Top 500 George MacDonald Quotes (2026 Update)
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301. “Every one, as you ought to know, has a beast-self – and a bird-self, and a stupid fish-self, ay, and a creeping serpent-self too – which it takes a deal of crushing to kill! In truth he has also a tree-self and a crystal-self, and I don’t know how many selves more – all to get into harmony. You can tell what sort a man is by his creature that comes oftenest to the front.”

— George MacDonald

302. “Alas! how easily things go wrong!”

— George MacDonald

303. “Heed not thy feeling. Do thy work.”

— George MacDonald

304. “Humility is essential greatness, the inside of grandeur.”

— George MacDonald

305. “Let us comfort ourselves in the thought of the Father and the Son. So long as there dwells harmony, so long as the Son loves the Father with all the love the Father can welcome, all is well with the little ones.”

— George MacDonald

306. “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

307. “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

308. “I do not say we are called upon to dispute and defend the truth with logic and argument, but we are called upon to show by our lives that we stand on the side of truth. But when i say truth, I do not mean opinion. To treat opinion as if that were truth is grievously to wrong the truth. The soul that loves the truth and tries to be true will know when to speak and when to be silent.”

— George MacDonald

309. “The possession of wealth is, as it were, prepayment, and involves an obligation of honor to the doing of correspondent work.”

— George MacDonald

310. “It needs brains to be a real fool.”

— George MacDonald

311. “Never wait for fitter time or place to talk to Him. To wait till thou go to church or to thy closet is to make Him wait. He will listen as thou walkest.”

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

313. “Ignorance is no reason with a fool for holding his tongue.”

— George MacDonald

314. “All haste implies weakness.”

— George MacDonald

315. “I must accept my fate! But how was life to be lived in a world of which I had all the laws to learn? There would, however, be adventure! that held consolation; and whether I found my way home or not, I should at least have the rare advantage of knowing two worlds!”

— George MacDonald

316. “Oh the folly of any mind that would explain God before obeying Him! That would map out the character of God instead of crying, Lord, what wouldst thou have me to do?”

— George MacDonald

317. “A fairytale is not an allegory. There may be allegory in it, but it is not an allegory.”

— George MacDonald

318. “I rose as from the death that wipes out the sadness of life, and then dies itself in the new morrow.”

— George MacDonald

319. “A man is in bondage to whatever he cannot part with that is less than himself.”

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

321. “Love is the opener as well as closer of eyes.”

— George MacDonald

322. “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

323. “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

324. “Not to be believed does not at all agree with princesses: for a real princess cannot tell a lie. So all the afternoon she did not speak a word. Only when the nurse spoke to her, she answered her, for a real princess is never rude – even when she does well to be offended.”

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

326. “And her life will perhaps be the richer, for holding now within it the memory of what came, but could not stay.”

— George MacDonald

327. “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

328. “Will is not unfrequently weakness.”

— George MacDonald

329. “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

330. “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

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

— George MacDonald

332. “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

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

336. “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

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

339. “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

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

343. “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

344. “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

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

— George MacDonald

346. “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

347. “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

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

— George MacDonald

349. “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

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

— George MacDonald