George MacDonald > Quotes

“To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved.”
― George MacDonald

“Her heart - like every heart, if only its fallen sides were cleared away - was an inexhaustible fountain of love: she loved everything she saw. ”
― George MacDonald, The Day Boy and the Night Girl

“It is by loving, and not by being loved, that one can come nearest the soul of another; yea, that, where two love, it is the loving of each other, that originates and perfects and assures their blessedness. I knew that love gives to him that loveth, power over over any soul be loved, 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. ”
― George MacDonald, Phantastes

“Man finds it hard to get what he wants, because he does not want the best; God finds it hard to give, because He would give the best, and man will not take it.”
― George MacDonald

“Work is not always required. There is such a thing as sacred idleness.”
― George MacDonald

“Seeing is not believing - it is only seeing.”
― George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin (Dover Juvenile Classics

“Few delights can equal the mere presence of one whom we trust utterly.”
― George MacDonald

“When I can no more stir my soul to move, and life is but the ashes of a fire; when I can but remember that my heart once used to live and love, long and aspire- O, be thou then the first, the one thou art; be thou the calling, before all answering love, and in me wake hope, fear, boundless desire.”
― George MacDonald, The Diary of an Old soul

“A beast does not know that he is a beast, and the nearer a man gets to being a beast, the less he knows it.”
― George MacDonald

“Come, then, affliction, if my Father wills, and be my frowning friend. A friend that frowns is better than a smiling enemy. ”
― George MacDonald

“It is by loving and not by being loved that one can come nearest to the soul of another.”
― George MacDonald

“No story ever really ends, and I think I know why. ”
― George MacDonald

“If we will but let our God and Father work His will with us, there can be no limit to His enlargement of our existence”
― George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons: Series I, Ii, Iii

“There is this difference between the growth of some human beings and that of others: in the one case it is a continuous dying, in the other a continuous resurrection.”
― George MacDonald, The Princess and Curdie

“As you grow ready for it, somewhere or other you will find what is needful for you in a book.”
― George MacDonald, The Marquis of Lossie

“A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean. If my drawing, on the other hand, is so far from being a work of art that it needs THIS IS A HORSE written under it, what can it matter that neither you nor your child should know what it means? It is there not so much to convey a meaning as to wake a meaning. If it do not even wake an interest, throw it aside. A meaning may be there, but it is not for you. If, again, you do not know a horse when you see it, the name written under it will not serve you much. At all events, the business of the painter is not to teach zoology.”
― George MacDonald, The Light Princess and Other Fairy Stories

“We are all very anxious to be understood, and it is very hard not to be. But there is one thing much more necessary.'
What is that, grandmother?'
To understand other people.'
Yes, grandmother. I must be fair - for if I'm not fair to other people, I'm not worth being understood myself. I see.”
― George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin (Dover Juvenile Classics

“Doing the will of God leaves me no time for disputing about His plans.”
― George MacDonald

“To try to be brave is to be brave.”
― George MacDonald

“All that is not God is death.”
― George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons: Series I, Ii, Iii

“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, The Princess and the Goblin (Dover Juvenile Classics

“Our life is no dream; but it ought to become one, and perhaps will.”
― George MacDonald

“Whose work is it but your own to open your eyes? But indeed the business of the universe is to make such a fool out of you that you will know yourself for one, and begin to be wise.”
― George MacDonald, Lilith A and Lilith, 1896: A Duplex

“Philosophy is really homesickness.”
― George MacDonald

“A man is as free as he chooses to make himself, never an atom freer.”
― George MacDonald, Lilith

“The world is full of resurrections. Every night that folds us up in darkness is a death; and those of you that have been out early, and have seen the first of the dawn, will know it--the day rises out of the night like a being that has burst its tomb and escaped into life. ”
― George MacDonald

“I don't know how to thank you.'
Then I will tell you. There is only one way I care for. Do better, and grow better, and be better.”
― George MacDonald, The Princess and Curdie

“Here I should like to remark, for the sake of princes and princesses in general, that it is a low and contemptible thing to refuse to confess a fault, or even an error. If a true princess has done wrong, she is always uneasy until she has had an opportunity of throwing the wrongness away from her by saying: 'I did it; and I wish I had not; and I am sorry for having done it.”
― George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin (Dover Juvenile Classics

“It is when people do wrong things wilfully that they are the more likely to do them again.”
― George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin (Dover Juvenile Classics

“To love righteousness is to make it grow, not to avenge it. Throughout his life on earth, Jesus resisted every impulse to work more rapidly for a lower good.”
― George MacDonald

“Then the Old Man of the Earth stooped over the floor of the cave, raised a huge stone from it, and left it leaning. It disclosed a great hole that went plumb-down.
That is the way," he said.
But there are no stairs."
You must throw yourself in. There is no other way.”
― George MacDonald, The Golden Key

“Love me, beloved; Hades and Death
Shall vanish away like a frosty breath;
These hands, that now are at home in thine,
Shall clasp thee again, if thou art still mine;
And thou shalt be mine, my spirit's bride,
In the ceaseless flow of eternity's tide,
If the truest love thy heart can know
Meet the truest love that from mine can flow.
Pray God, beloved, for thee and me,
That our sourls may be wedded eternally.”
― George MacDonald, The Diary of an Old soul

“The best thing you can do for your fellow, next to rousing his conscience, is — not to give him things to think about, but to wake things up that are in him; or say, to make him think things for himself.”
― George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts

“...it is so silly of people to fancy that old age means crookedness and witheredness and feebleness and sticks and spectacles and rheumatism and forgetfulness! It is so silly! Old age has nothing whatever to do with all that. The right old age means strength and beauty and mirth and courage and clear eyes and strong painless limbs.”
― George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin (Dover Juvenile Classics

“You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it himself. (Quoted by C.S.Lewis in Mere Christianity)”
― George MacDonald

“I write, not for children,but for the child-like, whether they be of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.”
― George MacDonald

“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, Unspoken Sermons: Series I, Ii, Iii

“Annihilation itself is no death to evil. Only good where evil was, is evil dead. An evil thing must live with its evil until it chooses to be good. That alone is the slaying of evil.”
― George MacDonald

“Her face was fair and pretty, with eyes like two bits of night sky, each with a star dissolved in the blue.”
― George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin (Dover Juvenile Classics

“A Baby Sermon-
The lighting and thunder, they go and they come: But the stars and the stillness are always at home”
― George MacDonald

“We are and remain such creeping Christians, because we look at ourselves and not at Christ; because we gaze at the marks of our own soiled feet, and the trail of our own defiled garments.... Each, putting his foot in the footprint of the Master, and so defacing it, turns to examine how far his neighbor’s footprint corresponds with that which he still calls the Master’s, although it is but his own.”
― George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons: Series I, Ii, Iii

“No, there is no escape. There is no heaven with a little of hell in it - no place to retain this or that of the devil in our hearts or our pockets. Out Satan must go, every hair and feather.”
― George MacDonald

“My prayers, my God, flow from what I am not;
I think thy answers make me what I am.”
― George MacDonald, The Diary of an Old Soul & the White Page Poems

“I am sometimes almost terrified at the scope of the demands made upon me, at the perfection of the self-abandonment required of me; yet outside of such absoluteness can be no salvation.”
― George MacDonald

“...though I cannot promise to take you home," said North Wind, as she sank nearer and nearer to the tops of the houses, "I can promise you it will be all right in the end. You will get home somehow.”
― George MacDonald, At the Back of the North Wind

“Only he knew that to be left alone is not always to be forsaken.”
― George MacDonald, At the Back of the North Wind

“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. I learned that he that will be a hero, will barely be a man; that he that will be nothing but a doer of his work, is sure of his manhood. In nothing was my ideal lowered, or dimmed, or grown less precious; I only saw it too plainly, to set myself for a moment beside it. Indeed, my ideal soon became my life; whereas, formerly, my life had consisted in a vain attempt to behold, if not my ideal in myself, at least myself in my ideal.”
― George MacDonald, Phantastes

“There is no water in oxygen, no water in hydrogen: it comes bubbling fresh from the imagination of the living God, rushing from under the great white throne of the glacier. The very thought of it makes one gasp with an elemental joy no metaphysician can analyse. The water itself, that dances, and sings, and slakes the wonderful thirst--symbol and picture of that draught for which the woman of Samaria made her prayer to Jesus--this lovely thing itself, whose very wetness is a delight to every inch of the human body in its embrace--this live thing which, if I might, I would have running through my room, yea, babbling along my table--this water is its own self its own truth, and is therein a truth of God.”
― George MacDonald

“But there are victories far worse than defeats; and to overcome an angel too gentle to put out all his strength, and ride away in triumph on the back of a devil, is one of the poorest.”
― George MacDonald, The Lost Princess: A Double Story

“And her life will perhaps be the richer, for holding now within it the memory of what came, but could not stay.”
― George MacDonald, Phantastes