Quotes from George MacDonald

Nothing that could be got from the heart of the earth could have been put to better purposes than the silver the king's miners got for him. There were people in the country who, when it came into their hands, degraded it by locking it up in a chest, and then it grew diseased and was called mammon, and bred all sorts of quarrels; but when first it left the king's hands it never made any but friends, and the air of the world kept it clean.

In seeking to improve their conditions, might I not do them harm, and only harm?

The stars, great and earnest, like children's eyes, bent down lovingly towards the waters; and the reflected stars within seemed to float up, as if longing to meet their embraces.

94] Small Prayers In every request, heart and soul and mind ought to supply the low accompaniment, "Thy will be done"; but the making of any request brings us near to Him…. Anything large enough for a wish to light upon, is large enough to hang a prayer upon: the thought of Him to whom that prayer goes will purify and correct the desire.

It is always the way. Until a man knows God, he seeks to obey him by doing things he neither commands nor cares about;

Who knows what harm may be done to a man by hurrying a spiritual process in him?

How many things are there in the world in which the wisest of us can ill descry the hand of God! Who not knowing could read the lily in its bulb, the great oak in the pebble-like acorn? God's beginnings do not look like his endings, but they are like; the oak is in the acorn, though we cannot see it.

she had now no inclination to trouble Gibbie's heart with what men call the plan of salvation. It was enough to her to find that he followed her Master. Being in the light she understood the light, and had no need of system, either true or false, to explain it to her.

Better to sit at the waters' birth, Than a sea of waves to win; To live in the love that floweth forth, Than the love that cometh in. Be thy heart a well of love, my child, Flowing, and free, and sure; For a cistern of love, though undefiled, Keeps not the spirit pure.

One day it had rained before sunrise, and a soft spring wind had been blowing ever since, a soothing and persuading wind, that seemed to draw out the buds from the secret places of the dry twigs, and whisper to the roots of the rose-trees that their flowers would be wanted by and by.

The imagination of man is made in the image of the imagination of God. Everything of man must have been of God first; and it will help much towards our understanding of the imagination and its functions in man if we first succeed in regarding aright the imagination of God, in which the imagination of man lives and moves and has its being.

Malcolm) A library cannot be made all at once, any more than a house or a nation or a tree: they must all take time to grow, and so must a library.... (Lady Florimel) You could get somebody who knew more about them (the books) to buy them for you. (Malcolm) I would as soon think of getting somebody to eat my dinner for me.

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 any 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.

There was the lamp--dead indeed, and so changed that she would never have taken it for a lamp but for the shape! No, it was not the lamp anymore now it was dead, for all that made it a lamp was gone, namely, the bright shining of it.

It was not, she said, confessing to her husband her sleeplessness, that she was afraid. She was only keepin' them company, an' haudin' the yett open, she said. The latter phrase was her picture-periphrase for praying. She never said she prayed; she held the gate open.

My dear queen," said he, "duplicity of any sort is exceedingly objectionable between married people of any rank, not to say kings and queens; and the most objectionable form duplicity can assume is that of punning." MacDonald, George. The Light Princess: and Other Fairy Stories (Kindle Locations 193-195). Dancing Unicorn Books. Kindle Edition.

but he had a great respect for money, and much overrated its value as a means of doing even what he called good: religious people generally do -- with a most unchristian dulness. We are not told that the Master made the smallest use of money for his end. When he paid the temple-rate, he did it to avoid giving offence; and he defended the woman who divinely wasted it.

Letty's first false step was here: she said to herself _I can not_, and did not. She lacked courage--a want in her case not much to be wondered at, but much to be deplored, for courage of the true sort is just as needful to the character of a woman as of a man.

Divine Fire The fire of God, which is His essential being, His love, His creative power, is a fire unlike its earthly symbol in this, that it is only at a distance it burns—that the further from Him, it burns the worse.

It is the vile falsehood and miserable unreality of Christians, their faithlessness to their Master, their love of their own wretched sects, their worldliness and unchristianity, their talking and not doing, that has to answer, I suspect, for the greater part of our present atheism.

In truth, they were not given to quarrelling. Many couples who love each other more, quarrel more, and with less politeness.

To be conceited of doing one's duty is, then, a sign of how little one does it, and how little one sees what a contemptible thing it is not to do it.

But whoever is diligent will soon be cheerful

In God we live every commonplace as well as most exalted moment of our being. To trust in Him when no need is pressing, when things seem going right of themselves, may be harder than when things seem going wrong.