Top 500 George MacDonald Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “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

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

— George MacDonald

303. “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

304. “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

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

307. “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

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

311. “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

312. “Moderation is the basis of justice.”

— George MacDonald

313. “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

314. “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

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

318. “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

319. “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

320. “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

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

323. “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

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

— George MacDonald

325. “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

326. “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

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

— George MacDonald

328. “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

329. “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

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

— George MacDonald

331. “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

332. “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

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

335. “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

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

341. “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

342. “Self will come to life even in the slaying of self; but there is ever something deeper and stronger than it, which will emerge at last from the unknown abysses of the soul: will it be as a solemn gloom, burning with eyes? or a clear morning after the rain? or a smiling child, that finds itself nowhere, and everywhere?”

— George MacDonald

343. “There are many, doubtless, who have not yet got farther in love than their own family; but there are others who have learned that for the true heart there is neither Frenchman nor Englishman, neither Jew nor Greek, neither white nor black – only the sons and daughters of God, only the brothers and sisters of the one elder brother.”

— George MacDonald

344. “But in the meantime you must be content, I say, to be misunderstood for a while. We are all very anxious to be understood, and it is very hard not to be.”

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

349. “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

350. “The word doctrine, as used in the Bible, means teaching of duty, not theory.”

— George MacDonald