Top 500 George MacDonald Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “He never married. But he wrote a good book.”

— George MacDonald

402. “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

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

405. “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

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

— George MacDonald

407. “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

408. “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

409. “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

410. “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

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

413. “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

414. “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

415. “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

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

— George MacDonald

417. “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

418. “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

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

422. “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

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

— George MacDonald

424. “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

425. “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

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

— George MacDonald

427. “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

428. “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

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

— George MacDonald

430. “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

431. “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

432. “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

433. “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

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

— George MacDonald

435. “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

436. “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

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

— George MacDonald

438. “Really he was not an interesting man: short, broad, stout, red-faced, with an immense amount of mental inertia, discharging itself in constant lingual activity about little nothings.”

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

443. “The imagination of man is made in the image of the imagination of God. Everything of man must have been of God first; and it will help much towards our understanding of the imagination and its functions in man if we first succeed in regarding aright the imagination of God, in which the imagination of man lives and moves and has its being.”

— George MacDonald

444. “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

445. “Nobody knows what anything is; a man can only learn what a thing means!”

— George MacDonald

446. “Nothing that could be got from the heart of the earth could have been put to better purposes than the silver the king’s miners got for him. There were people in the country who, when it came into their hands, degraded it by locking it up in a chest, and then it grew diseased and was called mammon, and bred all sorts of quarrels; but when first it left the king’s hands it never made any but friends, and the air of the world kept it clean.”

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

449. “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

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

— George MacDonald