Quotes from George MacDonald

God is easy to please, but hard to satisfy.

They who believe in the influences of the stars over the fates of men, are, in feeling at least, nearer the truth than they who regard the heavenly bodies as related to them merely by a common obedience to an external law.

Never pupil was more humble, never pupil more obedient; thinking nothing of himself or of anything he had done or could do, his path was open to the swiftest and highest growth. It matters little where a man may be at this moment; the point is whether he is growing. The next point will be, whether he is growing at the ratio given him. The key to the whole thing is _obedience_, and nothing else.

When a feeling was there, they felt as if it would never go; when it was gone they felt as if it had never been; when it returned, they felt as if it had never gone.

Come then, sore heart, and see whether his heart cannot heal thine. He knows what sighs and tears are, and if he knew no sin in himself, the more pitiful must it have been to him to behold the sighs and tears that guilt wrung from the tortured hearts of his brethren and sisters. Brothers, sisters, we MUST get rid of this misery of ours. It is slaying us. It is turning the fair earth into a hell, and our hearts into its fuel.

Descubrí que la alegría era como la vida misma: no puede ser creada por ningún razonamiento. Luego aprendí que la mejor manera de manejar cierta clase de pensamientos dolorosos es atreverse a dejarlos obrar en su forma peor. Que se aposenten y roan el corazón hasta que se cansen y allí encontraremos que todavía queda un residuo de vida que no pueden matar.

Not only then has each man his individual relation to God, but each man has his peculiar relation to God. He is to God a peculiar being, made after his own fashion, and that of no one else. Hence he can worship God as no man else can worship Him.

As soon as a man begins to make excuses, the time has come when he might be doing that from which he excuses himself.

Instead of automatically blaming the person who does not believe in God, we should ask first if his notion of God is a God that ought to be believed in.

Do what he might, however, his thoughts WOULD wander back to the great gothic gulf into which he had been pouring out his soul, and the greater human gulfs that opened into the ancient pile, whose mouths were the faces that hid the floor beneath them—until at length he was altogether vexed with himself for being interested in what he had done, instead of absorbed in what he had yet to do.

entrance of the Rev. Clement Sclater -- the minister of her parish, recently appointed. He was a man between young and middle-aged, an honest fellow, zealous to perform the duties of his office, but with notions of religion very beggarly. How could it be otherwise when he knew far more of what he called the Divine decrees than he did of his own heart, or the needs and miseries of human nature?

As through the hard rock go the branching silver veins; as into the solid land run the creeks and gulfs from the unresting sea; as the lights and influences of the upper worlds sink silently through the earth's atmosphere; so doth Faerie invade the world of men, and sometimes startle the common eye with an association as of cause and effect, when between the two no connecting links can be traced.

Nor do we know how much of the pleasures even of life we owe to the intermingled sorrows. Joy cannot unfold the deepest truths, although deepest truth must be deepest joy. Cometh white-robed Sorrow, stooping and wan, and flingeth wide the doors she may not enter. Almost we linger with Sorrow for very love.

what is the love of child, or mother, or dog, but the love of God, shining through another being—which is a being just because he shines through it.

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

It is like his Father, too, not to withhold good wine because men abuse it. Enforced virtue is unworthy of the name. That men may rise above temptation, it is needful that they should have temptation. It is the will of him who makes the grapes and the wine.

if I be a child of God, I must be like him, even in the matter of creative energy.

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 a well of love, my child, Flowing, and free, and sure; For a cistern of love, though undefiled, Keeps not the spirit pure.

The ruin of a man's teaching comes of his followers, such as having never touched the foundation he has laid, build upon it wood, hay, and stubble, fit only to be burnt. Therefore, if only to avoid his worst foes, his admirers, a man should avoid system. The more correct a system the worse will it be misunderstood; its professed admirers will take both its errors and their misconceptions of its truths, and hold them forth as its essence.

You ought to have principles of your own, Mr Walton. I hope I have. And one of them is, not to make mountains of molehills; for a molehill is not a mountain. A man ought to have too much to do in obeying his conscience and keeping his soul's garments clean, to mind whether he wears black or white when telling his flock that God loves them, and that they will never be happy till they believe it.

I should be ill," she continued, "if I did not live on the borders of the fairies' country, and now and then eat of their food. And I see by your eyes that you are not quite free of the same need; though, from your education and the activity of your mind, you have felt it less than I. You may be further removed too from the fairy race.

She began to learn that nothing is dead, that there cannot be a physical abstraction, that nothing exists for the sake of the laws of its phenomena.

You must not forget what you have been teaching me all this time–that the will of our God, the perfect God, is all in all! He is not a God far off: oh, Donal, to know that is enough to have lived for if one never learned anything more in all her life! You have taught me that, and I love you–love you next to God and his Christ, with a true heart fervently.

Jesus Christ is the very God I want. I want a father like him, like the father of him who came as our big brother to take us home. No other than the God exactly like Christ can be the true God. Cast away from you that doctrine of devils, that Jesus died to save us from our father. There is no safety, no good of any kind but with the father, his father and our father, his God and our God.