Quotes from George MacDonald

Few, in this world, will ever be able to utter what they feel. Fewer still will be able to utter it in forms of their own. Nor is it necessary that there should be many such. But it is necessary that all should feel. It is necessary that all should understand and imagine the good; that all should begin, at least, to follow and find out God.

A man's real belief is that which he lives by;

When a heart hears - and believes, or half believes - that it is not the child of God by origin, from the first of its being, but may possibly be adopted into His family, its love sinks at once in a cold faint: where is its own father, and who is this that would adopt it?

Let a man think and care ever so little about God, He does not therefore exist without God. God is here with him, upholding, warming, delighting, teaching him - making life a good thing to him. God gives him Himself, though he knows it not.

The greatest obscuration of the words of the Lord, as of all true teachers, comes from those who give themselves to interpret rather than do them. Theologians have done more to hide the gospel of Christ than any of its adversaries.

The one use of the Bible is to make us look at Jesus, that through him we might know his Father and our Father, his God and our God. Till we thus know Him, let us hold the Bible dear as the moon of our darkness, by which we travel towards the east; not dear as the sun whence her light cometh, and towards which we haste, that, walking in the sun himself, we may no more need the mirror that reflected his absent brightness.

The same consciousness of evil and of offence which gave rise to the bloody sacrifice, is still at work in the minds of most who call themselves Christians. Naturally the first emotion of man towards the being he calls God, but of whom he knows so little, is fear.

The immediate end of the commandments never was that men should succeed in obeying them, but that, finding they could not do that which yet must be done, finding the more they tried the more was required of them, they should be driven to the SOURCE of life and law ... to seek from Him such reinforcement of life as should make the fulfilment of the law as possible, yea, as natural, as necessary.

God is the God of the animals in a far lovelier way, I suspect, than many of us dare to think, but he will not be the God of a man by making a good beast of him.

A condition which of declension would indicate a devil, may of growth indicate a saint.

With him all is simplicity of purpose and meaning and effort and end-namely, that we should be as he is, think the same thoughts, mean the same things, possess the same blessedness. It is so plain that any one may see it, every one ought to see it, every one shall see it. It must be so. He is utterly true and good to us, nor shall anything withstand his will.

How to be radiant Who obeys, shines.

The main secret of his progress, the secret of all wisdom, was, that with him action was the beginning and end of thought.

Everything in the world is more or less misunderstood at first: we have to learn what it is, and come at length to see that it must be so, that it could not be otherwise. Then we know it; and we never know a thing really until we know it thus.

By obedience, I intend no kind of obedience to man, or submission to authority claimed by man or community of men. I mean obedience to the will of the Father, however revealed in our conscience.

Yes, grannie, you are right. You remember how old dame Hope wouldn't take the money you offered her, and dropped such a disdainful courtesy. It was SO greedy of her, wasn't it?

God in the dark can make a man thirst for the light, who never in the light sought but the dark.

the way to worship God while the daylight lasts is to work; the service of God, the only divine service, is the helping of our fellows.

There must be hope while there is existence; for where there is existence there must be God; and God is forever good nor can be other than good.

Religion is nothing if it be not the deepest common-sense.

What heart in the kingdom of heaven would ever dream of constructing a metaphysical system of what we owed to God and why we owed it?

The year's fruit must fall that the next year's may come, and the winter is the only way to the spring.

that for God to give a man because he asked for it that which was not in harmony with his laws of truth and right, would be to damn him-to cast him into the outer darkness.

punishment had not been spared--with best results in patience and purification