Quotes from George MacDonald

But in after days Cosmo repented of having so completely dropped the old gentleman's acquaintance; he was under obligation to him; and if a man will have to do only with the perfect, he must needs cut himself first, and go out of the world.

Had God forgotten him? That could not be! that which could forget could not be God.

But Mrs. Wingfold had developed a great aptitude for liking people. Surely more people would allow themselves to be thus changed if they realized how greatly the coming of the kingdom of God is slowed by a simple lack of courtesy.

his mother, who had never been able to manage him, sent him to school to get rid of him, lamented his absence till he returned, then writhed and fretted under his presence until again he went.

What is time, but the airy ocean in which ghosts come and go!

A library can't be made all at once, any more than a house, or a nation, or a great tree: they must all take time to grow, and so must a library...Folk must make acquaintance among books as they would among living folk.

Self-love is the foulest of all foul feeders, and will defile that it may devour.

Had Job been Calvinist or Lutheran, the book of Job would have been very different. His perplexity would then have been—how God being just, could require of a man more than he could do, and punish him as if his sin were that of a perfect being who chose to do the evil of which he knew all the enormity.

He cannot find him! Yet is he in his presence all the time, and his words enter into the ear of God his Saviour.

When she went to church, nothing received her, nothing came near her, nothing brought her any message. Something was done, she supposed, that ought to be done—something she had no inclination to dispute, no interest in questioning; a certain good power called God, required from people, in return for the gift of existence, the attention of going to church; therefore she went sometimes.

Whatever belonging to the region of thought and feeling is uttered in words, is of necessity uttered imperfectly. For thought and feeling are infinite, and human speech, although far-reaching in scope, and marvelous in delicacy, can embody them after all but approximately and suggestively.

Then go - but beware of private quarrels in such a season of strife. You two may meet some day in mortal conflict on the battlefield. For my part, I would rather slay my friend than my enemy.

I could not help feeling a little annoyed, (which was very foolish, I know,)

I never had been by any means a book-worm; but the very outside of a book had a charm to me. It was a kind of sacrament—an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace; as, indeed, what on God's earth is not?

it is no use trying to account for things in Fairy Land; and one who travels there soon learns to forget the very idea of doing so, and takes everything as it comes; like a child, who, being in a chronic condition of wonder, is surprised at nothing.

VISITORS FROM THE HALL.

For Christianity does not mean what you think or what I think concerning Christ, but what IS OF Christ. My

To confess uprightness in one of the opposite party seemed to most men to involve treachery to their own.

No one who wants to enjoy a walk in the rain must carry an umbrella; it is pure folly.

You must give him time,' said her grandmother;'and you must be content not to be believed for a while. It is very hard to bear; but I have had to bear it, and shall have to bear it yet. I will take care of what Curdie thinks of you in the end. You must let him go now.

If a writer's aim be logical conviction, he must spare no logical pains, not merely to be understood but to escape being misunderstood; but where his object is to move by suggestion, to cause to imagine, then let him assail the soul of his reader as the wind assails an aeolian harp. If there be music in my reader, I would gladly wake it.

To oppose, to refute, to deny is not to know the truth. Whatever good may come in the destroying of the false, the best hammer of the critic will not serve to carve the celestial form of the real; and when the iconoclast becomes the bigot of negation and declares the non-existence of any form worthy of worship because he has destroyed so many unworthy forms, he becomes a fool. That he has never conceived a deity worth worshipping is poor ground for saying such cannot exist.

No man can lie FOR God, however he may try it, for God is lovelier than all the imaginations of all his creatures can think.

She was beginning to learn that a man may be right, although the creed for which he is ready to die may contain much that is wrong.