George MacDonald Quotes

243 Sourced Quotes

To have what we want is riches; but to be able to do without is power.

George MacDonald
To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved.

George MacDonald
Age is not all decay; it is the ripening,
the swelling, of the fresh life within, that withers and bursts the husks.

George MacDonald
When we are out of sympathy with the young, then I think our work in this world is over

George MacDonald
You can't live on amusement. It is the froth on water - an inch deep and then the mud.

George MacDonald
The miracles of Jesus were the ordinary works of his Father, wrought small and swift that we might take them in.

George MacDonald
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.

George MacDonald
Sad, indeed, would the whole matter be if the Bible had told us everything God meant us to believe. But herein is the Bible 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
There is no harm in being afraid. The only harm is in doing what Fear tells you. Fear is not your master! Laugh in his face and he will run away.

George MacDonald
Said the Wind to the Moon, "I will blow you out!"

George MacDonald
It has been well said that 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. Never load yourselves so, my friends. If you find yourselves so loaded, at least remember this: it is your own doing, not God's. He begs you to leave the future to Him, and mind the present.

George MacDonald
As to the pure all things are pure, so the common mind sees far more vulgarity in others than the mind developed in genuine refinement.

George MacDonald
Light-leaved acacias, by the door,
Stood up in balmy air,
Clusters of blossomed moonlight bore,
And breathed a perfume rare.

George MacDonald
The possession of wealth is, as it were, prepayment, and involves an obligation of honor to the doing of correspondent work.

George MacDonald
Human science is but the backward undoing of the tapestry-web of God's science.

George MacDonald
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.

George MacDonald
It's right to trust in God; but, if you don't stand to your halliards your craft'll miss stays, and your faith'll be blown out of the bolt-ropes in the turn of a marlinspike.

George MacDonald
But there are not a few who would be indignant at having their belief in God questioned, who yet seem greatly to fear imagining Him better than He is.

George MacDonald
Love makes everything lovely; hate concentrates itself on the one thing hated.

George MacDonald
It matters little where a man may be at this moment; the point is whether he is growing.

George MacDonald
Facts are like faces - capable of a thousand expressions and meanings.

George MacDonald
I only know when I don't know a thing.... wisdom lies in that.

George MacDonald
Truth is a very different thing from fact; it is the loving contact of the soul with spiritual fact, vital and potent. It does not work in the soul independently of all faculty or qualification there for setting it forth or defending it. Truth in the inward parts is a power, not an opinion.

George MacDonald
I begin indeed to fear that I have undertaken an impossibility, undertaken to tell what I cannot tell because no speech at my command will fit the forms in my mind.

George MacDonald
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.

George MacDonald
I do not myself believe there is any misfortune. What men call such is merely the shadowside of a good.

George MacDonald
All things are possible with God, but all things are not easy.

George MacDonald
I came from God, and I'm going back to God, and I won't have any gaps of death in the middle of my life.

George MacDonald
As Christ is the blossom of humanity, so the blossom of every man is Christ perfected in him.

George MacDonald
For the bliss of the animals lies in this, that, on their lower level, they shadow the bliss of those—few at any moment on the earth—who do not 'look before and after, and pine for what is not,' but live in the holy carelessness of the eternal now.

George MacDonald