The Laird's Inheritance Quotes

“Wherever there is anything to love, there is beauty in some form.”
― George MacDonald, The Laird's Inheritance

“To trust in spite of the look of being forgotten; to keep crying out into the vast whence comes no voice, and where seems no hearing; to struggle after light, where is no glimmer to guide; at every turn to find a door-less wall, yet ever seek a door; to see the machinery of the world pauseless grinding on as if self-moved, caring for no life, nor shifting a hair's-breadth for all entreaty, and yet believe that God is awake and utterly loving; to desire nothing but what comes meant for us from his hand; to wait patiently, willing to die of hunger, fearing only lest faith should fail—such is the victory that overcometh the world, such is faith indeed.”
― George MacDonald, Warlock o' Glenwarlock

“every question is a door-handle.”
― George MacDonald, Warlock o' Glenwarlock

“To be lord of space, a man must be free of all bonds of place. To be heir of all things, his heart must have no things in it. He must be like him who makes things, not like one who would put everything in his pocket. He must stand on the upper, not the lower side of them. He must be as the man who makes poems, not the man who gathers books of verse. God, having made a sunset, lets it pass, and makes such a sunset no more. He has no picture-gallery, no library. What if in heaven men shall be so busy growing, that they have not time to write or to read!”
― George MacDonald, Castle Warlock

“There are many, doubtless, who have not yet got farther in love than their own family; but there are others who have learned that for the true heart there is neither Frenchman nor Englishman, neither Jew nor Greek, neither white nor black—only the sons and daughters of God, only the brothers and sisters of the one elder brother.”
― George MacDonald, Warlock o' Glenwarlock

“Let death do what it can, there is just one thing it cannot destroy, and that is life. Never in itself, only in the unfaith of man, does life recognize any sway of death.”
― George MacDonald, Warlock o' Glenwarlock: A Homely Romance

“He came to the spot where his father and he had prayed together, and there kneeling lifted up his face to the stars. Oh mighty, only church! whose roof is a vaulted infinitude! whose lights come burning from the heart of the Maker! church of all churches—where the Son of Man prayed! In the narrow temple of Herod he taught the people, and from it drove the dishonest traders; but here, under the starry roof, was his house of prayer! church where not a mark is to be seen of human hand! church that is all church, and nothing but church, built without hands, despised and desecrated through unbelief! church of God’s building! thou alone in thy grandeur art fitting type of a yet greater, a yet holier church, whose stars are the burning eyes of unutterable, self-forgetting love, whose worship is a ceaseless ministration of self-forgetting deeds—the one real ideal church, the body of the living Christ, built of the hearts and souls of men and women out of every nation and every creed, through all time and over all the world, redeemed alike from Judaism, paganism, and all the false Christianities that darken and dishonor the true.”
― George MacDonald, The Laird's Inheritance

“In after years when he remembered the enchanting dreams of his boyhood, instead of sighing after them as something gone for ever, he would say to himself, "what matter they are gone? In the heavenly kingdom my own mother is waiting me, fairer and stronger and real. I imagined the elves; God imagined my mother.”
― George MacDonald, Warlock o' Glenwarlock

“There is no leveller like Christianity—but it levels by lifting to a lofty table-land, accessible only to humility. He only who is humble can rise, and rising lift.”
― George MacDonald, Warlock o' Glenwarlock

“His father could not have vanished like a sea-bubble on the sand! To have known a great man—perhaps I do not mean such a man as my reader may be thinking of—is to have some assurance of immortality. One of the best of men said to me once that he did not feel any longing after immortality, but, when he thought of certain persons, he could not for a moment believe they had ceased. He had beheld the lovely, believed therefore in the endless.”
― George MacDonald, Warlock o' Glenwarlock

“it is not because of God's poverty that the world is so slowly redeemed. Not the most righteous expenditure of money will save it, but that of life and soul and spirit—it may be, to that, of nerve and muscle, blood and brain. All these our Lord spent—but no money. Therefore I say, that of all means for saving the world, or doing good, as it is called, money comes last in order, and far behind.”
― George MacDonald, Warlock o' Glenwarlock

“One day it had rained before sunrise, and a soft spring wind had been blowing ever since, a soothing and persuading wind, that seemed to draw out the buds from the secret places of the dry twigs, and whisper to the roots of the rose-trees that their flowers would be wanted by and by.”
― George MacDonald, Warlock o' Glenwarlock

“There are souls innumerable in the world, as dry as the Sahara desert—souls which, when they look most gay and summer-like, are only flaunting the flowers gathered from other people's gardens, stuck without roots into their own unproducing soil. Oh, the dreariness, the sandy sadness of such poor arid souls! They are hungry, and eat husks; they are thirsty, and drink hot wine; their sleep is a stupor, and their life, if not an unrest, then a yielded decay. Only when praised or admired do they feel as if they lived! But Joan was not yet of such. She had had too much discomfort to have entered yet into their number. There was water not yet far from the surface of her consciousness.”
― George MacDonald, Warlock o' Glenwarlock

“His marriage was of infinitely more salvation to the laird than if it had set him free from all his worldly embarrassments, for it set him growing again—and that is the only final path out of oppression.”
― George MacDonald, Warlock o' Glenwarlock

“It was now to Aggie as if they were all dead and in the blessed world together, only she had brought with her an ache which it would need time to tune. All pain is discord.”
― George MacDonald, Warlock o' Glenwarlock

“but where is the use of saying what might have been, when all things are ever moving towards the highest and best for the individual as well as for the universe! —not the less that hell may be the only path to it for some—the hell of an absolute self-loathing.”
― George MacDonald, Warlock o' Glenwarlock

“Winna ye be gaein' awa', to write buiks, an' gar fowk fin' oot what's the maitter wi' them?”
― George MacDonald, Warlock o' Glenwarlock

“The fear of man, the trust in man, the deference to the opinion of man, is the merest worship of a rag-stuffed idol.”
― George MacDonald, Warlock o' Glenwarlock

“Oh, father!" he said, "how the fear and oppression of ages are gone like a cloud swallowed up of space. Oh, father! are not all human ills doomed thus to vanish at last in the eternal fire of the love-burning God?—An”
― George MacDonald, Warlock o' Glenwarlock

“To be lord of space, a man must be free of all bonds to place. To be heir of all things, his heart must have no THINGS in it. He must be like him who makes things, not like one who would put everything in his pocket. He must stand on the upper, not the lower side of them. He must be as the man who makes poems, not the man who gathers books of verse. God, having made a sunset, lets it pass, and makes such a sunset no more. He has no picture-gallery, no library. What if in heaven men shall be so busy growing, that they have not time to write or to read!”
― George MacDonald, Warlock o' Glenwarlock

“Be very sure, my son, God is the only adviser to be trusted, and you must do what he tells you, even if it lead you to a stake, to be burned by the slow fire of poverty.—O my Father!" cried the old man, breaking out suddenly in prayer, "my soul is a flickering flame of which thou art the eternal, inextinguishable fire. I am blessed because thou art. Because thou art life, I live. Nothing can hurt me, because nothing can hurt thee. To thy care I leave my son, for thou lovest him as thou hast loved me. Deal with him as thou hast dealt with me. I ask for nothing, care for nothing but thy will. Strength is gone from me, but my life is hid in thee. I am a feeble old man, but I am dying into the eternal day of thy strength.”
― George MacDonald, Warlock o' Glenwarlock

“himself—"What if the dying who seem thus divided from us, are but looking over the tops of insignificant earthly things? What if the heart within them is lying content in a closer contact with ours than our dull fears and too level outlook will allow us to share? One thing their apparent withdrawal means—that we must go over to them; they cannot retrace, for that would be to retrograde. They have already begun to learn the language and ways of the old world, begun to be children there afresh, while we remain still the slaves of new, low—bred habits of unbelief and self-preservation, which already to them look as unwise as unlovely.”
― George MacDonald, Warlock o' Glenwarlock

“The year's fruit must fall that the next year's may come, and the winter is the only way to the spring.”
― George MacDonald, Warlock o' Glenwarlock

“But in after days Cosmo repented of having so completely dropped the old gentleman's acquaintance; he was under obligation to him; and if a man will have to do only with the perfect, he must needs cut himself first, and go out of the world.”
― George MacDonald, Warlock o' Glenwarlock

“Truly, if ignorance is the foundation of any man's goodness, it is not worth the wind that upsets it, but in its mere self, ignorance of evil is a negative good.”
― George MacDonald, Warlock o' Glenwarlock

“The days glided by. The fervid Summer slid away round the shoulder of the world, and made room for her dignified matron sister; my lady Autumn swept her frayed and discoloured train out of the great hall-door of the world, and old brother Winter, who so assiduously waits upon the house, and cleans its innermost recesses, was creeping around it, biding his time, but eager to get to his work.”
― George MacDonald, Warlock o' Glenwarlock

“There are who are so pitiful over the poor man, that, finding they cannot lift him beyond the reach of the providence which intends there shall always be the poor on the earth, will do for him nothing at all. "Where is the use?" they say. They treat their money like their children, and would not send it into a sad house. If they had themselves no joys but their permanent ones, where would the hearts of them be?”
― George MacDonald, Warlock o' Glenwarlock

“She did not know that she was wishing for nothing more, and something a little less, than the kingdom of heaven—the very thing she thought the laird and Cosmo so strange for troubling their heads about. If men's wishes are not always for what the kingdom of heaven would bring them, their miseries at least are all for the lack of that kingdom.”
― George MacDonald, Warlock o' Glenwarlock

“It was a glorious morning. The wind had fallen quite, and the sun was shining as if he would say, "Keep up your hearts; I am up here still. I have not forgotten you. By and by you shall see more of me." But Nature lay dead, with a great white sheet cast over face and form. Not dead?—Just as much dead as ever was man, save for the inner death with which he kills himself, and which she cannot die. It is only to the eyes of his neighbours that the just man dies: to himself, and to those on the other side, he does not die, but is born instead: "He that liveth and believeth in me shall never die." But the poor old lord felt the approaching dank and cold of the sepulchre as the end of all things to him—if indeed he would be permitted to lie there, and not have to get up and go to worse quarters still.”
― George MacDonald, Warlock o' Glenwarlock

“There was no night there at this season, any more than all the year through in heaven. Indeed we have seldom real positive night in this world—so many provisions have been made against it. Every time we say, "What a lovely night!" we speak of a breach, a rift in the old night. There is light more or less, positive light, else were there no beauty. Many a night is but a low starry day, a day with a softened background against which the far-off suns of millions of other days show themselves: when the near vision vanishes the farther hope awakes. It is nowhere said of heaven, there shall be no twilight there,”
― George MacDonald, Warlock o' Glenwarlock