Top 500 George MacDonald Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “Because we easily imagine ourselves in want, we imagine God ready to forsake us.”

— George MacDonald

402. “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

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

— George MacDonald

404. “Love makes all safe.”

— George MacDonald

405. “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

406. “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

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

409. “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

410. “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

411. “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

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

414. “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

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

417. “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

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

— George MacDonald

419. “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

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

— George MacDonald

421. “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

422. “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

423. “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

424. “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

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

— George MacDonald

426. “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

427. “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

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

— George MacDonald

429. “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

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

432. “Religion is life essential.”

— George MacDonald

433. “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

434. “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

435. “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

436. “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

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

— George MacDonald

438. “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

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

— George MacDonald

440. “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

441. “If any one judge it hard that men should be made with ambitions to whose objects they can never attain, I answer, ambition is but the evil shadow of aspiration; and no man ever followed the truth, which is the one path of aspiration, and in the end complained that he had been made this way or that.”

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

443. “As soon as a man begins to make excuses, the time has come when he might be doing that from which he excuses himself.”

— George MacDonald

444. “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

445. “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

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

448. “At length she gently pushed me away, and with the words, “Go, my son, and do something worth doing,” turned back, and, entering the cottage, closed the door behind her. I felt very desolate as I went. CHAPTER.”

— George MacDonald

449. “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

450. “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