Macdonald Quotes & Sayings

She had not yet such a love of wisdom as to be able to bear with folly. The foolish and weak are the most easily disgusted with folly and weakness which is not of their own sort, and are the last to make allowances for them. — George MacDonald

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. — George MacDonald

The reason we have few friends in adversity, is, because we have no true ones in prosperity. — Norm MacDonald

The biggest obstacle to making Christ magnificent is the refusal to make yourself small. — James MacDonald

God, and not woman, is the heart of all. But she, as priestess of the visible earth, Holding the key, herself most beautiful, Had come to him, and flung the portals wide. He entered in: each beauty was a glass That gleamed the woman back upon his view. — George MacDonald

We also notice that Paul was focused. He had a clear goal, and he would not veer to the right or to the left from it. We can't help but wonder how many emails Paul would have skipped over, or how current he would have been with the news of the day, or even how vigorously he would be rooting for his favorite sports teams or athletes. Our ability to have information quickly is both a blessing and a curse. Our ability to function in a fast-paced society sometimes encourages us to focus on nothing of lasting value, just running from one temporal thing to the next. Just — James MacDonald

The first principle of solid wisdom is discretion, without it all the erudition of life is merely bagatelle. — Norm MacDonald

Similarly, there are multitudes who lose their lives pondering what they ought to believe, while something lies at their door waiting to be done, and rendering it impossible for him who makes it wait, ever to know what to believe. — George MacDonald

Letty's first false step was here: she said to herself _I can not_, and did not. She lacked courage--a want in her case not much to be wondered at, but much to be deplored, for courage of the true sort is just as needful to the character of a woman as of a man. — George MacDonald

That is the flaw in my personality. Vanity. And your flaw is sentimentality. They are the flaws which will inevitably kill us both. — John D. 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

George MacDonald gives me renewed strength during times of trouble
times when I have seen people tempted to deny God
when he says, The Son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like his. — Madeleine L'Engle

When you are broken, you run. But you don't always run away. Sometimes, helplessly, you run towards. — Helen Macdonald

Never, my little one, hide anything from those that love you. Never let anything that makes itself a nest in your heart, grow into a secret, for then at once it will begin to eat a hole in it. — George MacDonald

It's no good telling somebody they're trying too hard. It's very much like ordering a child to go stand in a corner for a half hour and never once think about elephants. — John D. MacDonald

You think you're safe. Until you see a picture like that. And then you know you'll always be a slave to the present because the present is more powerful than the past, no matter how long ago the present happened. — Ann-Marie MacDonald

I have no inhibitions about smoking or drinking, but I think too much of my voice to place it in jeopardy. I have spent many good years in training and cultivating it, and I would be foolish to do anything which might impair or ruin it. — Jeanette MacDonald

Faith is active confidence in God. — James MacDonald

Comedy is surprises, so if you're intending to make somebody laugh and they don't laugh, that's funny. — Norm MacDonald

She didn't look like any motel manager I had ever seen. More likely an actress who hadn't quite made the grade down south, or a very successful amateur tart on the verge of turning pro. Whatever her business was, there had to be sex in it. She was as full of sex as a grape is full of juice, and so young that it hadn't begun to sour. — Ross Macdonald

Somewhere on the bottom of the Pacific is a copy of The Forsyte Saga I heaved overboard one afternoon. I very quickly saw what was wrong with it; Galsworthy was a gentleman, and no gentleman would ever write a good book. — MacDonald Harris

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

I could not help feeling a little annoyed, (which was very foolish, I know,) — George MacDonald

I can actually feel the interior body of a dancer. I have the ability to capture a split second ... I want you to be hit with whatever the essence is of this sculpture. — Richard MacDonald

The causing of the little ones to offend hangs a fearful woe about the neck of the causer. — George MacDonald

Endurance must conquer, where force could not reach. — George MacDonald

I know that there are people who believe that if they get to the stage where life is absolutely intolerable because of pain and indignity ... they would like to end their life before nature intended, and we think they should have the choice to do so. — Margo MacDonald

Twilight-kind, oppressing the heart as with a condensed atmosphere of dreamy undefined love and longing. — George MacDonald

She was simply a young woman who believed that the man called Jesus Christ is a real person, such as those represent him who profess to have known him; and she therefore believed the man himself - believed that, when he said a thing, he entirely meant it, knowing it to be true; believed, therefore, that she had no choice but do as he told her. That man was the servant of all; therefore, to regard any honest service as degrading would be, she saw, to deny Christ, to call the life of creation's hero a disgrace. Nor was he the first servant; he did not of himself choose his life; the Father gave it him to live--sent him to be a servant, because he, the Father, is the first and greatest servant of all. — 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

You have to start knowing yourself so well that you begin to know other people. A piece of us is in every person we can ever meet. — John D. MacDonald

I opened the door of her car and helped her in. Her breast leaned against my shoulder heavily. I moved back. I preferred a less complicated kind of pillow, stuffed with feathers, not memories and frustrations. — Ross Macdonald

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

I did not want to quarrel with her, although I thought her both presumptuous and rude. — George MacDonald

Graff was floating on his back in the pool when George Wall and I went outside. His brown belly swelled above its surface like the humpback of a Galapagos tortoise. Mrs. Graff, fully clothed, was sitting by herself in a sunny corner. Her black dress and black hair seemed to annul the sunlight. Her face and body had the distinction that takes the place of beauty in people who have suffered long and hard. — Ross Macdonald

You might not think it now, but if you're one of God's children, you're going to figure it out by the end of your life God is good. — James MacDonald

You know what just seeing him did to me." "I know. Lois, he just isn't that ominous. Evil, but not ominous. Sly, but not prescient. Once he is off balance, he will stay off balance, and fall heavily. And the law will gather him in. — John D. MacDonald

Now I want you to think that in life troubles will come, which seem as if they never would pass away. The night and storm look as if they would last forever; but the calm and the morning cannot be stayed; the storm in its very nature is transient. The effort of nature, as that of the human heart, ever is to return to its repose, for God is Peace. — George MacDonald

What happens to the mind after bereavement makes no sense until later... what the mind does after losing one's father isn't just to pick new fathers from the world, but pick new selves to love them with. — Helen Macdonald

In short, a man must be set free from the sin he is , which makes him do the sin he does . — George MacDonald

Tourists and transients lived in hotels and motels along the waterfront. Behind them a belt of slums lay ten blocks deep, where the darker half of the population lived and died. On the other side of the tracks - the tracks were there - the business section wore its old Spanish facades like icing on a stale cake. — Ross Macdonald

On the Ridgeway path, aged nine or ten, was where for the first time I realized the power a person might feel by aligning themselves to deep history. Only much later did I understand these intimations of history had their own, darker, history. The chalk country-cult rested on a presumption of organic connections to a landscape, a sense of belonging sanctified through an appeal to your own imagined lineage. That chalk downloads held their national, as well as natural, histories. And it was much later, too, that I realized that these myths hurt. That they work to wipe away other cultures, other histories, other ways of loving, working and being in a landscape. How they tiptoe towards darkness. — Helen Macdonald

One of the good things that come of a true marriage is, that there is one face on which changes come without your seeing them; or rather there is one face which you can still see the same, through all the shadows which years have gathered upon it. — George MacDonald

We shall never be able to effect physical disarmament until we have succeeded in effecting moral disarmament. — Ramsay MacDonald

You ever see 'The Dating Game'? That's a weird game show. The prize on that show: another contestant. Talk about cheap. — Norm MacDonald

If all you are doing is spending time with the struggling members of your church and you are not building proactively into your church's culture, and you are being shortsighted and limiting the effectiveness of your ministry. — James MacDonald

The biblical counselor must always remember that the ROOT problem is deeper than skin; it is sin. The ultimate cure is not culture, but Christ. — James MacDonald

When we ask people what they want in church instead of giving them what they were created to long for, we play in the very idolatry that church was created to dismantle. — James MacDonald

Our Lord speaks of many coming up to His door confident of admission, whom He yet sends away. Faith is obedience, not confidence. — George MacDonald

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

For a while I didn't want to look at the men and their hawks any more and my eyes slipped to the white panels of cut light in the branches behind them. Then I walked to the hedge where the hawk had made her kill. Peered inside. Deep in the muddled darkness six copper pheasant feathers glowed in a cradle of blackthorn. Reaching through the thorns I picked them free, one by one, tucked the hand that held them into my pocket, and cupped the feathers in my closed fist as if I were holding a moment tight inside itself. It was death I had seen. — Helen Macdonald

God's holiness ... puts everything and everyone in their rightful place. — James MacDonald

Turning to him, Spurgeon said, If you had gone up the way you came down, you could have come down the way you went up. — James MacDonald

There is only one argument for doing something; the rest are arguments for doing nothing — Francis Macdonald Cornford

Sin does not remain a contented servant; it seeks to seize and master its participants. — James MacDonald

In the windowless tomb of a blind mother, in the dead of the night, under feeble rays of a lamp in an alabaster globe, a girl came into the darkness with a wail. — George MacDonald

Outside the gates of the finca, watching the passing rows of tin-roofed shacks which represented the residential section of San Francisco de Paula, I began to think about The Old Man and the Sea, and I realized it was Ernest's counterattack against those who had assaulted him for Across the River. It was an absolutely perfect counterattack and I envisioned a row of snickering carpies bearing the likenesses of Dwight Macdonald and Louis Kronenberger and E.B. White, who in the midst of cackling, "Through! Washed Up! Kaput!" suddenly grab their groins and keel over. It is a rather elementary military axiom that he who attacks must anticipate the counterattack, but the critics, poor boys, would never make General Staff. As Ernest once said, "One battle doesn't make a campaign but critics treat one book, good or bad, like a whole goddamn war. — A. E. Hotchner

Then I remembered that night is the fairies' day, and the moon their sun; and I thought - Everything sleeps and dreams now: when the night comes, it will be different. — George MacDonald

How many who love never come nearer than to behold each other as in a mirror; seem to know and yet never know the inward life; never enter the other soul; and part at last, with but the vaguest notion of the universe on the borders of which they have been hovering for years? — George MacDonald

When stories are not told, we risk losing our way. — Ann-Marie MacDonald

I don't think you have any control over who you are-it just happens. Sometimes in the morning I wake up and don't know who I am. I have to get out of bed and open the closet door, and then I think, oh yes, I'm the girl in the red dress. — MacDonald Harris

God pours out his choicest blessings on those who are anxious that nothing shall stick to their hands. Individuals who value the rainy day above the present agony of the world will get no blessing from God. — William MacDonald

The thief you must fear the most is not the one who steals mere things. — Ann-Marie MacDonald

Vast flocks of fieldfares netted the sky, turning it to something strangely like a sixteenth-century sleeve sewn with pearls. — Helen Macdonald

began to talk about the parish. — George MacDonald

Depression is anger slowed down; panic is grief speeded up. — Ann-Marie MacDonald

It is the work of the Canadian artist to paint or play or write in such a way that life will be enlarged for himself and his fellow man. The painter will look around him ... and finding everything good, will strive to communicate that feeling through a portrayal of the essentials of sunlight, or snow, or tree or tragic cloud, or human face, according to his power and individuality. — J. E. H. MacDonald

But he remembered that even if she did box his ears, he musn't box hers again, for she was a girl, and all that boys must do, if girls are rude, is to go away and leave them. — George MacDonald

By fall, they can read. It happened by osmosis, the way it ought to: after they have spent several months on Daddy's lap, following his spoken words with their eyes and pretending to read, their comes a day when they no longer have to pretend. — Ann-Marie MacDonald

The beginning of wisdom is the knowledge of folly. — Norm MacDonald

All change begins with a change of mind the Bible calls repentance. Repentance is detecting and destroying the rationalizations that led to me checking the sinful choice box in the first place. Repentance is what every biblical prophet was calling for because that is where a man begins to move from depravity to quality. Read the Old Testament and you'll notice the nonstop echo of calls for repentance. Ezekiel announced, Therefore I will judge you, O house of Israel, every one according to his ways, declares the Lord GOD. Repent and turn from all your transgressions, lest iniquity be your ruin. — James MacDonald

But more impressive than the facts and figures as to height, width, age, etc., are the entrancing beauty and tranquility that pervade the forest, the feelings of peace, awe and reverence that it inspires. — 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

It doesn't matter what has happened, better things are coming. God's plan produces hope in me. — James MacDonald

But I say, walk by the Spirit, and you will not gratify the desires of the flesh. — James MacDonald

I am an emptiness for Thee to fill; my soul a cavern for Thy sea — George MacDonald

Do not lower the standard or cater to the worldly laxness of the average Christian by making the way in easy. Make sure that everyone who joins fully understands his duties and obligations and is willing, in Christ's strength, to undertake them. — Isabella MacDonald Alden

And we had met at last in this same cave of greenery, while the summer night hung round us heavy with love, and the odours that crept through the silence from the sleeping woods were the only signs of an outer world that invaded our solitude. — George MacDonald

Now it stands to reason, mister, any damn fool stares into the sun long enough, he'll end up seeing exactly what some other damn fool tells him he's going to see. — John D. MacDonald

I like to do talk show appearances where I get to just be myself, and I do stand-up where I can completely be myself. That's what I've always loved the most, of anything. — Norm 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

Holy Spirit of God, thank You for filling my life with You. You are in control of all that I am - my thoughts, my actions, my words, and my feelings. Thank You, Spirit of God. I am now living under the downpour of Your power and strength and blessing, and I thank You for the riches of Your mercy. In the precious name of Jesus. Amen. — James MacDonald

But now Cathy had created the restlessness, the indignation, the beginnings of that shameful need to clamber aboard my spavined white steed, knock the rust off the armor, tilt the crooked old lance and shout huzzah. Sleep immediately followed decision. — John D. MacDonald

No one can say he is himself, until first he knows that he is, and then what himself is. In fact, nobody is himself, and himself is nobody. — George MacDonald

The hawk is on my fist. Thirty ounces of death in a feathered jacket; a being whose world is drawn in plots and vectors that pull her towards lives' ends. — Helen Macdonald

A magpie flies like a frying pan!'8 he could write, with the joy of discovering something new in the world. And it is that joy, that childish delight in the lives of creatures other than man, that I love most in White. He was a complicated man, and an unhappy one. But he knew also that the world was full of simple miracles. — Helen Macdonald

The two pillars of 'political correctness' are, a) willful ignorance, and b) a steadfast refusal to face the truth. — George MacDonald Fraser

Pulp Fiction is a, uh, gritty, urban satire. Pump Friction is a uh-uh, a bunch of uh, dudes and ladies having dirty sex. — Norm MacDonald

All the stories and poems and letters and oracles and wisdom verses of God's Word, like individual instruments in a great orchestra, serve THE WHOLE story. — James MacDonald

There is no leveller like Christianity - but it levels by lifting to a lofty table-land, accessible only to humility. He only who is humble can rise, and rising lift. — George MacDonald

I recognized the handwriting, and my heart gave a skip; when I opened it I got a turn, for it began, 'To my beloved Hector,' and I thought, by God she's cheating on me, and has sent me the wrong letter by mistake. But in the second line was a reference to Achilles, and another to Ajax, so I understood she was just addressing me in terms which she accounted fitting for a martial paladin; she knew no better. It was a common custom at that time, in the more romantic females, to see their soldier husbands and sweethearts as Greek heroes, instead of the whore-mongering, drunken clowns most of them were. However, the Greek heroes were probably no better, so it was not far off the mark. — George MacDonald Fraser

Ambition is but the evil shadow of aspiration. — George MacDonald

The things she sees are uninteresting to her. Irrelevant. Until there's a clatter of wings. We both look up. There's a pigeon, a woodpigeon, sailing down to roost in a lime tree above us. Time slows. The air thickens and the hawk is transformed. It's as if all her weapons systems were suddenly engaged. Red cross-hairs. She stands on her toes and cranes her neck. This. This flightpath. This thing, she thinks. This is fascinating. Some part of the hawk's young brain has just worked something out, and it has everything to do with death. — Helen Macdonald

We treat the crime capital of the United States as if it was a second Disneyland, smelling like roses, a great place to take the family or hold a convention. — Ross Macdonald

There are a great many more good things than bad things to do. — George MacDonald

I am pretty sure that if she had been one of us, that is, one of his own, he would have taken sharper measures with her; but he said we must never attempt to treat other people's children as our own, for they are not our own. We did not love them enough, he said, to make severity safe either for them or for us. — George MacDonald

Surely this youth will not serve our ends,' said I, 'for he weeps.' "The old woman smiled. 'Past tears are present strength,' said she. "'Oh!' said my brother, 'I saw you weep once over an eagle you shot.' "'That was because it was so like you, brother,' I replied; 'but indeed, this youth may have better cause for tears than that - I was wrong.' "'Wait — George MacDonald

To cease to wonder is to fall plumb-down from the childlike to the commonplace - the most undivine of all moods intellectual. Our nature can never be at home among things that are not wonderful to us. — George MacDonald

Her dark eyes were like twin entrances to two deep caves. Nothing lived in those caves. Maybe something had, once upon a time. There were piles of picked bones back in there, some scribbling on the walls, and some grey ash where the fires had been. — John D. MacDonald

I'm as religious as the next man - which is to say I'll keep in with the local parson for form's sake and read the lessons on feast-days because my tenants expect it, but I've never been fool enough to confuse religion with belief in God. That's where so many clergymen ... go wrong — George MacDonald Fraser