Quotes from George MacDonald

Where is the good of planning upon an if? To trust is to get ready, uncle says. Trust is better than foresight.

God lets men have their playthings, like the children they are, that they may learn to distinguish them from true possessions. If they are not learning that, he takes them from them, and tries the other way: for lack of them and its misery, they will perhaps seek the true!

good common heavenly sense to my people

The birds in the trees were singing A song as old as the world, Of love and green leaves and sunshine, And winter folded and furled. They sang that never was sadness But it melted and passed away; They sang that never was darkness But in came the conquering day.

Ourselves our centre instead of God, is the source of all wrong and all misery.

We are all very anxious to be understood, and it is very hard not to be. But there is one thing much more necessary. To understand other people.

Don't mess with me. Attitudes are more important than facts.

We are and remain such creeping Christians, because we look at ourselves and not at Christ; because we gaze at the marks of our own soiled feet, and the trail of our own defiled garments, instead of up at the snows of purity, whither the soul of Christ clomb. Each, putting his foot in the footprint of the Master, and so defacing it, turns to examine how far his neighbour's footprint corresponds with that which he still calls the Master's, although it is but his own.

but it is not that I do not think you a Christian; it is that I want you to be a downright real Christian, not one that is but trying to feel as a Christian ought to feel. I have lost so much precious time in that way!

For the best men and the weightiest questions are never seen in their time, save by the few.

Love is as lovely in the old as in the young–lovelier when in them, as often, more sympathetic and unselfish, that is true.

if Donal was in any danger of loving the things of this world, it was in the shape of books–books he had a strong inclination to accumulate and hoard.

If any one object that I have here imagined too much, I would remark, first, that the records in the Gospel are very brief and condensed; second, that the germs of a true intelligence must lie in this small seed, and our hearts are the soil in which it must unfold itself; third, that we are bound to understand the story, and that the foregoing are the suppositions on which I am able to understand it in a manner worthy of what I have learned concerning Him.

Every pain and every fear, yes, every doubt is a cry after God. What mother refuses to go to her child because he is only crying, not calling her by name!

kill the peddling creature we so wrongly call our self.

A name is one of those things one can give away and keep all the same.

And when we met amid the shadows, we were wrapped in the mantle of love, and from its folds looked out fearless on the ghostly world about us. Ghosts or none, they never annoyed us. Our love was a talisman, yea, an elixir of life, which made us equal to the twice-born—the disembodied dead. And they were as a wall of fear about us, to keep far off the unfriendly foot and the prying eye.

God who has made us can never be far from any man who draws the breath of life--nay, must be in him; not necessarily in his heart, as we say, but still in him.

Hate will sharpen observation, affording opportunity for many a shrewd guess, and the construction of clever and false theories, but will leave the observer blind to the whole.

When we have no summer without, we must supply it from within. Those must have comfort in themselves who are sent to comfort others.

It is not the hysterical alone for whom the great dash of cold water is good. All who dream life, instead of living it, require some similar shock.

Human science cannot discover God; for human science is but the backward undoing of the tepestry-web of God's science.

When you have once learned to honour anything, love is not very far off; at least that has always been my experience.

The destructible must be burned out of it, or begin to be burned out of it, before it can partake of eternal life. When that is all burnt away and gone, then it has eternal life. Or rather, when the fire of eternal life has possessed a man, then the destructible is gone utterly, and he is pure. Many a man's work must be burned, that by that very burning he may be saved—so as by fire.