as in his heart, though none of his acquaintances may be able to read it. The very intercourse with him may have rendered it more difficult.”

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

248. “People are so ready to think themselves changed when it is only their mood that is changed. Those who are good-tempered because it is a fine day will be ill-tempered when it rains: their selves are just the same both days; only in one case the fine weather has got into them, in the other the rainy.”

— George MacDonald

249. “Never wait for fitter time or place to talk to Him. To wait till thou go to church or to thy closet is to make Him wait. He will listen as thou walkest.”

— George MacDonald

250. “There are thousands willing to do great things for one willing to do a small thing.”

— George MacDonald