Quotes by George MacDonald

“The truth Fear tells is not much better than her lies.”

“The clouds were gathering over Mary, too--deep and dark, but of altogether another kind from those that enveloped Letty: no troubles are for one moment to be compared with those that come of the wr...”

“Love and marriage are of the Father's most powerful means for the making of his foolish little ones into sons and daughters. But so unlike in many cases are the immediate consequences to those desi...”

“I must show the blacksmith and the shopkeeper once more--two years after marriage--time long enough to have made common people as common to each other as the weed by the roadside; but these are not...”

“But we believe nay, Lord we only hope,That one day we shall thank thee perfectlyFor pain and hope and all that led or droveUs back into the bosom of thy love.”

“She could now be sad without losing a jot of hope. Nay, rather, the least approach of sadness would begin at once to wake her hope. She regretted nothing that had come, nothing that had gone. She b...”

“she had no stay, no root in herself yet. Well do I know not one human being ought, even were it possible, to be enough for himself; each of us needs God and every human soul he has made, before he ...”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“One of my greatest difficulties in consenting to think of religion was that I thought I should have to give up my beautiful thoughts and my love for the things God has made. But I find that the hap...”

“We stood there for a full half hour, like so many scarecrows, while they jeered at us from a distance, and one or two of us were shot down.”

“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.”

“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,...”

“Trust the Oak, said she; trust the Oak, and the Elm, and the great Beech. Take care of the Birch, for though she is honest, she is too young not to be changeable. But shun the Ash and the Alder; fo...”

“Some dreams, some poems, some musical phrases, some pictures, wake feelings such as one never had before, new in colour and formspiritual sensations, as it were, hitherto unproved”

“I do not write for children, but for the childlike, whether of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.”

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