Quotes from George MacDonald

Alas, how easily things go wrong! A sigh too much, or a kiss too long, And there follows a mist and a weeping rain, And life is never the same again.

He is right with himself because right with him whence he came.

Every highest human act is just a giving back to God of that which he first gave to us.

but natural to expect that the deeds of the great messenger should be just the works of the Father done in little. If he came to reveal his Father in miniature, as it were (for in these unspeakable things we can but use figures, and the homeliest may be the holiest), to tone down his great voice, which, too loud for men to hear it aright, could but sound to them as an inarticulate thundering, into such a still small voice as might enter their human ears in welcome human speech

Many men say right and many men say wrong. I might be more ready to speak my mind were it not that I greatly doubt some of those who cry loudest for liberty. I fear that once they had power, they would be the first to trample her underfoot. Liberty with some men means my liberty to do, and your liberty to suffer.

It is not in the nature of politics that the best men should be elected. The best men do not want to govern their fellow men.

If a man keeps the law, I know he is a lover of his neighbour. But he is not a lover because he keeps the law: he keeps the law because he is a lover.

He heard me through in silence, for it was a rule with him never to interrupt a narrator. He used to say, You will generally get at more, and in a better fashion, if you let any narrative take its own devious course, without the interruption of requested explanations. By the time it is over, you will find the questions you wanted to ask mostly vanished.

To the honest soul it is a comfort to believe that the truth will one day be known, that it will cease to be supposed that he was and did as dull heads and hearts reported of him. Still more satisfactory will be the unveiling where a man is misunderstood by those who ought to know him better—who, not even understanding the point at issue, take it for granted he is about to do the wrong thing, while he is crying for courage to heed neither himself nor his friends, but only the Lord.

Church or chapel is not the place for divine service. It is a place of prayer, a place of praise, a place to feed upon good things, a place to learn of God, as what place is not? It is a place to look in the eyes of your neighbour, and love God along with him. But the world in which you move, the place of your living and loving and labour, not the church you go to on your holiday, is the place of divine service. Serve your neighbour, and you serve him.

Let a man do right, nor trouble himself about worthless opinion; the less he heeds tongues, the less difficult will he find it to love men. Let him comfort himself with the thought that the truth must out. He will not have to pass through eternity with the brand of ignorant or malicious judgment upon him. He shall find his peers and be judged of them.

I am certain that he both thought and worked better, because he both thought and worked.

She did not know that she was wishing for nothing more, and something a little less, than the kingdom of heaven—the very thing she thought the laird and Cosmo so strange for troubling their heads about. If men's wishes are not always for what the kingdom of heaven would bring them, their miseries at least are all for the lack of that kingdom.

For we are made for love, not for self. Our neighbour is our refuge; self is our demon-foe. Every man is the image of God to every man, and in proportion as we love him, we shall know the sacred fact. The precious thing to human soul is, and one day shall be known to be, every human soul.

We have yet learned little of the blessed power of death. We call it and evil, but is is a holy friendly thing. We are not left shivering all the world's night in a stately portico with no house behind it. Death is the door to the temple-house, whose God is not seated aloft in motionless state, but walks about among his children, receiving his pilgrim sons in his arms, and washing the sore feet of the weary ones. Either God is altogether like Christ, or the Christian religion is a lie.

That which is the power and worth of life they must be, or die; and the vague consciousness of this makes them afraid. They love their poor existence as it is; God loves it as it must be—and they fear him.

The truth of every man, I say, is the perfected Christ in him.

The revival of ancient benefits, a new spring-time of old flowers, and the fresh quickening of one's own soul, are the spiritual wages of every spiritual service. In giving, a man receives more than he gives, and the MORE is in proportion to the worth of the thing given.

I took the guinea, and put it in my purse.

A man must learn to love his children, not because they are his, but because they are children, else his love will be scarcely a better thing at last than the party-spirit of the faithful politician. I doubt if it will prove even so good a thing.

He gives us the will wherewith to will, and the power to use it, and the help needed to supplement the power, whatever in any case the need may be; but we ourselves must will the truth, and for that the Lord is waiting, for the victory of God his father in the heart of his child.

His was a party whose distinctive and animating spirit was the love of freedom, which broke out upon occasion in the wildest vagaries of speech and doctrine. Yet it justified itself in its leaders, including Milton and Cromwell, who accorded to the consciences of others the freedom they demanded for their own - the love of liberty meaning not merely the love of enjoying freedom, but that respect for the thing itself which renders a man incapable of violating it in another.

Lord, think about my poor brother more than about me, for I know thee, and am at rest in thee. I am with thee always.

And as to death, the fact is we know next to nothing about it. "Do we not!" say the faithless indignantly. "Do we not know the misery of it, the tears, and the sinking of the heart and the desolation!" Yes; you know those; but those are your things, not those of death. About death you know nothing. God has never told us anything about it but that the dead are alive to him, and that one day, they will be again to us.