J. E. H. MacDonald Quotes

People must believe what they can, and those who believe more must not be hard upon those who believe less. I doubt if you would have believed it all yourself if you hadn't seen some of it.

Blessed be the true life that the pauses between its throbs are not death!

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.

A true friend is forever a friend.

As no scripture is of private interpretation, so is there no feeling in a human heart which exists in that heart alone - which is not, in some form or degree, in every human heart.

Were I asked, what is a fairytale? I should reply, Read Undine: that is a fairytale.

A Baby Sermon- The lighting and thunder, they go and they come: But the stars and the stillness are always at home

If both Church and fairy-tale belong to humanity, they may occasionally cross circles, without injury to either.

I only know when I don't know a thing. My uncle has taught me that wisdom lies in that.

It's right to trust in God; but, if you don't stand to your halliards your craft'll miss stays, and your faith'll be blown out of the bolt-ropes in the turn of a marlinspike.

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.

No one is likely to remember what is entirely uninteresting to him.

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.

Only because uplifted in song, was I able to endure the blaze of the dawn.

You will be dead so long as you refuse to die.

Ambition is but the evil shadow of aspiration.

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.

What would the Living One have me do?

Will is not unfrequently weakness.

It is only by loving a thing that you can make it yours.

Seeing is not believing - it is only seeing.

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

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.

Books are but dead bodies to you, and a library nothing but a catacomb!

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.

As I said to Speedicut, it's hell in the diplomatic.

If there be music in my reader, I would gladly wake it.

Why should my love be powerless to help another?

One of the grandest things in having rights is, that though they are your rights you may give them up

Alas! how easily things go wrong!

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.

It needs brains to be a real fool.

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.

Our life is no dream; but it ought to become one, and perhaps will.

In times of horror and torment prayer is a great thing Nobody answers But at least it stops you from thinking.

Put your characters where they are the most interesting.

Rejection is nature's way of telling you to write a better book.

Every obedience is not easy. This is for Jesus Christ. He deserves everything!