George MacDonald Quotes

“The one principle of hell is – “I am my own”
― George MacDonald, George MacDonald

“a man may be haunted with doubts, and only grow thereby in faith. Doubts are the messengers of the Living One to the honest. They are the first knock at our door of things that are not yet, but have to be, understood…. Doubt must precede every deeper assurance; for uncertainties are what we first see when we look into a region hitherto unknown, unexplored, unannexed.”
― George MacDonald, An Anthology: 365 Readings

“[91] Why Should It Be Necessary? “But if God is so good as you represent Him, and if He knows all that we need, and better far than we do ourselves, why should it be necessary to ask Him for anything?” I answer, What if He knows Prayer to be the thing we need first and most? What if the main object in God’s idea of prayer be the supplying of our great, our endless need—the need of Himself?…Hunger may drive the runaway child home, and he may or may not be fed at once, but he needs his mother more than his dinner. Communion with God is the one need of the soul beyond all other need: prayer is the beginning of that communion, and some need is the motive of that prayer”
― George MacDonald, An Anthology: 365 Readings

“Christ died to save us, not from suffering, but from ourselves; not from injustice, far less from justice, but from being unjust. He died that we might live—but live as He lives, by dying as He died who died to Himself.”
― George MacDonald, An Anthology: 365 Readings

“The care that is filling your mind at this moment, or but waiting till you lay the book aside to leap upon you—that need which is no need, is a demon sucking at the spring of your life. “No; mine is a reasonable care—an unavoidable care, indeed.” Is it something you have to do this very moment? “No.” Then you are allowing it to usurp the place of something that is required of you this moment. “There is nothing required of me at this moment.” Nay but there is—the greatest thing that can be required of man. “Pray, what is it?” Trust in the living God…. “I do trust Him in spiritual matters.” Everything is an affair of the spirit.”
― George MacDonald, An Anthology: 365 Readings

“A man must not choose his neighbor: he must take the neighbor that God sends him…. The neighbor is just the man who is next to you at the moment, the man with whom any business has brought you into contact.”
― George MacDonald, An Anthology: 365 Readings

“Instead of asking yourself whether you believe or not, ask yourself whether you have this day done one thing because He said, Do it, or once abstained because He said, Do not do it. It is simply absurd to say you believe, or even want to believe, in Him, if you do not do anything He tells you.”
― George MacDonald, An Anthology: 365 Readings

“The ideal flower of hospitality is almost unknown to the rich; it can hardly be grown save in the gardens of the poor; it is one of their beatitudes.”
― George MacDonald, An Anthology: 365 Readings

“That man is perfect in faith who can come to God in the utter dearth of his feelings and desires, without a glow or an aspiration, with the weight of low thoughts, failures, neglects, and wandering forgetfulness, and say to Him, “Thou art my refuge.”
― George MacDonald, An Anthology: 365 Readings

“What a horror will it not be to a vile man…when his eyes are opened to see himself as the pure see him, as God sees him! Imagine such a man waking all at once, not only to see the eyes of the universe fixed upon him with loathing astonishment, but to see himself at the same moment as those eyes see him.”
― George MacDonald, An Anthology: 365 Readings

“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, An Anthology: 365 Readings

“Low-sunk life imagines itself weary of life, but it is death, not life, it is weary of.”
― George MacDonald, An Anthology: 365 Readings

“But herein is the Bible itself greatly wronged. It nowhere lays claim to be regarded as the Word, the Way, the Truth. The Bible leads us to Jesus, the inexhaustible, the ever unfolding Revelation of God. It is Christ “in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge,” not the Bible, save as leading to Him.”
― George MacDonald, An Anthology: 365 Readings

“Complaint against God is far nearer to God than indifference about Him.”
― George MacDonald, An Anthology: 365 Readings

“His likeness to Christ is the truth of a man, even as the perfect meaning of a flower is the truth of a flower…. As Christ is the blossom of humanity, so the blossom of every man is the Christ perfected in him.”
― George MacDonald, An Anthology: 365 Readings

“But if God is so good as you represent Him, and if He knows all that we need, and better far than we do ourselves, why should it be necessary to ask Him for anything?” I answer, What if He knows Prayer to be the thing we need first and most? What if the main object in God’s idea of prayer be the supplying of our great, our endless need—the need of Himself?…Hunger may drive the runaway child home, and he may or may not be fed at once, but he needs his mother more than his dinner. Communion with God is the one need of the soul beyond all other need: prayer is the beginning of that communion, and some need is the motive of that prayer…. So begins a communion, a taking with God, a coming-to-one with Him, which is the sole end of prayer, yea, of existence itself in its infinite phases. We must ask that we may receive: but that we should receive what we ask in respect of our lower needs, is not God’s end in making us pray, for He could give us everything without that: to bring His child to his knee, God withholds that man may ask.”
― George MacDonald, An Anthology: 365 Readings

“It may be an infinitely less evil to murder a man than to refuse to forgive him. The former may be the act of a moment of passion: the latter is the heart’s choice. It is spiritual murder, the worst, to hate, to brood over the feeling that excludes, that, in our microcosm, kills the image, the idea of the hated. [13]”
― George MacDonald, An Anthology: 365 Readings

“It is the heart that is not yet sure of its God that is afraid to laugh in His presence.”
― George MacDonald, An Anthology: 365 Readings

“You will be dead so long as you refuse to die.”
― George MacDonald, An Anthology: 365 Readings

“The secret of your own heart you can never know; but you can know Him who knows its secret.”
― George MacDonald, An Anthology: 365 Readings

“Love makes everything lovely: hate concentrates itself on the one thing hated.”
― George MacDonald, An Anthology: 365 Readings

“There is one kind of religion in which the more devoted a man is, the fewer proselytes he makes: the worship of himself.”
― George MacDonald, An Anthology: 365 Readings

“When a man is…one with God, what should he do but live forever?”
― George MacDonald, An Anthology: 365 Readings

“For He regards men not as they are merely, but as they shall be; not as they shall be merely, but as they are now growing, or capable of growing, toward that image after which He made them that they might grow to it. Therefore a thousand stages, each in itself all but valueless, are of inestimable worth as the necessary and connected gradations of an infinite progress. A condition which of declension would indicate a devil, may of growth indicate a saint.”
― George MacDonald, An Anthology: 365 Readings

“There is endless room for rebellion against ourselves.”
― George MacDonald, George MacDonald

“With every morn my life afresh must break The crust of self, gathered about me fresh.”
― George MacDonald, An Anthology: 365 Readings

“I sickened at the sight of Myself; how should I ever get rid of the demon? The same instant I saw the one escape: I must offer it back to its source—commit it to Him who had made it. I must live no more from it but from the source of it; seek to know nothing more of it than He gave me to know by His presence therein…. What flashes of self-consciousness might cross me, should be God’s gift, not of my seeking, and offered again to Him in every new self-sacrifice.”
― George MacDonald, An Anthology: 365 Readings

“Do you ask, “What is faith in Him?” I answer, The leaving of your way, your objects, your self, and the taking of His and Him; the leaving of your trust in men, in money, in opinion, in character, in atonement itself, and doing as He tells you. I can find no words strong enough to serve for the weight of this obedience.”
― George MacDonald, An Anthology: 365 Readings

“The next hour, the next moment, is as much beyond our grasp and as much in God’s care, as that a hundred years away. Care for the next minute is just as foolish as care for the morrow, or for a day in the next thousand years—in neither can we do anything, in both God is doing everything. Those claims only of the morrow which have to be prepared today are of the duty of today: the moment which coincides with work to be done, is the moment to be minded; the next is nowhere till God has made it.”
― George MacDonald, An Anthology: 365 Readings

“Troubled soul, thou are not bound to feel but thou art bound to arise. God loves thee whether thou feelest or not. Thou canst not love when thou wilt, but thou art bound to fight the hatred in thee to the last. Try not to feel good when thou art not good, but cry to Him who is good. He changes not because thou changest. Nay, He has an especial tenderness of love toward thee for that thou art in the dark and hast no light, and His heart is glad when thou doest arise and say, “I will go to my Father.”…Fold the arms of thy faith, and wait in the quietness until light goes up in thy darkness. For the arms of thy Faith I say, but not of thy Action: bethink thee of something that thou oughtest to do, and go to do it, if it be but the sweeping of a room, or the preparing of a meal, or a visit to a friend. Heed not thy feeling: Do thy work.”
― George MacDonald, An Anthology: 365 Readings