Quotes from George MacDonald

Obedience is the opener of eyes.

My prayers my God flow from what I am not I think Thy answers make me what I am.

The first thing a kindness deserves is acceptance, the second, transmission.

To judge religion we must have it--not stare at it from the bottom of a seemingly interminable ladder.

Religion is life essential.

To cease to wonder is to fall plumb-down from the childlike to the commonplace—the most undivine of all moods intellectual. Our nature can never be at home among things that are not wonderful to us.

Where there is no choice, we do well to make no difficulty.

The more I work with the body, keeping my assumptions in a temporary state of reservation, the more I appreciate and sympathize with a given disease. The body no longer appears as a sick or irrational demon, but as a process with its own inner logic and wisdom.

Real good-breeding is independent of the forms and refinements of what has assumed to itself the name of society.

I came from God, and I'm going back to God, and I won't have any gaps of death in the middle of my life.

Few delights can equal the presence of one whom we trust utterly.

You must learn to be strong in the dark as well as in the day, else you will always be only half brave.

We can walk without fear, full of hope and courage and strength to do His will, waiting for the endless good which He is always giving as fast as He can get us able to take it in.

But there are victories far worse than defeats; and to overcome an angel too gentle to put out all his strength, and ride away in triumph on the back of a devil, is one of the poorest.

Forgiveness is the giving and so the receiving of life. the latter may be an impulse of a moment of heat; whereas the former is a cold and deliberate choice of the heart.

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

Attitudes are more important than facts.

A perfect faith would lift us absolutely above fear.

Not even nothingness preceded life. Nothingness owes its very idea to existence.

All that is made seems planless to the darkened mind, because there are more plans than it looked for...There seems no plan because it is all plan: there seems no centre because it is all centre.

If we knew as much about heaven as God does, we would clap our hands every time a Christian dies.

The time for speaking seldom arrives, the time for being never departs.

Life and religion are one, or neither is any thing.

And her life will perhaps be the richer, for holding now within it the memory of what came, but could not stay.