Top 500 George MacDonald Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

354. “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

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

— George MacDonald

356. “For this, deep waters whelm the fruitful lea, Wars ravage, famine wastes, plague withers, nor Shall cease till men have chosen the better part.”

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

358. “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

359. “Until a man has love, it is well he should have fear. So long as there are wild beasts about, it is better to be afraid than secure.”

— George MacDonald

360. “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

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

— George MacDonald

362. “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

363. “Jesus tells us we must leave the self altogether-yield it, deny it, refuse it, lose it. Thus only shall we save it... The self is given us that we may sacrifice it. It is ours in order that we, like Christ, may have something to offer- not that we should torment it, but that we should deny it; not that we should cross it, but that we should abandon it utterly.”

— George MacDonald

364. “I will be glad!” he said, “even in the midst of a world of rain! – Yet again, why should the mere look of a rainy night make it needful for me to assert joy and resist sadness? – After all, what is there to be merry about, in this best of possible worlds? I like going to the theatre; but if I don’t like the play, am I to be pleased all the same, sit it out with smiles, and applaud at the end? – I don’t see what there is to make me miserable, and I don’t see what there is to make me glad!”

— George MacDonald

365. “But I begin to think the chief difficulty in writing a book must be to keep out what does not belong to it.”

— George MacDonald

366. “Light-leaved acacias, by the door, Stood up in balmy air, Clusters of blossomed moonlight bore, And breathed a perfume rare.”

— George MacDonald

367. “Every soul has a landscape that changes with the wind that sweeps the sky, with the clouds that return after its rain.”

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

373. “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

374. “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

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

375. “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

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

— George MacDonald

377. “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

378. “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

379. “Above all things, I delight in listening to stories, and sometimes in telling them.”

— George MacDonald

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

380. “Never tell a child ‘you have a soul. Teach him, you are a soul; you have a body.’ As we learn to think of things always in this order, that the body is but the temporary clothing of the soul, our views of death and the unbefittingness of customary mourning will approximate to those of Friends of earlier generations.”

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

382. “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

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

— George MacDonald

384. “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

385. “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

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

— George MacDonald

387. “Moderation is the basis of justice.”

— George MacDonald

388. “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

389. “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

390. “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

391. “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

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

— George MacDonald

393. “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

394. “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

395. “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

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

— George MacDonald

397. “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

398. “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

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald