Quotes from George MacDonald

it is not because of God's poverty that the world is so slowly redeemed. Not the most righteous expenditure of money will save it, but that of life and soul and spirit—it may be, to that, of nerve and muscle, blood and brain. All these our Lord spent—but no money. Therefore I say, that of all means for saving the world, or doing good, as it is called, money comes last in order, and far behind.

I am his, and he shall do with me just as he likes.

His father could not have vanished like a sea-bubble on the sand! To have known a great man—perhaps I do not mean such a man as my reader may be thinking of—is to have some assurance of immortality. One of the best of men said to me once that he did not feel any longing after immortality, but, when he thought of certain persons, he could not for a moment believe they had ceased. He had beheld the lovely, believed therefore in the endless.

Perhaps the best thing for the princess would have been to fall in love. But how a princess who had no gravity could fall into anything is a difficulty--perhaps THE difficulty.

The First Meeting And all the time it was God near her that was making her unhappy. For as the Son of Man came not to send peace on the earth but a sword, so the first visit of God to the human soul is generally in a cloud of fear and doubt, rising from the soul itself at His approach. The sun is the cloud dispeller, yet often he must look through a fog if he would visit the earth at all.

Think not to make me afraid, for I fear nothing in the universe but that which I love the best.--I spake of the eyes of the Lord Jesus.--Then

There is no leveller like Christianity—but it levels by lifting to a lofty table-land, accessible only to humility. He only who is humble can rise, and rising lift.

He was but a married old bachelor, and fancied he must keep up his dignity in the eyes of his wife, not having yet learned that, if a man be true, his friends and lovers will see to his dignity.

Man was the one sacred thing. Gibbie's unconscious creed was a powerful leveller, but it was a leveller up, not down. The heart that revered the beggar could afford to be incapable of homage to position.

if I am not unfrequently sad, I yet cast no more of a shade on the earth, than most men who have lived in it as long as I. I have a strange feeling sometimes, that I am a ghost, sent into the world to minister to my fellow men, or, rather, to repair the wrongs I have already done. May the world be brighter for me, at least in those portions of it, where my darkness falls not.

White hands of whiteness Wash the stars' faces, Till glitter, glitter, glit, goes their brightness Down to poor places.

There are those who in their very first seeking of it are nearer to the Kingdom of Heaven than many who have for years believed themselves of it. In the former there is more of the mind of Jesus, and when He calls them they recognize Him at once and go after Him; while the others examine Him from head to foot, and finding Him not sufficiently like the Jesus of their conception, turn their backs and go to church or chapel or chamber to kneel before a vague form mingled of tradition and fancy.

And 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 heart.

Give me a chair and a table, fire enough to keep me from shivering, the few books I like best and writing materials, and I am absolutely content.

That God only whom Christ reveals to the humble seeker, can ever satisfy human soul.

In after years when he remembered the enchanting dreams of his boyhood, instead of sighing after them as something gone for ever, he would say to himself, what matter they are gone? In the heavenly kingdom my own mother is waiting me, fairer and stronger and real. I imagined the elves; God imagined my mother.

I do not care to argue that I did not fall when Adam fell; for I have fallen many a time, and there is a shadow on my soul which I or another may call a curse; I cannot get rid of a something that always intrudes between my heart and the blue of every sky.

By all means tell people, when you are busy about something that must be done, that you cannot spare the time for them except they want of you something of yet more pressing necessity; but tell them, and do not get rid of them by the use of the instrument commonly called the cold shoulder. It is a wicked instrument.

What is called a good conscience is often but a dull one that gives no trouble when it ought to bark loudest;

Never tell a child 'you have a soul. Teach him, you are a soul; you have a body.' As we learn to think of things always in this order, that the body is but the temporary clothing of the soul, our views of death and the unbefittingness of customary mourning will approximate to those of Friends of earlier generations.

he that will be a hero, will barely be a man; that he that will be nothing but a doer of his work, is sure of his manhood.

respectability to good impulses

To be fit to receive his word implies being of his kind. No matter how his image may have been defaced in me: the thing defaced is his image, remains his defaced image—an image yet that can hear his word.

To deny oneself is to act no more from the standing ground of self.... No longing after the praise of men influence a single throb of the heart. Right deeds, and not the judgment thereupon; true words, and not what reception they may have, shall be our concern.