George MacDonald - Man Quotes

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No man has the mind of Christ, except him who makes it his business to obey him.

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

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
The direst foe of courage is the fear itself, not the object of it; and the man who can overcome his own terror is a hero and more.

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

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

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
It is not the cares of today, but the cares of tomorrow, that weigh a man down.

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

George MacDonald
A man must learn to love his children, not because they are his, but because they are children, else his love will be scarcely a better thing at last than the party-spirit of the faithful politician.

George MacDonald
The man that feareth, Lord, to doubt,
In that fear doubteth thee.

George MacDonald
So, then, as darkness had no beginning, neither will it ever have an end. So, then, is it eternal. The negation of aught else, is its affirmation. Where the light cannot come, there abideth the darkness. The light doth but hollow a mine out of the infinite extension of the darkness. And ever upon the steps of the light treadeth the darkness; yea, springeth in fountains and wells amidst it, from the secret channels of its mighty sea. Truly, man is but a passing flame, moving unquietly amid the surrounding rest of night; without which he yet could not be, and whereof he is in part compounded.

George MacDonald
I would not favour a fiction to keep a whole world out of hell. The hell that a lie would keep any man out of is doubtless the very best place for him to go to. It is truth... that saves the world.

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
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
Then the Old Man of the Earth stooped over the floor of the cave, raised a huge stone from it, and left it leaning. It disclosed a great hole that went plumb-down. "That is the way," he said. "But there are no stairs." "You must throw yourself in. There is no other way.

George MacDonald
A man's real belief is that which he lives by. What a man believes is the thing he does, not the thing he thinks.

George MacDonald
It may be an infinitely less evil to murder a man than to refuse to forgive him. The former may be the act of a moment of passion: the latter is the heart's choice.

George MacDonald
God is the God of the animals in a far lovelier way, I suspect, than many of us dare to think, but he will not be the God of a man by making a good beast of him.

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
To say on the authority of the Bible that God does a thing no honourable man would do, is to lie against God; to say that it is therefore right, is to lie against the very spirit of God.

George MacDonald
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.

George MacDonald
LET A MAN THINK AND CARE ever so little about God, he does not therefore exist without God. God is here with him, upholding, warming, delighting, teaching him-making life a good thing to him. God gives him himself, though the man knows it not.

George MacDonald
Except the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ Jesus make a man sick of his opinions, he may hold them to doomsday for me; for no opinion, I repeat is Christianity, and no preaching of any plan of salvation is the preaching of the glorious gospel of the living God.

George MacDonald
For the greatest fool and rascal in creation there is yet a worse condition; and that is, not to know it, but to think himself a respectable man.

George MacDonald
All that man sees has to do with man. Worlds cannot be without an intermundane relationship. The community of the centre of all creation suggests an interradiating connection and dependence of the parts. Else a grander idea is conceivable than that which is already embodied.

George MacDonald
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.

George MacDonald
Many a thief is a better man than many a clergyman, and miles nearer to the gate of the kingdom.

George MacDonald
A man may sink by such slow degrees that, long after he is a devil, he may go on being a good churchman or a good dissenter and thinking himself a good Christian.

George MacDonald