George MacDonald Quotes

I firmly believe people have hitherto been a great deal too much taken up about doctrine and far too little about practice. The word "doctrine," as used in the Bible, means teaching of duty, not theory.

I am perplexed at the stupidity of the ordinary religious being. In the most practical of all matters he will talk and speculate and try to feel, but he will not set himself to do.

My prayers, my God, flow from what I am not; I think thy answers make me what I am.

And her life will perhaps be the richer, for holding now within it the memory of what came, but could not stay.

Ambition is but the evil shadow of aspiration.

Suppose you didn't know him, would that make any difference?' 'No,' said Willie, after thinking a little. 'Other people would know him if I didn't.' 'Yes, and if nobody knew him, God would know him, and anybody God has thought worth making, it's an honor to do anything for.

Beauty and sadness always go together. Nature thought beauty too rich to go forth Upon the earth without a meet alloy.

There are things that must be done in faith, else they never have being.

To receive honestly is the best thanks for a good thing.

The whole history of the Christian life is a series of resurrections. . . . Every time we find our hearts are troubled, that we are not rejoicing in God, a resurrection must follow; a resurrection out of the night of troubled thought into the gladness of the truth.

We are often unable to tell people what they need to know, because they want to know something else, and would therefore only misunderstand what we said.

I repent me of the ignorance wherein I ever said that God made man out of nothing: there is no nothing out of which to make anything; God is all in all, and he made us out of himself.

Blessed be the true life that the pauses between its throbs are not death!

Thou art beautiful because God created thee, but thou art a slave to sin... wickedness has made you ugly.

Faith is that which, knowing the Lord's will, goes and does it; or, not knowing it, stands and waits, content in ignorance as in knowledge, because God wills - neither pressing into the hidden future, nor careless of the knowledge which opens the path of action

I only know when I don't know a thing. My uncle has taught me that wisdom lies in that.

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

I know my Easts and Tom Brown, you see, and they're never happy unless their morality is being tried in the furnace and they can feel they are doing the right Christian thing and never mind the consequences to anyone else.

Could you not give me some sign, or tell me something about you that never changes, or some other way to know you, or thing to know you by?" — "No, Curdie: that would be to keep you from knowing me. You must know me in quite another way from that. It would not be the least use to you or me either if I were to make you know me in that way. It would be but to know the sign of me — not to know me myself.

We should teach our children to think no more of their bodies when dead than they do of their hair when cut off, or of their old clothes when they have done with them.

Somehow, I can't say how, it tells me that all is right; that it is coming to swallow up all cries.

No man ever sank under the burden of the day. It is when tomorrow's burden is added to the burden of today that the weight is more than a man can bear.

But we believe – nay, Lord we only hope, That one day we shall thank thee perfectly For pain and hope and all that led or drove Us back into the bosom of thy love.

As no scripture is of private interpretation, so is there no feeling in a human heart which exists in that heart alone - which is not, in some form or degree, in every human heart.

Never tell a child 'you have a soul.' Teach him, you are a soul; you have a body.

You will be dead so long as you refuse to die.

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

All that is not God is death.

What God may hereafter require of you, you must not give yourself the least trouble about. Everything He gives you to do, you must do as well as ever you can, and that is the best possible preparation for what He may want you to do next. If people would but do what they have to do, they would always find themselves ready for what came next.

The Root of All Rebellion: It is because we are not near enough to Thee to partake of thy liberty that we want a liberty of our own different from thine.

Right gladly would He free them from their misery, but He knows only one way: He will teach them to be like himself, meek and lowly, bearing with gladness the yoke of His Father's will. This in the one, the only right, the only possible way of freeing them from their sin, the cause of their unrest.

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.

Not even nothingness preceded life. Nothingness owes its very idea to existence.

To be kind neither hurts nor compromises.

...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.

Things come to the poor that can't get in at the door of the rich. Their money somehow blocks it up. It is a great privilege to be poor--one that no man covets, and brat a very few have sought to retain, but one that yet many have learned to prize.

It needs brains to be a real fool.

There is little hope of the repentance and redemption of certain some until they have committed one or another of the many wrong things of which they are daily, through a course of unrestrained selfishness, becoming more and more capable.

What would the Living One have me do?

Moderation is the basis of justice.

Trust to God to weave your thread into the great web, though the pattern shows it not yet.

One chief cause of the amount of unbelief in the world is tha tthose who have seen something of the glory of Christ set themselves to theorize concerning him rather than to obey him.

I've been thinking about it a great deal, and it seems to me that although any one sixpence is as good as any other sixpence, not twenty lambs would do instead of one sheep whose face you knew. Somehow, when once you've looked into anybody's eyes, right deep down into them, I mean, nobody will do for that one any more . Nobody, ever so beautiful or so good, will make up for that one going out of sight.

He (God) loves what I shall be.

I say again, if I cannot draw a horse, I will not write THIS IS A HORSE under what I foolishly meant for one.

Will is not unfrequently weakness.

I believe in fate, never in chance.

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.