Quotes from George MacDonald

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

Blessed be the true life that the pauses between its throbs are not death!

The ideal is the only absolute real; and it must become the real in the individual life as well, however impossible they may count it who never tried it.

I rose as from the death that wipes out the sadness of life, and then dies itself in the new morrow.

Our life is no dream; but it ought to become one, and perhaps will.

Whose work is it but your own to open your eyes? But indeed the business of the universe is to make such a fool out of you that you will know yourself for one, and begin to be wise.

it is so silly of people to fancy that old age means crookedness and witheredness and feebleness and sticks and spectacles and rheumatism and forgetfulness! It is so silly! Old age has nothing whatever to do with all that. The right old age means strength and beauty and mirth and courage and clear eyes and strong painless limbs.

You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it himself. (Quoted by C.S.Lewis in Mere Christianity)

You doubt because you love truth.

I want to help you to grow as beautiful as God meant you to be when He thought of you first.

I don't know how to thank you.' Then I will tell you. There is only one way I care for. Do better, and grow better, and be better.

Well, perhaps; but I begin to think there are better things than being comfortable.

To love righteousness is to make it grow, not to avenge it. Throughout his life on earth, Jesus resisted every impulse to work more rapidly for a lower good.

Her face was fair and pretty, with eyes like two bits of night sky, each with a star dissolved in the blue.

What God may hereafter require of you, you must not give yourself the least trouble about. Everything He gives you to do, you must do as well as ever you can, and that is the best possible preparation for what He may want you to do next. If people would but do what they have to do, they would always find themselves ready for what came next.

It was foolish indeed - thus to run farther and farther from all who could help her, as if she had been seeking a fit spot for the goblin creature to eat her in at his leisure; but that is the way fear serves us: it always sides with the thing we are afraid of.

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

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

Love me, beloved; Hades and Death Shall vanish away like a frosty breath; These hands, that now are at home in thine, Shall clasp thee again, if thou art still mine; And thou shalt be mine, my spirit's bride, In the ceaseless flow of eternity's tide, If the truest love thy heart can know Meet the truest love that from mine can flow. Pray God, beloved, for thee and me, That our sourls may be wedded eternally.

We don't have a soul. We are a soul. We have a body. George Macdonald, 1892

No, there is no escape. There is no heaven with a little of hell in it - no place to retain this or that of the devil in our hearts or our pockets. Out Satan must go, every hair and feather.

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.... Each, putting his foot in the footprint of the Master, and so defacing it, turns to examine how far his neighbor's footprint corresponds with that which he still calls the Master's, although it is but his own.

there is no harm in being afraid. The only harm is in doing what Fear tells you. Fear is not your master! Laugh in his face and he will run away.

Doubt may be a poor encouragement to do anything, but it is a bad reason for doing nothing.