George MacDonald Quotes & Sayings

good common heavenly sense to my people, — George MacDonald

Sir Galahad and Sir Percivale rencountered in the depths of a great forest. Now, Sir Galahad was dight all in harness of silver, clear and shining; the which is a delight to look upon, but full hasty to tarnish, and withouten the labour of a ready squire, uneath to be kept fair and clean. And yet withouten squire or page, Sir Galahad's armour shone like the moon. And he rode a great white mare, whose bases and other housings were black, but all besprent with fair lilys of silver sheen. — George MacDonald

Anybody with leisure can do that who is willing to begin where everything ought to be begun
that is, at the beginning. Nothing worth calling good can or ever will be started full grown. The essential of any good is life, and the very body of created life, and essential to it, being its self operant, is growth. The larger start you make, the less room you leave for life to extend itself. You fill with the dead matter of your construction the places where assimilation ought to have its perfect work, building by a life-process, self-extending, and subserving the whole. Small beginnings with slow growings have time to root themselves thoroughly
I do not mean in place nor yet in social regard, but in wisdom. Such even prosper by failures, for their failures are not too great to be rectified without injury to the original idea. — George MacDonald

Sad-hearted, be at peace: the snowdrop lies Buried in sepulchre of ghastly snow; — 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

Some thinkers would feel sorely hampered if at liberty to use no forms but such as existed in nature, or to invent nothing save in accordance with the laws of the world of the senses; but
it must not therefore be imagined that they desire escape from the region of law. — George MacDonald

The next hour, the next moment, is as much beyond our grasp and as much in God's care, as that a hundred years away. Care for the next minute is just as foolish as care for the morrow, or for a day in the next thousand years - in neither can we do anything, in both God is doing everything. Those claims only of the morrow which have to be prepared today are of the duty of today: the moment which coincides with work to be done, is the moment to be minded; the next is nowhere till God has made it. — George MacDonald

Is it not time I lost a few things when I care for them so unreasonably? This losing of things is of the mercy of God: It comes to teach us to let them go. — George MacDonald

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

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

What a good thing, for instance, it was that one princess should sleep for a hundred years! Was she not saved from all the plague of young men who were not worthy of her? And did not she come awake exactly at the right moment when the right prince kissed her? For my part, I cannot help wishing a good many girls would sleep till just the same fate overtook them. It would be happier for them, and more agreeable to their friends. — George MacDonald

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. — George MacDonald

Whether the lightning bewildered me and made me take a false turn, I cannot tell; for the hardest thing to understand, in intellectual as well as moral mistakes, is - how we came to go wrong. — 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

... leaning with her back bowed into the back of the chair, her head hanging down and her hands in her lap, very miserable as she would say herself, not even knowing what she would like, except to go out and get very wet, catch a particularly nice cold and have to go to bed and take gruel. — George MacDonald

Difficulty adds to result, as the ramming of powder sends the bullet the further. — George MacDonald

Certainly work is not always required of a man. There is such a thing as a sacred idleness, the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected. — George MacDonald

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. — George MacDonald

But I don't quite understand, Father: is nobody your friend but the one that does something for you? — George MacDonald

It was a profound pleasure to her not to know what was coming next, provided some one whom she loved did. — George MacDonald

But I withhold my pen; for vain were the fancy, by treatise or sermon or poem or tale, to persuade a man to forget himself. He cannot if he would. Sooner will he forget the presence of a raging tooth. There is no forgetting of ourselves but in the finding of our deeper, our true self -- God's idea of us when he devised us -- the Christ in us. Nothing but that self can displace the false, greedy, whining self, of which, most of us are so fond and proud. And that self no man can find for himself; seeing of himself he does not even know what to search for. — George MacDonald

The necessary unlikeness between the creator and the created holds within it the equally necessary likeness of the thing made to him who makes it, and so of the work of the made to the work of the maker ... The imagination of man is made in the image of the imagination of God. — 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

The truly wise talk little about religion and are not given to taking sides on doctrinal issues. When they hear people advocating or opposing the claims of this or that party in the church, they turn away with a smile such as men yield to the talk of children. They have no time, they would say, for that kind of thing. They have enough to do in trying to faithfully practice what is beyond dispute. — George MacDonald

It is not where one is, but in what direction he is going. — George MacDonald

It is not the hysterical alone for whom the great dash of cold water is good.
All who dream life, instead of living it,
require some similar shock. — George MacDonald

He who seeks the Father more than anything He can give, is likely to have what he asks, for he is not likely to ask amiss. — George MacDonald

She had left his church and gone to the missionars, and there found more spiritual nourishment than Mr Cowie's sermons could supply, but she could not forget his kisses, or his gentle words, or his shilling, for by their means, although she did not know it, Mr Cowie's self had given her a more confiding notion of God, a better feeling of his tenderness, than she could have had from all Mr Turnbull's sermons together. What equal gift could a man give? Was it not worth bookfuls of sound doctrine? — George MacDonald

Then let us be of one heart too, Dawtie!"
She was so accustomed to hear Andrew speak in figures, that sometimes she looked through and beyond his words. She did so now, and seeing nothing, stood perplexed.
"Willna ye, Dawtie?" said Andrew, holding out his hands.
"I dinna freely understand ye, An'rew!"
"Ye heavenly idiot!" cried Andrew. "Will ye be my wife, or will you no? — George MacDonald

In truth, they were not given to quarrelling. Many couples who love each other more, quarrel more, and with less politeness. — George MacDonald

Those Christians who are very strict in their observances, think a good deal more of the Sabbath than of man, a great deal more of the Bible than of the truth, and ten times more of their creed than of the will of God. Of course, if they heard anyone utter such words as I have just written, they would say he was and atheist. — George MacDonald

But this part of my dream, the most lovely of all, I can find no words to describe; nor can I even recall to my own mind the half of what I felt. I only know that something was given me then, some spiritual apprehension, to be again withdrawn, but to be given to us all, I believe, some day, out of his infinite love, and withdrawn no more. Every heart that had ever ached, or longed, or wandered, I knew was there, folded warm and soft, safe and glad. And it seemed in my dream that to know this was the crown of all my bliss - yes, even more than to be myself in my Father's arms. Awake, the thought of multitude had always oppressed my mind; it did not then. From the comfort and joy it gave me to see them there, I seemed then first to know how my own heart had ached for them. — George MacDonald

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

Sorrow herself will reveal one day that she was only the beneficent shadow of Joy. Will Evil ever show herself the beneficent shadow of Good? — George MacDonald

He did not torture himself with vain attempts to hold his brain as a mirror to his heart, that he might read his heart there. The heart is deaf and dumb and blind, but it has more in it - more life and blessedness, more torture and death - than any poor knowledge-machine of a brain can understand, or even delude itself into the fancy of understanding. — George MacDonald

The whole trouble is that we won't let God help us. — George MacDonald

Never be discouraged because good things get on so slowly here; and never fail daily to do that good which lies next to your hand. — George MacDonald

For God alone is our salvation; to know him is salvation. He is in us all the time, else we could never move to seek him. — George MacDonald

What does it all mean?' I said.
'A good question,' he rejoined: 'nobody knows what anything is; a man can learn only what a thing means. Whether he do, depends on the use he is making of it. — George MacDonald

Of all things let us avoid the false refuge of a weary collapse, a hopeless yielding to things as they are. It is the life in us that is discontented: we need more of what is discontented, not more of the cause of its discontent. — George MacDonald

her - nobody but Sarah; — George MacDonald

One who not merely beholds the outward shows of things, but catches a glimpse of the soul that looks out of them, whose garment and revelation they are-if he be such, I say, he will stand, for more than a moment, speechless with something akin to that which made the morning stars sing together. — George MacDonald

Mary did not care a straw for the world besides. She was too much occupied with obedience to trouble her head about opinion, either her own or other people's. Not until a question comes puzzling and troubling us so as to paralyze the energy of our obedience is there any necessity for its solution, or any probability of finding a real one. A thousand foolish _doctrines_ may lie unquestioned in the mind, and never interfere with the growth or bliss of him who lives in active subordination of his life to the law of life: obedience will in time exorcise them, like many another worse devil. — George MacDonald

Do you think you love your children better than He who made them? Is not your love what it is because He put it into your heart first? Have you not often been cross with them? Sometimes unjust to them? Whence came the returning love that rose from unknown depths in your being, and swept away the anger and the injustice? You did not create that love. Probably you were not good enough to send for it by prayer. But it came. God sent it. He makes you love your children. — George MacDonald

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

Until you repent and believe afresh, believe in a nobler Christ, namely the Christ revealed by himself, and not the muffled form of something vaguely human and certainly not all divine, which the false interpretations of men have substituted for him, you will be, as, I repeat, you are, the main reason why faith is so scanty in the earth, and the enemy comes in like a flood. — George MacDonald

Here lies David Elginbrod
Have mercy on my soul, dear God,
As I would ye if I were God
And ye were David Elginbrod. — George MacDonald

what is the love of child, or mother, or dog, but the love of God, shining through another being - which is a being just because he shines through it. — George MacDonald

I do believe that when a man confesses to his neighbor and says he's sorry, he thinks more of him than he did before. You see, we all know we have done wrong, but we haven't usually confessed it. And it's a funny thing, but when the time comes when there's something he needs to repent of himself, he hesitates for fear of the shame of having to confess it. To me the shame lies in not confessing after you know you're in the wrong. — George MacDonald

Two people may be at the same spot in manners and behaviour, and yet one may be getting better, and the other worse, which is the greatest of differences that could possibly exist between them. — George MacDonald

How kind is weariness sometimes! It is like the Father's hand laid a little heavy on the heart to make it still. — George MacDonald

We die daily. Happy those who daily come to life as well. — George MacDonald

To know that she could not be near God in peace and love without fulfilling certain mental conditions - that he would not have her just as she was now, filled her with an undefined but terribly real misery ... — George MacDonald

It is the heart that is not sure of its God that is afraid to laugh in His presence. — George MacDonald

to teach is the best way to learn, but that the imperfect are the best teachers of the imperfect. — George MacDonald

A condition which of declension would indicate a devil, may of growth indicate a saint. — George MacDonald

Oh the folly of any mind that would explain God before obeying Him! That would map out the character of God instead of crying, Lord, what wouldst thou have me to do? — George MacDonald

When I look like this into the blue sky, it seems so deep, so peaceful, so full of a mysterious tenderness, that I could lie for centuries and wait for the dawning of the face of God out of the awe-inspiring loving-kindness. — George MacDonald

All about us, in earth and air, wherever the eye or ear can reach, there is a power ever breathing itself forth in signs, now in daisy, now in a wind-waft, a cloud, a sunset; a power that holds constant and sweetest relation with the dark and silent world within us. The same God who is in us, and upon whose tree we are the buds, if not yet the flowers, also is all about us- inside, the Spirit; outside, the Word. And the two are ever trying to meet in us ... — George MacDonald

The claim that hung over him haunted his very life, turning the currents of his thought into channels of speculation unknown before.
One day when these questions were fighting in his heart, all at once it seemed as if a soundless voice in the depth of his soul replied, "Thy soul, however it became known to itself, is from the pure heart of God."
And with the thought, the horizon of his life began to clear. — George MacDonald

Could we see things always as we have sometimes seen them - and as one day we must always see them, only far better - should we ever know dullness? Greatly as we might enjoy all forms of art, much as we might learn through the eyes and thoughts of other men, should we fly to these for deliverance from ennui, from any haunting discomfort? Should we not just open our own child-eyes, look upon the things themselves, and be consoled? — George MacDonald

The first thing a kindness deserves is acceptance, the second, transmission. — George MacDonald

There is hardly a limit to the knowledge and sympathy a man may have in respect of the finest things, and yet be a fool. Sympathy is not harmony. A man may be a poet even, and speak with the tongue of an angel, and yet be a very bad fool. — George MacDonald

I should not be surprised," said Mr. Graham, "that the day should come when men will refuse to believe in God simply on the ground of the apparent injustice of things. They would argue that there might be either an omnipotent being who did not care, or a good being who could not help, but that there could not be a being both all good and omnipotent or else he would never have suffered things to be as they are. — George MacDonald

A voice is in the wind I do not know
A meaning on the face of the high hills
Whose utterance I cannot comprehend.
A something is behind them: that is God. — George MacDonald

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

Mary was one who possessed power over her own spirit--rare gift, given to none but those who do something toward the taking of it. She was able in no small measure to order her own thoughts. Without any theory of self-rule, she yet ruled her Self. She was not one to slip about in the saddle, or let go the reins for a kick and a plunge or two. There was the thing that should be, and the thing that should not be; the thing that was reasonable, and the thing that was absurd. — George MacDonald

I am his, and he shall do with me just as he likes. — George MacDonald

There are thousands willing to do great things for one willing to do a small thing. — George MacDonald

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

A ghost grew out of the shadowy air,
And sat in the midst of her moony hair.

In her gleamy hair she sat and wept;
In the dreamful moon they lay and slept;

The shadows above, and the bodies below,
Lay and slept in the moonbeams slow.

And she sang, like the moan of an autumn wind
Over the stubble left behind. — George MacDonald

One of my greatest difficulties in consenting to think of religion was that I thought I should have to give up my beautiful thoughts and my love for the things God has made. But I find that the happiness springing from all things not in themselves sinful is much increased by religion. God is the God of the Beautiful - Religion is the love of the Beautiful, and Heaven is the Home of the Beautiful - -Nature is tenfold brighter in the Sun of Righteousness, and my love of Nature is more intense since I became a Christian - -if indeed I am one. God has not given me such thoughts and forbidden me to enjoy them. — George MacDonald

Well, papa, I sometimes wish you wouldn't explain things so much. I seem to understand you all the time you are preaching, but when I try the text afterwards by myself, I can't make anything of it, and I've forgotten every word you said about it." "Perhaps that is because you have no right to understand it." "I thought all Protestants had a right to understand every word of the Bible," she returned. "If they can, — George MacDonald

However strange it may well seem, to do one's duty will make anyone conceited who only does it sometimes. Those who do it always would as soon think of being conceited of eating their dinner as of doing their duty. What honest boy would pride himself on not picking pockets? — George MacDonald

When she went to church, nothing received her, nothing came near her, nothing brought her any message. Something was done, she supposed, that ought to be done - something she had no inclination to dispute, no interest in questioning; a certain good power called God, required from people, in return for the gift of existence, the attention of going to church; therefore she went sometimes. — George MacDonald

Nobody knows what anything is; a man can only learn what a thing means! — George MacDonald

I hurried away to the white hall of Phantasy heedless of the innumerable forms of beauty that crowded my way: these might cross my eyes, but the unseen filled my brain. — George MacDonald

If God were not only to hear our prayers, as he does ever and always, but to answer them as we want them answered, he would not be God our Saviour but the ministering genius of our destruction. — George MacDonald

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

Wherever there is anything to love, there is beauty in some form. — George MacDonald

She had now no inclination to trouble Gibbie's heart with what men call the plan of salvation. It was enough to her to find that he followed her Master. Being in the light she understood the light, and had no need of system, either true or false, to explain it to her. — George MacDonald

It is because the young cannot recognize the youth of the aged, and the old will not acknowledge the experience of the young, that they repel each other. — George MacDonald

That God only whom Christ reveals to the humble seeker, can ever satisfy human soul. — George MacDonald

I am always hearing ... the sound of a far off song. I do not exactly know where it is, or what it means; and I don't hear much of it, only the odour of its music, as it were, flitting across the great billows of the ocean outside this air in which I make such a storm; but what I do hear, is quite enough to make me able to bear the cry from the drowning ship. So it would you if you could hear it.'
'No it wouldn't,' returned Diamond stoutly. 'For they wouldn't hear the music of the far-away song; and if they did, it wouldn't do them any good. You see you and I are not going to be drowned, and so we might enjoy it.'
'But you have never heard the psalm, and you don't know what it is like. Somehow, I can't say how, it tells me that all is right; that it is coming to swallow up all the cries ... It wouldn't be the song it seems if it did not swallow up all their fear and pain too, and set them singing it themselves with all the rest. — George MacDonald

A perfect faith would lift us absolutely above fear — George MacDonald

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

On Good Friday Jesus died But rose again at Eastertide ... Lord, teach us to understand that your Son died to save us not from suffering but from ourselves, not from injustice ... but from being unjust. He died that we might live - but live as he lives, by dying as he died who died to himself. — George MacDonald

But in truth there was more expression in the flower than was yet in the face. The flower expressed what God was thinking of when He made it; the face, what the girl was thinking of her self. When she ceased thinking of herself, then, like the flower, she would show what God was thinking of when he made her. — George MacDonald

Like some of the rest of us, she never reflected how balefully her evil mood might operate; and that all things work for good in the end, will not cover those by whom come the offenses. Another night's rest, it is true, sent the evil mood to sleep again for a time, but did not exorcise it; for there are demons that go not out without prayer, and a bad temper is one of them--a demon as contemptible, mean-spirited, and unjust, as any in the peerage of hell--much petted, nevertheless, and excused, by us poor lunatics who are possessed by him. — George MacDonald

On a summer morning she woke to a sense of returning health. She had been lying like a waste shore, at low spring-tide, covered with dry seaweeds, withered jelly-fishes, and a multitudinous life that gasped for the ocean: at last the cook washing throb of the great sea of bliss, whose fountain is the heart of God, had stolen upon her consciousness, and she knew that she lived. — George MacDonald

Pious people in general seem to regard religion as a necessary accompaniment of life; to Wingfold it was life itself; with him religion must be all, or could be nothing. — George MacDonald

The doing of things from duty is but a stage on the road to the kingdom of truth and love. — George MacDonald

You would not think any duty small, If you yourself were great. — George MacDonald

He was dimly angry with himself, he did not know why. It was that he had struck his wife. He had forgotten it, but was miserable about it, notwithstanding. And this misery was the voice of the great Love that had made him and his wife and the baby and Diamond, speaking in his heart, and telling him to be good. For that great Love speaks in the most wretched and dirty hearts; only the tone of its voice depends on the echoes of the place in which it sounds. On Mount Sinai, it was thunder; in the cabman's heart it was misery; in the soul of St John it was perfect blessedness. — George MacDonald

If we do not die to ourselves, we cannot live to God, andhe that does not live to God, is dead. — George MacDonald

He rebelled against the highest as if the highest were the lowest - as if the power that could create a heart for bliss, might gloat on its sufferings. — George MacDonald

Our minds are small because they are faithless,' I said to myself.
'If we had faith in God our hearts would share in His greatness and
peace for we should not then be shut up in ourselves, but would walk
abroad in him — George MacDonald

When a man dreams his own dream, he is the sport of his dream; when Another gives it him, that Other is able to fulfill it. — George MacDonald

GGibbie never thought about himself, therefore was there wide room for the entrance of the spirit. Does the questioning thought arise to any reader: How could a man be conscious of bliss without the thought of himself? I answer the doubt: When a man turns to look at himself, that moment the glow of the loftiest bliss begins to fade; the pulsing fire-flies throb paler in the passionate night; an unseen vapour steams up from the marsh and dims the star-crowded sky and the azure sea; and the next moment the very bliss itself looks as if it had never been more than a phosphorescent gleam
the summer lightning of the brain. For then the man sees himself but in his own dim mirror, whereas ere he turned to look in that, he knew himself in the absolute clarity of God's present thought out-bodying him. — George MacDonald