George MacDonald Quotes

243 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

George MacDonald
A man is in bondage to whatever he cannot part with that is less than
himself.

George MacDonald
There is no inborn longing that shall not be fulfilled. I think that is as certain as the forgiveness of sins.

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

George MacDonald
Books are but dead bodies to you, and a library nothing but a catacomb!

George MacDonald
Every soul has a landscape that changes with the wind that sweeps the sky, with the clouds that return after its rain.

George MacDonald
It is a happy thing for us that this is really all we have to concern ourselves about--what to do next. No man can do the second thing. He can do the first.

George MacDonald
The kingdom of heaven is not come even when God's will is our law; it is fully come when God's will is our will.

George MacDonald
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
Only because uplifted in song, was I able to endure the blaze of the dawn.

George MacDonald
The perfection of His relation to us swallows up all our imperfections, all our defeats, all our evils; for our childhood is born of His fatherhood. That man is perfect in faith who can come to God in the utter dearth of his feelings and his 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, because Thou art my home.

George MacDonald
There is but one thing that can free a man from superstition, and that is belief. All history proves it. The most sceptical have ever been the most credulous.

George MacDonald
In whatever man does without God, he must fail miserably, or succeed more miserably.

George MacDonald
"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?"

George MacDonald
God chooses that men should be tried, but let a man beware of tempting his neighbor.

George MacDonald
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

George MacDonald
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.

George MacDonald
The Lord never came to deliver men from the consequences of their sins while yet those sins remained...Yet men, loving their sins and feeling nothing of their dread hatefulness, have, consistent with their low condition, constantly taken this word concerning the Lord to mean that he came to save them from the punishment of their sins.

George MacDonald
Not only then has each man his individual relation to God, but each man has his peculiar relation to God.

George MacDonald
There is no water in oxygen, no water in hydrogen: it comes bubbling fresh from the imagination of the living God, rushing from under the great white throne of the glacier. The very thought of it makes one gasp with an elemental joy no metaphysician can analyse.

George MacDonald
In joy or sorrow, feebleness or might,
Peace or commotion, be thou, Father, my delight.

George MacDonald
The ruin of a man's teaching comes of his followers, such as having never touched the foundation he has laid, build upon it wood, hay, and stubble, fit only to be burnt. Therefore, if only to avoid his worst foes, his admirers, a man should avoid system. The more correct a system the worse will it be misunderstood; its professed admirers will take both its errors and their misconceptions of its truths, and hold them forth as its essence.

George MacDonald
They are not the best students who are most dependent on books. What can be got out of them is at best only material; a man must build his house for himself.

George MacDonald
The birds, the poets of the animal creation - what though they never get beyond the lyrical! - awoke to utter their own joy, and awake like joy in others of God's children.

George MacDonald
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....

George MacDonald
I dare not say with Paul that I am the slave of Christ, but my highest aspiration and desire is to be the slave of Christ.

George MacDonald
The love of our neighbor is the only door out of the dungeon of self.

George MacDonald
What a man is lies as certainly upon his countenance as in his heart, though none of his acquaintances may be able to read it. The very intercourse with him may have rendered it more difficult.

George MacDonald