Top 500 George MacDonald Quotes (2026 Update)
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401. “Possessed by the power of the gorgeous night, she seemed at one and the same moment annihilated and glorified.”

— George MacDonald

402. “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

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

— George MacDonald

404. “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

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

— George MacDonald

406. “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

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

409. “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

410. “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

411. “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

412. “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

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

— George MacDonald

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

— 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. “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

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

— George MacDonald

418. “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

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

421. “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

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

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

— 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. “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

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

— George MacDonald

429. “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

430. “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

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

— George MacDonald

432. “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

433. “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

434. “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

435. “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

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

439. “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

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

— George MacDonald

441. “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

442. “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

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

445. “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

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. “I may love him, I may love him, for he is a man, and I am only a beech-tree.”

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald