George MacDonald Quotes

All words, then, belonging to the inner world of the mind, are of the imagination, are originally poetic words.

Where people know their work and do it, life has few blank spaces for boredom and they are seldom to be pitied. Where people have not yet found their work, they may be more pitied than those that beg their bread. When a man knows his work and will not do it, pity him more than one who is to be hanged tomorrow.

Work done is of more consequence for the future than the foresight of an angel.

Her heart - like every heart, if only its fallen sides were cleared away - was an inexhaustible fountain of love: she loved everything she saw.

All that is not God is death.

You have tasted of death now,” said the old man. “Is it good?”
“It is good,” said Mossy. “It is better than life.”
“No,” said the old man: “it is only more life.

The back door of every tomb opens on a hilltop.

If God were not only to hear our prayers, as he does ever and always, but to answer them as we want them answered, he would not be God our Saviour but the ministering genius of our destruction.

Love loves unto purity. Love has ever in view the absolute loveliness of that which it beholds. Therefore all that is not beautiful in the beloved, all that comes between and is not of love's kind, must be destroyed. And our God is a consuming fire.

But we believe – nay, Lord we only hope,
That one day we shall thank thee perfectly
For pain and hope and all that led or drove
Us back into the bosom of thy love.

There is little hope of the repentance and redemption of certain some until they have committed one or another of the many wrong things of which they are daily, through a course of unrestrained selfishness, becoming more and more capable.

As you grow ready for it, somewhere or other you will find what is needful for you in a book.

...I am still librarian in your house, for I never was dismissed, and never gave up the office. Now I am librarian here as well.'

'But you have just told me you were sexton here!'

'So I am. It is much the same profession. Except you are a true sexton, books are but dead bodies to you, and a library nothing but a catacomb!

How old are you?"
"Ten," answered Tangle.
"You don't look like it," said the lady.
"How old are you, please?" returned Tangle.
"Thousands of years old," answered the lady.
"You don't look like it," said Tangle.
"Don't I? I think I do. Don't you see how beautiful I am!

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

No gift unrecognized as coming from God is at its own best: therefore many things that God would gladly give us, things even that we need because we are, must wait until we ask for them, that we may know whence they come: when in all gifts we find Him, then in Him we shall find all things.

The love of our neighbor is the only door out of the dungeon of self, where we mope and mow, striking sparks, and rubbing phosphorescences out of the walls, and blowing our own breath in our own nostrils, instead of issuing to the fair sunlight of God, the sweet winds of the universe.

To cease to wonder is to fall plumb-down from the childlike to the commonplace - the most undivine of all moods intellectual. Our nature can never be at home among things that are not wonderful to us.

A man is as free as he chooses to make himself, never an atom freer.

As in all sweetest music, a tinge of sadness was in every note. Nor do we know how much of the pleasures even of life we owe to the intermingled sorrows. Joy cannot unfold the deepest truths, although deepest truth must be deepest joy.