Top 500 George MacDonald Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “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

252. “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

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

— George MacDonald

254. “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

255. “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

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

260. “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

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

— George MacDonald

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

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. “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

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

— George MacDonald

270. “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

271. “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

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

— George MacDonald

273. “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

274. “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

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. “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

277. “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

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

— George MacDonald

279. “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

280. “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

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

284. “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

285. “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

286. “Blessed be the true life that the pauses between its throbs are not death!”

— George MacDonald

287. “Until a man has love, it is well he should have fear. So long as there are wild beasts about, it is better to be afraid than secure.”

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

289. “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

290. “As I said to Speedicut, it’s hell in the diplomatic.”

— George MacDonald

291. “My teacher taught me that the way for me to help others was not to tell them their duty, but myself to learn of Him who bore our griefs and carried our sorrows. As.”

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

293. “And when heart and head go together, nothing can stand before them.”

— George MacDonald

294. “I wondered over again for the hundredth time what could be the principle which, in the wildest, most lawless, fantastically chaotic, apparently capricious work of Nature, always kept it beautiful.”

— George MacDonald

295. “The righteousness that makes a man visit the sins of a father upon his children, is the righteousness of a devil, not the righteousness of God. When God visits the sins of a father on his children, it is to deliver the child from his own sins through yielding to inherited temptation.”

— George MacDonald

296. “Knowlegde no doubt made bad people worse, but it must make good people better!”

— George MacDonald

297. “I begin indeed to fear that I have undertaken an impossibility, undertaken to tell what I cannot tell because no speech at my command will fit the forms in my mind.”

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

299. “It’s right to trust in God; but, if you don’t stand to your halliards your craft’ll miss stays, and your faith’ll be blown out of the bolt-ropes in the turn of a marlinspike.”

— George MacDonald

300. “Do you ask, “What is faith in Him?” I answer, The leaving of your way, your objects, your self, and the taking of His and Him; the leaving of your trust in men, in money, in opinion, in character, in atonement itself, and doing as He tells you. I can find no words strong enough to serve for the weight of this obedience.”

— George MacDonald