Top 500 George MacDonald Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 7 of 10

301. “You had better not open that door.”

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

303. “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

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

— George MacDonald

305. “I believe in fate, never in chance.”

— George MacDonald

306. “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

307. “Only a pure heart can understand, and a pure heart is one that sends out ready hands.”

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

310. “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

311. “It is a happy thing for us that this is really all we have to concern ourselves about – what to do next. No man can do the second thing. He can do the first.”

— George MacDonald

312. “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

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

— George MacDonald

314. “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

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

317. “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

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

321. “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

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

— George MacDonald

323. “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

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

— George MacDonald

325. “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

326. “Come, come to Him who made thy heart; Come weary and oppressed; To come to Jesus is thy part; His part, to give thee rest.”

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

328. “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

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

— George MacDonald

330. “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

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

335. “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

336. “Self-loathing is not sorrow. Yet it is good, for it marks a step in the way home, and in the father’s arms the prodigal forgets the self he abominates. Once with his father, he is to himself of no more account.”

— George MacDonald

337. “But it is not the rich person only who is under the domination of things; they too are slaves who, having no money, are unhappy from the lack of it.”

— George MacDonald

338. “Love makes all safe.”

— George MacDonald

339. “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

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

342. “Moderation is the basis of justice.”

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

344. “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

345. “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

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

— George MacDonald

347. “I awoke one morning with the usual perplexity of mind which accompanies the return of consciousness.”

— George MacDonald

348. “God is just like Jesus – exactly like him!”

— George MacDonald

349. “This is in the very nature of things: obedience alone places a man in the position in which he can see so as to judge that which is above him.”

— George MacDonald

350. “Sweet sounds can go where kisses may not enter.”

— George MacDonald