George MacDonald Quotes
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.
No; but you came, and found the riddles waiting for you! Indeed you are yourself the only riddle. What you call riddles are truths, and seem riddles because you are not true.
The ideal is the only absolute real; and it must become the real in the individual life as well, however impossible they may count it who never tried it.
Common people, whether lords or shop-keepers, are slow to understand that possession, whether in the shape of birth or lands or money or intellect, is a small affair in the difference between men.
I rose as from the death that wipes out the sadness of life, and then dies itself in the new morrow.
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.
Never was there a more injurous mistake than to say it was thebusiness only of the clergy to care for souls.
We have to do with God, to whom no one can look without the need of being good waking up in his heart; to think about God is to begin to be good.
What distressed me most - more even than my own folly - was the perplexing question, How can beauty and ugliness dwell so near?
I saw thee ne'er before; I see thee never more; But love, and help, and pain, beautiful one, Have made thee mine, till all my years are done.
Somehow, I can't say how, it tells me that all is right; that it is coming to swallow up all cries.
For this, deep waters whelm the fruitful lea, Wars ravage, famine wastes, plague withers, nor Shall cease till men have chosen the better part.
One of the grandest things in having rights is, that though they are your rights you may give them up
It is to the man who is trying to live, to the man who is obedient to the word of the Master, that the word of the Master unfolds itself.
There is no cheating in nature and the simple unsought feelings of the soul. There must be a truth involved in it, though we may but in part lay hold of the meaning.
She would wonder what had hurt her when she found her face wet with tears, and then would wonder how she could have been hurt without knowing it.
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.
Until a man has love, it is well he should have fear. So long as there are wild beasts about, it is better to be afraid than secure.
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.
In times of horror and torment prayer is a great thing Nobody answers But at least it stops you from thinking.
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.
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.
I want to help you to grow as beautiful as God meant you to be when He thought of you first.
Seeing is not believing, it is only seeing, ”George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin
But we believe – nay, Lord we only hope, That one day we shall thank thee perfectlyFor pain and hope and all that led or droveUs back into the bosom of thy love.
You have tasted of death now, ” said the old man. “Is it good?” “It is good, ” said Mossy. “It is better than life.”“No, ” said the old man: “it is only more life.
I do not write for children, but for the childlike, whether of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.
his mother, who had never been able to manage him, sent him to school to get rid of him, lamented his absence till he returned, then writhed and fretted under his presence until again he went.
We stood there for a full half hour, like so many scarecrows, while they jeered at us from a distance, and one or two of us were shot down.
Some dreams, some poems, some musical phrases, some pictures, wake feelings such as one never had before, new in colour and form—spiritual sensations, as it were, hitherto unproved
I think little of people who will deny their history because it doesn't present the picture they would like.
There are as many kinds of anger as there are of the sunsets with which they ought to end