Top 500 George MacDonald Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “Love makes all safe.”

— George MacDonald

354. “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

355. “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

356. “Which of us is other than a secret to all but God!”

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

358. “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

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

361. “He was in fact a poet without words, the more absorbed and endangered, that the springing waters were dammed back in his soul, where, finding no utterance, they grew, and swelled, and undermined.”

— George MacDonald

362. “I lost myself, and if I hadn’t found the beautiful lady, I should never have found myself.”

— George MacDonald

363. “There is no forgetting of ourselves but in the finding of our deeper, our true self – God’s idea of us when he devised us – the Christ in us. Nothing but that self can displace the false, greedy, whining self, of which, most of us are so fond and proud. And that self no man can find for himself; seeing of himself he does not even know what to search for. “But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God.”

— George MacDonald

364. “The sin he dwells in, the sin he will not come out of, is the sole ruin of a man. His present, his live sins, those pervading his thoughts and ruling his conduct; the sins he keeps doing, and will not give up; the sins he is called to abandon, and clings to; the same sins which are the cause of his misery, though he may not know it, these are they for which he is even now condemned.”

— George MacDonald

365. “I tell you, there are more worlds, and more doors to them, than you will think of in many years!”

— George MacDonald

366. “One day it had rained before sunrise, and a soft spring wind had been blowing ever since, a soothing and persuading wind, that seemed to draw out the buds from the secret places of the dry twigs, and whisper to the roots of the rose-trees that their flowers would be wanted by and by.”

— George MacDonald

367. “Religion is life essential.”

— George MacDonald

368. “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

369. “Some dreams, some poems, some musical phrases, some pictures, wake feelings such as one never had before, new in colour and form – spiritual sensations, as it were, hitherto unproved.”

— George MacDonald

370. “There is but one thing that can free a man from superstition, and that is belief. All history proves it. The most sceptical have ever been the most credulous.”

— George MacDonald

371. “But then to every lover of the truth, a true thing is dearer because it is old-fashioned, and dearer because it is new-fashioned: and true music, like true love, like all truth, laughs at the god Fashion, because it knows him to be but an ape.”

— George MacDonald

372. “For the greatest fool and rascal in creation there is yet a worse condition; and that is, not to know it, but to think himself a respectable man.”

— George MacDonald

373. “He had fallen in love with her almost, already; for her anger made her more charming than any one else had ever beheld her; and, as far as he could see, which certainly was not far, she had not a single fault about her, except, of course, that she had not any gravity. No prince, however, would judge of a princess by weight.”

— George MacDonald

374. “Could you not give me some sign, or tell me something about you that never changes, or some other way to know you, or thing to know you by?” – “No, Curdie: that would be to keep you from knowing me. You must know me in quite another way from that. It would not be the least use to you or me either if I were to make you know me in that way. It would be but to know the sign of me – not to know me myself.”

— George MacDonald

375. “There can hardly be a plainer proof of the lowness of our nature, until we have laid hold of the higher nature that belongs to us by birthright, than this, that even a just anger tends to make us unjust and unkind.”

— George MacDonald

376. “If you will not determine to be pure, you will grow more and more impure.”

— George MacDonald

377. “Remember, then, that whoever does not mean good is always in danger of harm. But I try to give everybody fair play, and those that are in the wrong are in far more need of it always than those who are in the right: they can afford to do without it.”

— George MacDonald

378. “What is called a good conscience is often but a dull one that gives no trouble when it ought to bark loudest;.”

— George MacDonald

379. “From the neglect of a real duty, she became the slave of a false one.”

— George MacDonald

380. “God never gave man a thing to do concerning which it were irreverent to ponder how the Son of God would have done it.”

— George MacDonald

381. “That which is within a man, not that which lies beyond his vision, is the main factor in what is about to befall him:.”

— George MacDonald

382. “In short, a man must be set free from the sin he is, which makes him do the sin he does .”

— George MacDonald

383. “Life and religion are one, or neither is any thing.”

— George MacDonald

384. “Those that hope little cannot grow much.”

— George MacDonald

385. “Of all teachings that which presents a far distant God is the nearest to absurdity. Either there is none, or he is nearer to every one of us than our nearest consciousness of self. An unapproachable divinity is the veriest of monsters, the most horrible of human imaginations.”

— George MacDonald

386. “The boy should enclose and keep, as his life, the old child at the heart of him, and never let it go. He must still, to be a right man, be his mother’s darling, and more, his father’s pride, and more. The child is not meant to die, but to be forever fresh born.”

— George MacDonald

387. “Ah, what is it we send up thither, where our thoughts are either a dissonance or a sweetness and a grace?”

— George MacDonald

388. “When a man dreams his own dream, he is the sport of his dream; when Another gives it him, that Other is able to fulfill it.”

— George MacDonald

389. “Thou art beautiful because God created thee, but thou art a slave to sin... wickedness has made you ugly.”

— George MacDonald

390. “There is no slave but the creature that wills against its Creator.”

— George MacDonald

391. “God chooses that men should be tried, but let a man beware of tempting his neighbor.”

— George MacDonald

392. “Every truth must be accompanied by some corresponding act.”

— George MacDonald

393. “Who knows what harm may be done to a man by hurrying a spiritual process in him?”

— George MacDonald

394. “Show me the person ready to step from any, let it be the narrowest, sect of Christian Pharisees into a freer and holier air, and I shall look to find in that person the one of that sect who, in the midst of its darkness and selfish worldliness, mistaken for holiness, has been living a life more obedient than the rest.”

— George MacDonald

395. “Verily the God that knows how not to reveal himself, must also know how best to reveal himself! If there be a calling child, there must be an answering Father!”

— George MacDonald

396. “Think not to make me afraid, for I fear nothing in the universe but that which I love the best. – I spake of the eyes of the Lord Jesus. – Then.”

— George MacDonald

397. “If you know you are yourself, you know that you are not somebody else; but do you know that you are yourself? Are you sure you are not your own father? – or, excuse me, your own fool? – Who are you, pray?” I.”

— George MacDonald

398. “Sir Galahad and Sir Percivale rencountered in the depths of a great forest. Now, Sir Galahad was dight all in harness of silver, clear and shining; the which is a delight to look upon, but full hasty to tarnish, and withouten the labour of a ready squire, uneath to be kept fair and clean. And yet withouten squire or page, Sir Galahad’s armour shone like the moon. And he rode a great white mare, whose bases and other housings were black, but all besprent with fair lilys of silver sheen.”

— George MacDonald

399. “There is an aching that is worse than any pain.”

— George MacDonald

400. “Many feelings are simply too good to last – using the phrase not in the unbelieving sense in which it is generally used, but to express the fact that intensity and endurance cannot coexist in the human frame. But the virtue of a mood depends by no means on its immediate presence. Like any other experience, it may be believed in, and, in its absence, which leaves the mind free to contemplate it, works even more good than its presence.”

— George MacDonald