Quotes from George MacDonald

the heart which haunts the treasure-house where the moth and rust corrupt, will be exposed to the same ravages as the treasure, will itself be rusted and moth-eaten.

True business can never be left in any shop. It is a care, white or black, that sits behind every horseman.

People are so ready to think themselves change when it is only their mood that is changed! Those who are good-tempered because it is a fine day, will be ill-tempered when it rains: their selves are just the same both days; only in one case , the fine weather has got them, in the other the rainy.

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

For the end of imagination is harmony.

Take my advice, my dear Mr Walton, and don't make too much of your poor, or they'll soon be too much for you to manage.—Come, Pet: it's time to go home to lunch.—And for the surplice, take your own way and wear it. I shan't say anything more about it.

There are who are so pitiful over the poor man, that, finding they cannot lift him beyond the reach of the providence which intends there shall always be the poor on the earth, will do for him nothing at all. Where is the use? they say. They treat their money like their children, and would not send it into a sad house. If they had themselves no joys but their permanent ones, where would the hearts of them be?

A slave will amuse himself in his dungeon; a free man must file through his chains and dig through his prison-walls before he can frolic.

revenge is," as Lord Bacon says, "a kind of wild justice," and is easily satisfied. The hearts desire upon such a one's enemies is best met and granted when the hate is changed into love and compassion.

To hear one talk is better than to see one.

I did not want to quarrel with her, although I thought her both presumptuous and rude.

She had not yet such a love of wisdom as to be able to bear with folly. The foolish and weak are the most easily disgusted with folly and weakness which is not of their own sort, and are the last to make allowances for them.

And earth was given back to earth, to mingle with the rest of the stuff the great workman works withal.

Perhaps you have had more friends than you are aware of. You owe something to the man, for instance, who, with his outspoken antagonism, roused you first to a sense of what was lacking to you. I hope I shall be grateful to God for it some day, returned Wingfold. I cannot say that I feel much obligation to Mr. Bascombe. And yet when I think of it,—perhaps—I don't know—what ought a man to be more grateful for than honesty?

The man whose vision is weak, but who, as far as he sees, and desirous to see farther, does the thing he sees, is a true man. If a man knows what is, and says it is not, his knowing does not make him less than a liar.

There are women, returned my uncle, some of them of the most admired, who are slaves to a demoniacal love of power. The very pleasure of their consciousness consists in the knowledge that they have power--not power to do things, but power to make other people do things. [Uncle; Flight of the Shadow]

The man is a true man who chooses duty; he is a perfect man who at length never thinks of duty, who forgets the name of it.

For God alone is our salvation; to know him is salvation. He is in us all the time, else we could never move to seek him.

There is a certain amount of the queenly element in every woman, so that she cannot feel perfectly at ease without something to govern, however small and however troublesome her queendom may be. At my fathers, I had every ministration and all comforts, but no responsibilities and no rule. I could not help feeling idle.

things may be very different from what we have been taught, or what we may of ourselves desire; but every difference will be the step of an ascending stair—each nearer and nearer to the divine perfection which alone can satisfy the children of a God, alone supply the poorest of their cravings.

It is not alone the first beginnings of religion that are full of fear. So long as love is imperfect, there is room for torment. That lore only which fills the heart—and nothing but love can fill any heart—is able to cast out fear, leaving no room for its presence. What we find in the beginnings of religion, will hold in varying degree, until the religion, that is the love, be perfected.

The things of thy world so crowd our hearts, that there is no room in them for the things of thy heart, which would raise ours above all fear, and make us merry children in our Father's house!

But her mother was one of those weakest of women who can never forget the beauty they once possessed, or quite believe they have lost it, remaining, even after the very traces of it have vanished, as greedy as ever of admiration.

But the more familiar one becomes with any religious system, while yet the conscience and will are unawakened and obedience has not begun, the harder is it to enter into the kingdom of heaven. Such familiarity is a soul-killing experience, and great will be the excuse for some of those sons of religious parents who have gone further toward hell than many born and bred thieves and sinners.