Quotes from George MacDonald

for nothing is ever so mischievous in its own place as it is out of it;

It is as necessary for a poor man to give away, as for a rich man. Many poor men are more devoted worshipers of Mammon than some rich men.

His likeness to Christ is the truth of a man, even as the perfect meaning of a flower is the truth of a flower…. As Christ is the blossom of humanity, so the blossom of every man is the Christ perfected in him.

I lost myself, and if I hadn't found the beautiful lady, I should never have found myself.

It matters little where a man may be at this moment; the point is whether he is growing.

Why know the name of a thing when the thing itself you do not know? Whose work is it but your own to open your eyes? But indeed the business of the universe is to make such a fool of you that you will know yourself for one, and so begin to be wise!" But

The necessary unlikeness between the creator and the created holds within it the equally necessary likeness of the thing made to him who makes it, and so of the work of the made to the work of the maker... The imagination of man is made in the image of the imagination of God.

Indeed, a man is rather being thought than thinking, when a new thought arises in his mind.

whoever is diligent will soon be cheerful

The very fact that anything can die, implies the existence of something that cannot die; which must either take to itself another form, as when the seed that is sown dies, and arises again; or, in conscious existence, may, perhaps, continue to lead a purely spiritual life.

For essential beauty is infinite, and, as the soul of Nature needs an endless succession of varied forms to embody her loveliness, countless faces of beauty springing forth, not any two the same, at every one of her heart-throbs, so the individual form needs an infinite change of its environments, to enable it to uncover all the phases of its loveliness.

Love makes everything lovely: hate concentrates itself on the one thing hated.

There are thousands willing to do great things for one willing to do a small thing.

But is it not rather that art rescues nature from the weary and sated regards of our senses, and the degrading injustice of our anxious everyday life, and, appealing to the imagination, which dwells apart, reveals Nature in some degree as she really is, and as she represents herself to the eye of the child, whose everyday life, fearless and unambitious, meets the true import of the wonder-teeming world around him, and rejoices therein without questioning?

With a fiction it was the same. Mine was the whole story. For I took the place of the character who was most like myself, and his story was mine; until, grown weary with the life of years condensed in an hour, or arrived at my deathbed, or the end of the volume, I would awake, with a sudden bewilderment, to the consciousness of my present life, recognising the walls and roof around me, and finding I joyed or sorrowed only in a book.

The secret of your own heart you can never know; but you can know Him who knows its secret.

Now I knew that life and truth were one; that life mere and pure is in itself bliss; that where being is not bliss, it is not life, but life-in-death. Every inspiration of the dark wind that blew where it listed went out a sigh of thanksgiving. At last I was! I lived, and nothing could touch my life! My darling walked beside me, and we were on our way home to see the Father!

There is hardly a limit to the knowledge and sympathy a man may have in respect of the finest things, and yet be a fool. Sympathy is not harmony. A man may be a poet even, and speak with the tongue of an angel, and yet be a very bad fool.

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

If man could do what in his wildest self-worship he can imagine, the grand result would be that he would be his own God, which is the Hell of Hells.

the churchyard, in ruins, some of the people who used to pray there, go there still. they need help from each other to get their thinking done, and their feelings hatched, so they talk and sing together, and then, they say, the big thought floats out of their hearts like a great ship out of the river at high water.

Mankind had disappointed him, but here was a dog!

She was a mother. One who is mother only to her own children is not a mother; she is only a woman who has borne children. But here was one of God's mothers.

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.