A Dish of Orts Quotes

“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

“In very truth, a wise imagination, which is the presence of the spirit of God, is the best guide that man or woman can have; for it is not the things we see the most clearly that influence us the most powerfully; undefined, yet vivid visions of something beyond, something which eye has not seen nor ear heard, have far more influence than any logical sequences whereby the same things may be demonstrated to the intellect. It is the nature of the thing, not the clearness of its outline, that determines its operation. We live by faith, and not by sight.”
― George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts

“The greatest forces lie in the region of the uncomprehended.”
― George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts

“Seek not that your sons and your daughters should not see visions, should not dream dreams; seek that they should see true visions, that they should dream noble dreams. Such out-going of the imagination is one with aspiration, and will do more to elevate above what is low and vile than all possible inculcations of morality.”
― George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts

“All words, then, belonging to the inner world of the mind, are of the imagination, are originally poetic words.”
― George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts

“To inquire into what God has made is the main function of the imagination. It is aroused by facts, is nourished by facts; seeks for higher and yet higher laws in those facts; but refuses to regard science as the sole interpreter of nature, or the laws of science as the only region of discovery.”
― George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts

“Indeed, a man is rather being thought than thinking, when a new thought arises in his mind.”
― George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts

“The necessary unlikeness between the creator and the created holds within it the equally necessary likeness of the thing made to him who makes it, and so of the work of the made to the work of the maker... The imagination of man is made in the image of the imagination of God.”
― George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts

“If we speak of direct means for the culture of the imagination, the whole is comprised in two words--food and exercise.”
― George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts

“For the world is - allow us the homely figure - the human being turned inside out. All that moves in the mind is symbolized in Nature. Or, to use another more philosophical, and certainly not less poetic figure, the world is a sensuous analysis of humanity, and hence an inexhaustible wardrobe for the clothing of human thought. Take any word expressive of emotion - take the word 'emotion' itself - and you will find that its primary meaning is of the outer world. In the swaying of the woods, in the unrest of the "wavy plain" the imagination saw the picture of a well-known condition of the human mind; and hence the word 'emotion'.

The man who cannot invent will never discover.

Wisdom as well as folly will serve a fool's purpose; he turns all into folly.”
― George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts

“Few, in this world, will ever be able to utter what they feel. Fewer still will be able to utter it in forms of their own. Nor is it necessary that there should be many such. But it is necessary that all should feel. It is necessary that all should understand and imagine the good; that all should begin, at least, to follow and find out God.”
― George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts : Chiefly Papers on the Imagination, and on Shakespeare

“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, A Dish of Orts : Chiefly Papers on the Imagination, and on Shakespeare

“This is in the very nature of things: obedience alone places a man in the position in which he can see so as to judge that which is above him.”
― George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts : Chiefly Papers on the Imagination, and on Shakespeare

“Humility is essential greatness, the inside of grandeur.”
― George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts : Chiefly Papers on the Imagination, and on Shakespeare

“For repose is not the end of education; its end is a noble unrest, an ever renewed awaking from the dead, a ceaseless questioning of the past for the interpretation of the future, an urging on of the motions of life, which had better far be accelerated into fever, than retarded into lethargy.”
― George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts

“differing plants, correspond to the law of the relative distances of the planets in approach to their central sun, wakes in him that hope of a central Will, which alone can justify one ecstatic throb at any seeming loveliness of the universe. For without the hope of such a centre, delight is unreason—a mockery not such as the skeleton at the Egyptian feast, but such rather as a crowned corpse at a feast of skeletons. Life without the higher glory of the unspeakable, the atmosphere of a God, is not life, is not worth living. He would rather cease to be, than walk the dull level of the commonplace”
― George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts : Chiefly Papers on the Imagination, and on Shakespeare

“The right teacher would have his pupil easy to please, but ill to satisfy; ready to enjoy, unready to embrace; keen to discover beauty, slow to say, "Here I will dwell.”
― George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts : Chiefly Papers on the Imagination, and on Shakespeare

“A gathered mountain of misplaced worships would be swept into the sea by the study of one good book; and while what was good in an inferior book would still be admired, the relative position of the book would be altered and its influence lessened”
― George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts : Chiefly Papers on the Imagination, and on Shakespeare

“and will therefore send the man forth from its loftiest representations to do the commonest duty of the most wearisome calling in a hearty and hopeful spirit. This is the work of the right imagination; and towards this work every imagination, in proportion to the rightness that is in it, will tend.”
― George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts : Chiefly Papers on the Imagination, and on Shakespeare

“Never seeking true or high things, caring only for appearances, and, therefore, for inventions, he had left his imagination all undeveloped, and when it represented his own inner condition to him, had repressed it until it was nearly destroyed, and what remained of it was set on fire of hell.”
― George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts : Chiefly Papers on the Imagination, and on Shakespeare

“Thus her long down-trodden imagination rose and took vengeance, even through those senses which she had thought to subordinate to her wicked will.”
― George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts : Chiefly Papers on the Imagination, and on Shakespeare

“The danger that lies in the repression of the imagination may be well illustrated from the play of "Macbeth." The imagination of the hero (in him a powerful faculty), representing how the deed would appear to others, and so representing its true nature to himself, was his great impediment on the path to crime.”
― George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts : Chiefly Papers on the Imagination, and on Shakespeare

“As well speak of religion as the mother of cruelty because religion has given more occasion of cruelty, as of all dishonesty and devilry, than any other object of human interest. Are we not to worship, because our forefathers burned and stabbed for religion? It is more religion we want. It is more imagination we need.”
― George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts : Chiefly Papers on the Imagination, and on Shakespeare

“And the heart must open the door to the understanding. It is the far-seeing imagination which beholds what might be a form of things, and says to the intellect: "Try whether that may not be the form of these things;”
― George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts : Chiefly Papers on the Imagination, and on Shakespeare

“Thy very ATTENTION, does it not mean an attentio, a STRETCHING-TO? Fancy that act of the mind, which all were conscious of, which none had yet named,—when this new poet first felt bound and driven to name it.”
― George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts : Chiefly Papers on the Imagination, and on Shakespeare

“We answer: To inquire into what God has made is the main function of the imagination. It is aroused by facts, is nourished by facts; seeks for higher and yet higher laws in those facts; but refuses to regard science as the sole interpreter of nature, or the laws of science as the only region of discovery.”
― George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts : Chiefly Papers on the Imagination, and on Shakespeare

“For the end of imagination is harmony.”
― George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts

“here is this rude boyhood, if we may so say, of the one art, roofed in with the perfection of another, of architecture; a perfection which now we can only imitate at our best: below, the clumsy contrivance and the vulgar jest; above, the solemn heaven of uplifted arches, their mysterious glooms ringing with the delight of the multitude: the play of children enclosed in the heart of prayer aspiring in stone.”
― George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts : Chiefly Papers on the Imagination, and on Shakespeare

“When he was fifteen years old, Sir Thomas North's translation of Plutarch (through the French) was first published. Any reader who has compared one of Shakspere's Roman plays with the corresponding life in Plutarch, will not be surprised that we should mention this as one of those events which must have been of paramount influence upon Shakspere.”
― George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts : Chiefly Papers on the Imagination, and on Shakespeare

“But when peace had fallen on the land, it would seem as if”
― George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts : Chiefly Papers on the Imagination, and on Shakespeare