Top 500 George MacDonald Quotes (2026 Update)
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201. “I need a God; and if there be none how did I come to need one?”

— George MacDonald

202. “To be kind neither hurts nor compromises.”

— George MacDonald

203. “I do not care to argue that I did not fall when Adam fell; for I have fallen many a time, and there is a shadow on my soul which I or another may call a curse; I cannot get rid of a something that always intrudes between my heart and the blue of every sky.”

— George MacDonald

204. “You ought to have principles of your own, Mr Walton.” “I hope I have. And one of them is, not to make mountains of molehills; for a molehill is not a mountain. A man ought to have too much to do in obeying his conscience and keeping his soul’s garments clean, to mind whether he wears black or white when telling his flock that God loves them, and that they will never be happy till they believe it.”

— George MacDonald

205. “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. Cometh white-robed Sorrow, stooping and wan, and flingeth wide the doors she may not enter. Almost we linger with Sorrow for very love.”

— George MacDonald

206. “He rebelled against the highest as if the highest were the lowest – as if the power that could create a heart for bliss, might gloat on its sufferings.”

— George MacDonald

207. “Where is the good of planning upon an “if?” To trust is to get ready, uncle says. Trust is better than foresight.”

— George MacDonald

208. “Never was there a more injurous mistake than to say it was thebusiness only of the clergy to care for souls.”

— George MacDonald

209. “We are not made for law, we are made for love.”

— George MacDonald

210. “Impossibilities “I thank thee, Lord, for forgiving me, but I prefer staying in the darkness: forgive me that too.” – “No; that cannot be. The one thing that cannot be forgiven is the sin of choosing to be evil, of refusing deliverance. It is impossible to forgive that. It would be to take part in it.”

— George MacDonald

211. “To be fit to receive his word implies being of his kind. No matter how his image may have been defaced in me: the thing defaced is his image, remains his defaced image – an image yet that can hear his word.”

— George MacDonald

212. “He had come to think that so long as a man wants to do right he may go where he can: when he can go no further, then it is not the way.”

— George MacDonald

213. “If a man keeps the law, I know he is a lover of his neighbour. But he is not a lover because he keeps the law: he keeps the law because he is a lover. No heart will be content with the law for love. The law cannot fulfil love.”

— George MacDonald

214. “Better to sit at the waters’ birth, Than a sea of waves to win; To live in the love that floweth forth, Than the love that cometh in. Be thy heart a well of love, my child, Flowing, and free, and sure; For a cistern of love, though undefiled, Keeps not the spirit pure.”

— George MacDonald

215. “No man knows it when he is making an idiot of himself.”

— George MacDonald

216. “I knew now, that it is by loving, and not by being loved, that one can come nearest the soul of another; yea, that, where two love, it is the loving of each other, and not the being loved by each other, that originates and perfects and assures their blessedness.”

— George MacDonald

217. “The truth Fear tells is not much better than her lies.”

— George MacDonald

218. “These love self, not life, and self is but the shadow of life. When it is taken for life itself, and set as the man’s center, it becomes a live death in the man, a devil he worships as his God: the worm of the death eternal he clasps to his bosom as his one joy.”

— George MacDonald

219. “Hell The one principle of hell is – “I am my own!”

— George MacDonald

220. “Do you think Jesus came to deliver us from the punishment of our sins? He would not have moved a step for that. The terrible thing is to be bad, and all punishment is to help to deliver us from it, nor will it cease till we have given up being bad. God will have us good; and Jesus works out the will of his father.”

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

224. “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

225. “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

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

229. “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

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

232. “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

233. “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

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

— George MacDonald

235. “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

236. “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

237. “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

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

— George MacDonald

239. “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

240. “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

241. “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

242. “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

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

— George MacDonald

244. “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

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

— George MacDonald

246. “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

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

— George MacDonald

248. “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

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

— George MacDonald

250. “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