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

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

354. “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

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

— George MacDonald

356. “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

357. “Religion is life essential.”

— George MacDonald

358. “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

359. “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

360. “There had been a time in Godfrey’s life when, had she stood before him in all her splendor, he would have turned from her, because of her history, with a sad disgust. Was he less pure now? He was more pure, for he was humbler.”

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

364. “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

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

367. “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

368. “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

369. “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

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

372. “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

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

— George MacDonald

374. “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

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

— George MacDonald

376. “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

377. “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

378. “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

379. “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

380. “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

381. “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

382. “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

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

— George MacDonald

384. “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

385. “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

386. “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

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

— George MacDonald

388. “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

389. “Either there is a God, and that God the perfect heart of truth and loveliness, or all poetry and art is but an unsown, unplanted, rootless flower, crowning a somewhat symmetrical heap of stones.”

— George MacDonald

390. “Is it not time I lost a few things when I care for them so unreasonably? This losing of things is of the mercy of God: It comes to teach us to let them go.”

— George MacDonald

391. “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

392. “He never married. But he wrote a good book.”

— George MacDonald

393. “Now and then, when I look round on my books, they seem to waver as if a wind rippled their solid mass, and another world were about to break through.”

— George MacDonald

394. “We profess to think Jesus the grandest and most glorious of men, yet hardly care to be like him. When we are offered his Spirit, that is, his very nature within us, for the asking, we will hardly take the trouble to ask for it.”

— George MacDonald

395. “She could now be sad without losing a jot of hope. Nay, rather, the least approach of sadness would begin at once to wake her hope. She regretted nothing that had come, nothing that had gone. She believed more and more that not anything worth having is ever lost; that even the most evanescent shades of feeling are safe for those who grow after their true nature, toward that for which they were made – in other and higher words, after the will of God.”

— George MacDonald

396. “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

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

400. “For the absence of human companionship in bestial forms; the loss of green fields, free to her as to the winds of heaven, and of country sounds and odours; and an almost constant sense of oppression from the propinquity of one or another whom she had cause to fear, were speedily working sad effects upon her.”

— George MacDonald