Top 500 George MacDonald Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “That’s all nonsense,” said Curdie. “I don’t know what you mean.” “Then if you don’t know what I mean, what right have you to call it nonsense?”

— George MacDonald

402. “What distressed me most – more even than my own folly – was the perplexing question, How can beauty and ugliness dwell so near?”

— George MacDonald

403. “There is no inborn longing that shall not be fulfilled. I think that is as certain as the forgiveness of sins.”

— George MacDonald

404. “What distressed me most – more even than my own folly – was the perplexing question – How can beauty and ugliness dwell so near? Even with her altered complexion and face of dislike; disenchanted of the belief that clung around her; known for a living, walking sepulcher, faithless, deluding, traitorous; I felt, notwithstanding all this, that she was beautiful. Upon this I pondered with undiminished perplexity...”

— George MacDonald

405. “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

406. “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

407. “Low-sunk life imagines itself weary of life, but it is death, not life, it is weary of.”

— George MacDonald

408. “I never heard of her loving anybody but herself, and I do not think she could have managed that if she had not somehow got used to herself.”

— George MacDonald

409. “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

410. “The world is a fine thing to save, but a wretch to worship.”

— George MacDonald

411. “It is the vile falsehood and miserable unreality of Christians, their faithlessness to their Master, their love of their own wretched sects, their worldliness and unchristianity, their talking and not doing, that has to answer, I suspect, for the greater part of our present atheism.”

— George MacDonald

412. “Suddenly pressing both hands on her heart, she fell to the ground, and the mist rose from her and melted in the air. I ran to her. But she began to writhe in such torture that I stood aghast. A moment more and her legs, hurrying from her body, sped away serpents. From her shoulders fled her arms as in terror, serpents also. Then something flew up from her like a bat, and when I looked again, she was gone.”

— George MacDonald

413. “All is loss that comes between us and Christ.”

— George MacDonald

414. “What can money do to console a man with a headache?”

— George MacDonald

415. “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

416. “What a hell of horror, I thought, to wander alone, a bare existence never going out of itself, never widening its life in another life, but, bound with the cords of its poor peculiarities, lying an eternal prisoner in the dungeon of its own being! I.”

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

419. “With a fiction it was the same. Mine was the whole story. For I took the place of the character who was most like myself, and his story was mine; until, grown weary with the life of years condensed in an hour, or arrived at my deathbed, or the end of the volume, I would awake, with a sudden bewilderment, to the consciousness of my present life, recognising the walls and roof around me, and finding I joyed or sorrowed only in a book.”

— George MacDonald

420. “The thing most alien to the true idea of humanity is the notion that our well-being lies in surpassing our fellows. We have to rise above ourselves, not above our neighbors, to take all the good of them not from them, and give them all our good in return. That which cannot be freely shared can never be possessed.”

— George MacDonald

421. “It is only by loving a thing that you can make it yours.”

— George MacDonald

422. “I am his, and he shall do with me just as he likes.”

— George MacDonald

423. “One of the grandest things in having rights is, that though they are your rights you may give them up.”

— George MacDonald

424. “In seeking to improve their conditions, might I not do them harm, and only harm?”

— George MacDonald

425. “A man might flatter, or bribe, or coax a tyrant; but there is no refuge from the love of God; that love will, for very love, insist upon the uttermost farthing.”

— George MacDonald

426. “It is a hard thing for a rich man to grow poor; but it is an awful thing for him to grow dishonest, and some kinds of speculation lead a man deep into dishonesty before he thinks what he is about. Poverty will not make a man worthless – he may be of worth a great deal more when he is poor than he was when he was rich; but dishonesty goes very far indeed to make a man of no value – a thing to be thrown out in the dust-hole of the creation, like a bit of broken basin, or dirty rag.”

— George MacDonald

427. “I knew that love gives to him that loveth, power over any soul beloved, even if that soul know him not, bringing him inwardly close to that spirit; a power that cannot be but for good; for in proportion as selfishness intrudes, the love ceases, and the power which springs therefrom dies. Yet all love will, one day, meet with its return. All true love will, one day, behold its own image in the eyes of the beloved, and be humbly glad.”

— George MacDonald

428. “To say a man might disobey and be none the worse would be to say that no might be yes and light sometimes darkness.”

— George MacDonald

429. “The very fact that anything can die, implies the existence of something that cannot die; which must either take to itself another form, as when the seed that is sown dies, and arises again; or, in conscious existence, may, perhaps, continue to lead a purely spiritual life.”

— George MacDonald

430. “I was a bookworm then, but when I came to know it, I woke among the butterflies.”

— George MacDonald

431. “Real good-breeding is independent of the forms and refinements of what has assumed to itself the name of society.”

— George MacDonald

432. “If those who had set themselves to explain the various theories of Christianity had set themselves instead to do the will of the Master, how different the world would be now!”

— George MacDonald

433. “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

434. “It’s not good at all – mind that, Diamond – to do everything for those you love, and not give them a share in the doing. It’s not kind. It’s making too much of yourself.”

— George MacDonald

435. “It is not where one is, but in what direction he is going.”

— George MacDonald

436. “Her intercourse with Andrew had as yet failed to open her eyes to the fact that the faith required of us is faith in a person, and not in the truest of statements concerning anything, even concerning him; or to the fact, that faith in the living One, the very essence of it, consists in obedience to Him. A man can obey before he is sure, and except he obey the command he knows to be right, wherever it may come from, he will never be sure. To find the truth, man or woman must be true.”

— George MacDonald

437. “Then first I knew the delight of being lowly; of saying to myself, “I am what I am, nothing more.”

— George MacDonald

438. “A devil – “A power that lives against its life.”

— George MacDonald

439. “Remember, then, that whoever does not mean good is always in danger of harm.”

— George MacDonald

440. “Never, my little one, hide anything from those that love you. Never let anything that makes itself a nest in your heart, grow into a secret, for then at once it will begin to eat a hole in it.”

— George MacDonald

441. “I need a God; and if there be none how did I come to need one?”

— George MacDonald

442. “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

443. “Our Selves are like some little children who will be happy enough so long as they are left to their own games, but when we begin to interfere with them, and make them presents of too nice playthings, or too many sweet things, they begin at once to fret and spoil.”

— George MacDonald

444. “Well, perhaps; but I begin to think there are better things than being comfortable.”

— George MacDonald

445. “She did not even trouble herself much to show Godfrey her gratitude. We may spoil gratitude as we offer it, by insisting on its recognition. To receive honestly is the best thanks for a good thing.”

— George MacDonald

446. “Only because uplifted in song, was I able to endure the blaze of the dawn.”

— George MacDonald

447. “To be kind neither hurts nor compromises.”

— George MacDonald

448. “Nobody who has not been tried knows how difficult it is; but whoever has come out well of it – and those who do not overcome never do come out of it – always looks back with horror, not on what she has come through, but on the very idea of the possibility of having failed and being still the same miserable creature as before.”

— George MacDonald

449. “You ought to have principles of your own, Mr Walton.” “I hope I have. And one of them is, not to make mountains of molehills; for a molehill is not a mountain. A man ought to have too much to do in obeying his conscience and keeping his soul’s garments clean, to mind whether he wears black or white when telling his flock that God loves them, and that they will never be happy till they believe it.”

— George MacDonald

450. “Now he learned what law and order and truth are, what consent and harmony mean; how the individual may find his own end in a higher end, where law and freedom mean the same thing, and the purest certainty exists without the slightest constraint.”

— George MacDonald