George MacDonald Quotes
Anything large enough for a wish to light upon, is large enough to hang a prayer upon.
Ah, what is it we send up thither, where our thoughts are either a dissonance or a sweetness and a grace?
I do not myself believe there is any misfortune. What men call such is merely the shadowside of a good.
It is when people do wrong things wilfully that they are the more likely to do them again.
In the hearts of witches, love and hate lie close together and often tumble over each other.
What I would say is this, that the light is not blinding because God would hide, but because the truth is too glorious for our vision.
There's a point, you know, where treachery is so complete and unashamed that it becomes statesmanship.
Division has done more to hide Christ from the view of men than all the infidelity that has ever been spoken.
We are often unable to tell people what they need to know, because they want to know something else, and would therefore only misunderstand what we said.
...though I cannot promise to take you home," said North Wind, as she sank nearer and nearer to the tops of the houses, "I can promise you it will be all right in the end. You will get home somehow.
Every soul has a landscape that changes with the wind that sweeps the sky, with the clouds that return after its rain.
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.
The part of the philanthropist is indeed a dangerous one; and the man who would do his neighbour good must first study how not to do him evil, and must begin by pulling the beam out of his own eye.
But it is not the rich man only who is under the dominion of things; they too are slaves who, having no money, are unhappy from the lack of it.
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.
We should teach our children to think no more of their bodies when dead than they do of their hair when cut off, or of their old clothes when they have done with them.
A condition which of declension would indicate a devil, may of growth indicate a saint.
It matters little where a man may be at this moment; the point is whether he is growing.
You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it himself. (Quoted by C.S.Lewis in Mere Christianity)
All that is made seems planless to the darkened mind, because there are more plans than it looked for...There seems no plan because it is all plan: there seems no centre because it is all centre.
If we will but let our God and Father work His will with us, there can be no limit to His enlargement of our existence
Her face was fair and pretty, with eyes like two bits of night sky, each with a star dissolved in the blue.
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.
The possession of wealth is, as it were, prepayment, and involves an obligation of honor to the doing of correspondent work.
But, for as cold and wretched as it looks, the sun has not forsaken it. He has only drawn away from it a little, for good reasons, one of which is that we may learn that we cannot do without him.
A fairytale is not an allegory. There may be allegory in it, but it is not an allegory.
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.
I watched her departure, as one watches a sunset. She went like a radiance through the dark wood, which was henceforth bright to me, from simply knowing that such a creature was in it.
Her heart - like every heart, if only its fallen sides were cleared away - was an inexhaustible fountain of love: she loved everything she saw.
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.
As Christ is the blossom of humanity, so the blossom of every man is Christ perfected in him.
To try too hard to make people good is one way to make them worse. The only way to make them good is to be good, remembering well the beam and the mote.
I am an optimistic fatalist. This world and all its beginnings will pass on into something better.
If there be a God and one has never sought him, it will be small consolation to remember that one could not get proof of his existence.
