Quotes from George 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.

the road to the next duty is the only straight one

Who can give a man this, his own name?

Self will come to life even in the slaying of self; but there is ever something deeper and stronger than it, which will emerge at last from the unknown abysses of the soul: will it be as a solemn gloom, burning with eyes? or a clear morning after the rain? or a smiling child, that finds itself nowhere, and everywhere?

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.

You see when he forgot his Self his mother took care of his Self, and loved and praised his Self. Our own praises poison our Selves, and puff and swell them up, till they lose all shape and beauty, and become like great toadstools. But the praises of father or mother do our Selves good, and comfort them and make them beautiful. They never do them any harm. If they do any harm, it comes of our mixing some of our own praises with them, and that turns them nasty and slimy and poisonous.

Thy will be done. I yield up everything. 'The life is more than meat' -- then more than health; 'The body more than raiment' -- then more than wealth; The hairs I made not, thou art numbering. Thou art my life--I the brook, thou the spring. Because thine eyes are open, I can see; Because thou art thyself, 'tis therefore I am me.

For the bliss of the animals lies in this, that, on their lower level, they shadow the bliss of those -- few at any moment on the earth -- who do not look before and after, and pine for what is not, but live in the holy carelessness of the eternal now. Gibbie by no means belonged to the higher order, was as yet, indeed, not much better than a very blessed little animal.

There is little hope of the repentance and redemption of certain some until they have committed one or another of the many wrong things of which they are daily, through a course of unrestrained selfishness, becoming more and more capable.

Now Gibbie had been honoured with the acquaintance of many dogs, and the friendship of most of them, for a lover of humanity can hardly fail to be a lover of caninity.

The nearer persons come to each other, the greater is the room and the more are the occasions for courtesy; but just in proportion to their approach the gentleness of most men diminishes.

Where was God? In him and his question.

She was in utter darkness once more. But when we are following the light, even its extinction is a guide.

The library, although duly considered in many alterations of the house and additions to it, had nevertheless, like an encroaching state, absorbed one room after another until it occupied the greater part of the ground floor.

Many feelings are simply too good to last--using the phrase not in the unbelieving sense in which it is generally used, but to express the fact that intensity and endurance cannot coexist in the human frame. But the virtue of a mood depends by no means on its immediate presence. Like any other experience, it may be believed in, and, in its absence, which leaves the mind free to contemplate it, works even more good than its presence

Of all teachings that which presents a far distant God is the nearest to absurdity. Either there is none, or he is nearer to every one of us than our nearest consciousness of self. An unapproachable divinity is the veriest of monsters, the most horrible of human imaginations.

He never married. But he wrote a good book.

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

There is this difference between the growth of some human beings and that of others: in the one case it a continuous dying, in the other a continuous resurrection.

Nobody who has not been tried knows how difficult it is; but whoever has come out well of it - and those who do not overcome never do come out of it - always looks back with horror, not on what she has come through, but on the very idea of the possibility of having failed and being still the same miserable creature as before.

Afflictions are but the shadow of His wings.

From the neglect of a real duty, she became the slave of a false one.

But a man may then imagine in your work what he pleases, what you never meant! Not what he pleases, but what he can.

It may be an infinitely less evil to murder a man than to refuse to forgive him. The former may be the act of a moment of passion: the latter is the heart's choice. It is spiritual murder, the worst, to hate, to brood over the feeling that excludes, that, in our microcosm, kills the image, the idea of the hated. [13]