Top 500 George MacDonald Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “A man is in bondage to whatever he cannot part with that is less than himself.”

— George MacDonald

252. “No; I’m not bad. But sometimes beautiful things grow bad by doing bad, and it takes some time for their badness to spoil their beauty. So little boys may be mistaken if they go after things because they beautiful.”

— George MacDonald

253. “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

254. “There is a childhood into which we have to grow, just as there is a childhood which we must leave behind; a childlikeness which is the highest gain of humanity, and a childishness from which but few of those who are counted the wisest among men, have freed themselves in their imagined progress towards the reality of things.”

— George MacDonald

255. “Ah, let a man beware, when his wishes, fulfilled, rain down upon him, and his happiness is unbounded.”

— George MacDonald

256. “Complaint against God is far nearer to God than indifference about Him.”

— George MacDonald

257. “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

258. “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

259. “The secret of your own heart you can never know; but you can know Him who knows its secret.”

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

261. “I say again, if I cannot draw a horse, I will not write THIS IS A HORSE under what I foolishly meant for one.”

— George MacDonald

262. “But we believe – nay, Lord we only hope, That one day we shall thank thee perfectly For pain and hope and all that led or drove Us back into the bosom of thy love.”

— George MacDonald

263. “But I begin to think the chief difficulty in writing a book must be to keep out what does not belong to it.”

— George MacDonald

264. “People must believe what they can, and those who believe more must not be hard upon those who believe less. I doubt if you would have believed it all yourself if you hadn’t seen some of it.”

— George MacDonald

265. “If both Church and fairy-tale belong to humanity, they may occasionally cross circles, without injury to either.”

— George MacDonald

266. “I do not myself believe there is any misfortune. What men call such is merely the shadowside of a good.”

— George MacDonald

267. “As to the pure all things are pure, so the common mind sees far more vulgarity in others than the mind developed in genuine refinement.”

— George MacDonald

268. “You can’t live on amusement. It is the froth on water – an inch deep and then the mud.”

— George MacDonald

269. “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.”

— George MacDonald

270. “Jesus tells us we must leave the self altogether-yield it, deny it, refuse it, lose it. Thus only shall we save it... The self is given us that we may sacrifice it. It is ours in order that we, like Christ, may have something to offer- not that we should torment it, but that we should deny it; not that we should cross it, but that we should abandon it utterly.”

— George MacDonald

271. “But it is no use trying to account for things in Fairy Land; and one who travels there soon learns to forget the very idea of doing so, and takes everything as it comes; like a child, who, being in a chronic condition of wonder, is surprised at nothing.”

— George MacDonald

272. “The purposes of God point to one simple end-that we should be as he is, think the same thoughts, mean the same things, possess the same blessedness.”

— George MacDonald

273. “Contempt is murder committed by the intellect, as hatred is murder committed by the heart.”

— George MacDonald

274. “Every soul has a landscape that changes with the wind that sweeps the sky, with the clouds that return after its rain.”

— George MacDonald

275. “To say on the authority of the Bible that God does a thing no honourable man would do, is to lie against God; to say that it is therefore right, is to lie against the very spirit of God.”

— George MacDonald

276. “God will not take shelter behind a jugglery of logic or metaphysics. He is neither a schoolman nor theologian, but our Father in Heaven.”

— George MacDonald

277. “You would not think any duty small, If you yourself were great.”

— George MacDonald

278. “Whose work is it but your own to open your eyes?”

— George MacDonald

279. “The question is not at present, however, of removing mountains, a thing that will one day be simple to us, but of waking and rising from the dead now.”

— George MacDonald

280. “These are they who gather grace, as the mountain-tops the snow, to send down rivers of water to their fellows.”

— George MacDonald

281. “But when we are following the light, even its extinction is a guide.”

— George MacDonald

282. “For this, deep waters whelm the fruitful lea, Wars ravage, famine wastes, plague withers, nor Shall cease till men have chosen the better part.”

— George MacDonald

283. “I believe in fate, never in chance.”

— George MacDonald

284. “Above all things, I delight in listening to stories, and sometimes in telling them.”

— George MacDonald

285. “If we will but let our God and Father work His will with us, there can be no limit to His enlargement of our existence.”

— George MacDonald

286. “One thing is clear to me, that no indulgence of passion destroys the spiritual nature so much as respectable selfishness.”

— George MacDonald

287. “But there are victories far worse than defeats; and to overcome an angel too gentle to put out all his strength, and ride away in triumph on the back of a devil, is one of the poorest.”

— George MacDonald

288. “To receive honestly is the best thanks for a good thing.”

— George MacDonald

289. “The Root of All Rebellion: It is because we are not near enough to Thee to partake of thy liberty that we want a liberty of our own different from thine.”

— George MacDonald

290. “I do not write for children, but for the childlike, whether of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.”

— George MacDonald

291. “You had better not open that door.”

— George MacDonald

292. “I will be glad!” he said, “even in the midst of a world of rain! – Yet again, why should the mere look of a rainy night make it needful for me to assert joy and resist sadness? – After all, what is there to be merry about, in this best of possible worlds? I like going to the theatre; but if I don’t like the play, am I to be pleased all the same, sit it out with smiles, and applaud at the end? – I don’t see what there is to make me miserable, and I don’t see what there is to make me glad!”

— George MacDonald

293. “Home is ever so far away in the palm of your hand, and how to get there it is of no use to tell you. But you will get there; you must get there; you have to get there. Everybody who is not at home, has to go home. You thought you were at home where I found you: if that had been your home, you could not have left it. Nobody can leave home.”

— George MacDonald

294. “How many things are there in the world in which the wisest of us can ill descry the hand of God! Who not knowing could read the lily in its bulb, the great oak in the pebble-like acorn? God’s beginnings do not look like his endings, but they are like; the oak is in the acorn, though we cannot see it.”

— George MacDonald

295. “Light-leaved acacias, by the door, Stood up in balmy air, Clusters of blossomed moonlight bore, And breathed a perfume rare.”

— George MacDonald

296. “No man can make haste to be rich without going against the will of God, in which case it is the one frightful thing to be successful.”

— George MacDonald

297. “What I would say is this, that the light is not blinding because God would hide, but because the truth is too glorious for our vision.”

— George MacDonald

298. “It is a happy thing for us that this is really all we have to concern ourselves about – what to do next. No man can do the second thing. He can do the first.”

— George MacDonald

299. “To judge religion we must have it – not stare at it from the bottom of a seemingly interminable ladder.”

— George MacDonald

300. “It is to the man who is trying to live, to the man who is obedient to the word of the Master, that the word of the Master unfolds itself.”

— George MacDonald