Top 500 George MacDonald Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

304. “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

305. “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

306. “If there be music in my reader, I would gladly wake it.”

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

308. “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

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

— George MacDonald

310. “Moderation is the basis of justice.”

— George MacDonald

311. “We have to do with God, to whom no one can look without the need of being good waking up in his heart; to think about God is to begin to be good.”

— George MacDonald

312. “It was evening. The sun was below the horizon; but his rosy beams yet illuminated a feathery cloud, that floated high above the world. I arose, I reached the cloud; and, throwing myself upon it, floated with it in sight of the sinking sun. He sank, and the cloud grew gray; but the grayness touched not my heart. It carried its rose-hue within; for now I could love without needing to be loved again.”

— George MacDonald

313. “For I had long thought that the way to make indifferent things bad, was for good people not to do them.”

— George MacDonald

314. “To will not from self, but with the Eternal, is to live.”

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

316. “They will pressure you into doing things that may be unsafe, use your good judgment, and remember, ‘I would rather be laughed at, than cried for.’”

— George MacDonald

317. “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

318. “The man who grounds his action on another’s cowardice, is essentially a coward himself.”

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

320. “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

321. “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

322. “We should teach our children to think no more of their bodies when dead than they do of their hair when cut off, or of their old clothes when they have done with them.”

— George MacDonald

323. “The doing of things from duty is but a stage on the road to the kingdom of truth and love.”

— George MacDonald

324. “Alas! this time is never the time for self-denial, it is always the next time. Abstinence is so much more pleasant to contemplate upon the other side of indulgence.”

— George MacDonald

325. “But there is no veil like light – no adamantine armor against hurt like the truth.”

— George MacDonald

326. “There is no strength in unbelief. Even the unbelief of what is false is no source of might. It is the truth shining from behind that gives the strength to disbelieve.”

— George MacDonald

327. “It is a great privilege to be poor, Peter. You must not mistake, however, and imagine it a virtue; it is but a privilege, and one also that may be terribly misused.”

— George MacDonald

328. “To be humbly ashamed is to be plunged in the cleansing bath of truth.”

— George MacDonald

329. “Difficulty adds to result, as the ramming of powder sends the bullet the further.”

— George MacDonald

330. “God is just!′ said a carping theologian to me the other day. ‘Yes,’ I answered, ’and he cannot be pleased that you should call that justice which is injustice, and attribute it to him!”

— George MacDonald

331. “It is like his Father, too, not to withhold good wine because men abuse it. Enforced virtue is unworthy of the name. That men may rise above temptation, it is needful that they should have temptation. It is the will of him who makes the grapes and the wine.”

— George MacDonald

332. “Somehow, I can’t say how, it tells me that all is right; that it is coming to swallow up all cries.”

— George MacDonald

333. “By all means rid yourself of an impoverished faith.”

— George MacDonald

334. “Because we easily imagine ourselves in want, we imagine God ready to forsake us.”

— George MacDonald

335. “It was now dark enough for me to see that every flower was shining with a light of its own.”

— George MacDonald

336. “Not only then has each man his individual relation to God, but each man has his peculiar relation to God.”

— George MacDonald

337. “The region of the senses is the unbelieving part of the human soul.”

— George MacDonald

338. “There is little hope of the repentance and redemption of certain some until they have committed one or another of the many wrong things of which they are daily, through a course of unrestrained selfishness, becoming more and more capable.”

— George MacDonald

339. “There is hardly a limit to the knowledge and sympathy a man may have in respect of the finest things, and yet be a fool. Sympathy is not harmony. A man may be a poet even, and speak with the tongue of an angel, and yet be a very bad fool.”

— George MacDonald

340. “The only way to come to know where you are is to begin to make yourself at home.”

— George MacDonald

341. “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.”

— George MacDonald

342. “A condition which of declension would indicate a devil, may of growth indicate a saint.”

— George MacDonald

343. “Endurance must conquer, where force could not reach.”

— George MacDonald

344. “There is endless room for rebellion against ourselves.”

— George MacDonald

345. “No one is likely to remember what is entirely uninteresting to him.”

— George MacDonald

346. “Common people, whether lords or shop-keepers, are slow to understand that possession, whether in the shape of birth or lands or money or intellect, is a small affair in the difference between men.”

— George MacDonald

347. “I’ve been thinking about it a great deal, and it seems to me that although one sixpence is as good as another sixpence, not twenty lambs would do instead of one sheep whose face you knew. Somehow, when once you’ve looked into anybody’s eyes, right deep down into them, I mean, nobody will do for that one anymore. Nobody, ever so beautiful or so good, will make up for that one going out of sight.”

— George MacDonald

348. “Books are but dead bodies to you, and a library nothing but a catacomb!”

— George MacDonald

349. “What would the Living One have me do?”

— George MacDonald

350. “If there be a God and one has never sought him, it will be small consolation to remember that one could not get proof of his existence.”

— George MacDonald