George MacDonald

“Bees and butterflies, moths and dragonflies, the flowers and the brooks and the clouds.”

“Until a man has love, it is well he should have fear. So long as there are wild beasts about, it is better to be afraid than secure.”

“Could you not give me some sign, or tell me something about you that never changes, or some other way to know you, or thing to know you by?" — "No, Curdie: that would be to keep you from knowing me. You must know me in quite another way from that. It would not be the least use to you or me either if I were to make you know me in that way. It would be but to know the sign of me — not to know me myself.”

“My prayers, my God, flow from what I am not;I think thy answers make me what I am.”

“The man that feareth, Lord, to doubt,In that fear doubteth thee.”

“You would not think any duty small,If you yourself were great.”

“We must do the thing we mustBefore the thing we may;We are unfit for any trustTill we can and do obey.”

“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.”

“It may be an infinitely less evil to murder a man than to refuse to forgive him. The former may be the act of a moment of passion: the latter is the heart’s choice.”

“The best thing you can do for your fellow, next to rousing his conscience, is — not to give him things to think about, but to wake things up that are in him; or say, to make him think things for himself.”

“For that great Love speaks in the most wretched and dirty hearts; only the tone of its voice depends on the echoes of the place in which it sounds.”

“It is to the man who is trying to live, to the man who is obedient to the word of the Master, that the word of the Master unfolds itself.”

“Once, as I passed by a cottage, there came out a lovely fairy child, with two wondrous toys, one in each hand. The one was the tube through which the fairy-gifted poet looks when he beholds the same thing everywhere; the other that through which he looks when he combines into new forms of loveliness those images of beauty which his own choice has gathered from all regions wherein he has travelled. Round the child’s head was an aureole of emanating rays. As I looked at him in wonder and delight, round crept from behind me the something dark, and the child stood in my shadow. Straightway he was a commonplace boy, with a rough broad-brimmed straw hat, through which brim the sun shone from behind. The toys he carried were a multiplying-glass and a kaleidoscope. I sighed and departed.”

“I saw thee ne'er before;I see thee never more;But love, and help, and pain, beautiful one,Have made thee mine, till all my years are done.”

“But words are vain; reject them all— They utter but a feeble part:Hear thou the depths from which they call, The voiceless longing of my heart.”

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

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

“Many feelings are simply too good to last--using the phrase not in the unbelieving sense in which it is generally used, but to express the fact that intensity and endurance cannot coexist in the human frame. But the virtue of a mood depends by no means on its immediate presence. Like any other experience, it may be believed in, and, in its absence, which leaves the mind free to contemplate it, works even more good than its presence”

“I write, not for children,but for the child-like, whether they be of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.”

“I repent me of the ignorance wherein I ever said that God made man out of nothing: there is no nothing out of which to make anything; God is all in all, and he made us out of himself. ”

“But there are victories far worse than defeats; and to overcome an angel too gentle to put out all his strength, and ride away in triumph on the back of a devil, is one of the poorest.”

“Doubt swells and surges, with swelling doubt behind!My soul in storm is but a tattered sail,Streaming its ribbons on the torrent gale;In calm, 'tis but a limp and flapping thing:Oh! swell it with thy breath; make it a wing,To sweep through thee the ocean, with thee the windNor rest until in thee its haven it shall find.Roses are scentless, hopeless are the morns,Rest is but weakness, laughter crackling thorns,But love is life. To die of love is thenThe only pass to higher life than this.All love is death to loving, living men;All deaths are leaps across clefts to the abyss.Weakness needs pity, sometimes love's rebuke;Strength only sympathy deserves and draws -And grows by every faithful loving look.Ripeness must always come with loss of might.”

“With every morn my life afresh must breakThe crust of self, gathered about me fresh;That thy wind-spirit may rush in and shakeThe darkness out of me, and rend the meshThe spider-devils spin out of the flesh-Eager to net the soul before it wake,That it may slumberous lie, and listen to the snake.George MacDonald”

“Only he knew that to be left alone is not always to be forsaken.”

“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.”

“I learned that it is better, a thousand-fold, for a proud man to fall and be humbled, than to hold up his head in his pride and fancied innocence. I learned that he that will be a hero, will barely be a man; that he that will be nothing but a doer of his work, is sure of his manhood. In nothing was my ideal lowered, or dimmed, or grown less precious; I only saw it too plainly, to set myself for a moment beside it. Indeed, my ideal soon became my life; whereas, formerly, my life had consisted in a vain attempt to behold, if not my ideal in myself, at least myself in my ideal.”

“To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved.”

“...though I cannot promise to take you home," said North Wind, as she sank nearer and nearer to the tops of the houses, "I can promise you it will be all right in the end. You will get home somehow.”

“A Baby Sermon-The lighting and thunder, they go and they come: But the stars and the stillness are always at home”

“Love me, beloved; Hades and DeathShall 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 knowMeet the truest love that from mine can flow.Pray God, beloved, for thee and me,That our sourls may be wedded eternally.”

“The world...is full of resurrections... Every night that folds us up in darkness is a death; and those of you that have been out early, and have seen the first of the dawn, will know it - the day rises out of the night like a being that has burst its tomb and escaped into life.”

“Then the Old Man of the Earth stooped over the floor of the cave, raised a huge stone from it, and left it leaning. It disclosed a great hole that went plumb-down."That is the way," he said. "But there are no stairs." "You must throw yourself in. There is no other way.”

“No story ever really ends, and I think I know why. ”

“I hurried away to the white hall of Phantasy heedless of the innumerable forms of beauty that crowded my way: these might cross my eyes, but the unseen filled my brain.”

“Here I should like to remark, for the sake of princes and princesses in general, that it is a low and contemptible thing to refuse to confess a fault, or even an error. If a true princess has done wrong, she is always uneasy until she has had an opportunity of throwing the wrongness away from her by saying: 'I did it; and I wish I had not; and I am sorry for having done it.”

“We are all very anxious to be understood, and it is very hard not to be. But there is one thing much more necessary.'What is that, grandmother?'To understand other people.'Yes, grandmother. I must be fair - for if I'm not fair to other people, I'm not worth being understood myself. I see.”

“Seeing is not believing - it is only seeing.”

“People must believe what they can, and those who believe more must not be hard upon those who believe less. I doubt if you would have believed it all yourself if you hadn't seen some of it.”

“...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.”

“It is when people do wrong things wilfully that they are the more likely to do them again.”

“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.”

“She got very tired, so tired that even her toys could no longer amuse her. You would wonder at that if I had time to describe to you one half of the toys she had. But then, you wouldn't have the toys themselves, and that makes all the difference: you can't get tired of a thing before you have it.”

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

“We are dwellers in a divine universe where no desires are in vain - if only they be large enough.”

“Few delights can equal the mere presence of one whom we trust utterly.”

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

“There is no water in oxygen, no water in hydrogen: it comes bubbling fresh from the imagination of the living God, rushing from under the great white throne of the glacier. The very thought of it makes one gasp with an elemental joy no metaphysician can analyse. The water itself, that dances, and sings, and slakes the wonderful thirst--symbol and picture of that draught for which the woman of Samaria made her prayer to Jesus--this lovely thing itself, whose very wetness is a delight to every inch of the human body in its embrace--this live thing which, if I might, I would have running through my room, yea, babbling along my table--this water is its own self its own truth, and is therein a truth of God.”

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

“There is no strength in unbelief. Even the unbelief of what is false is no source of might. It is the truth shining from behind that gives the strength to disbelieve. ”

“Annihilation itself is no death to evil. Only good where evil was, is evil dead. An evil thing must live with its evil until it chooses to be good. That alone is the slaying of evil.”