Top 500 George MacDonald Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “We are all very anxious to be understood, and it is very hard not to be. But there is one thing much more necessary.′ ‘What is that, grandmother?’ ‘To understand other people.”

— George MacDonald

252. “My prayers, my God, flow from what I am not; I think thy answers make me what I am.”

— George MacDonald

253. “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

254. “If we do not die to ourselves, we cannot live to God, andhe that does not live to God, is dead.”

— George MacDonald

255. “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

256. “You will be dead so long as you refuse to die.”

— George MacDonald

257. “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

258. “Annihilation itself is no death to evil. Only good where evil was, is evil dead. An evil thing must live with its evil until it chooses to be good. That alone is the slaying of evil.”

— George MacDonald

259. “Ere long, I learned that it was not myself, but only my shadow, that I had lost. I learned that it is better, a thousand-fold, for a proud man to fall and be humbled, than to hold up his head in his pride and fancied innocence. I learned that he that will be a hero, will barely be a man; that he that will be nothing but a doer of his work, is sure of his manhood.”

— George MacDonald

260. “God hides nothing. His very work from the beginning is revelation – a casting aside of veil after veil, a showing unto men of truth after truth. On and on from fact Divine He advances, until at length in His Son Jesus He unveils His very face.”

— George MacDonald

261. “There is no cheating in nature and the simple unsought feelings of the soul. There must be a truth involved in it, though we may but in part lay hold of the meaning.”

— George MacDonald

262. “No story ever really ends, and I think I know why.”

— George MacDonald

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263. “That man is perfect in faith who can come to God in the utter dearth of his feelings and desires, without a glow or an aspiration, with the weight of low thoughts, failures, neglects, and wandering forgetfulness, and say to Him, “Thou art my refuge.”

— George MacDonald

264. “A man must learn to love his children, not because they are his, but because they are children, else his love will be scarcely a better thing at last than the party-spirit of the faithful politician.”

— George MacDonald

265. “But words are vain; reject them all – They utter but a feeble part: Hear thou the depths from which they call, The voiceless longing of my heart.”

— George MacDonald

266. “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

267. “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

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

— George MacDonald

269. “Man’s rank is his power to uplift.”

— George MacDonald

270. “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

271. “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

272. “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

273. “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

274. “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

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

— George MacDonald

276. “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

277. “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

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

— George MacDonald

279. “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

280. “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

281. “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

282. “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

283. “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

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

— George MacDonald

285. “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

286. “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

287. “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

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

— George MacDonald

289. “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

290. “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

291. “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

292. “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

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

— George MacDonald

294. “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

295. “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

296. “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

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

— George MacDonald

298. “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

299. “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

300. “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