George MacDonald Quotations

To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved.

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

If instead of a gem, or even a flower, we should cast the gift of a loving thought into the heart of a friend, that would be giving as the angels give.

Many a thief is a better man than many a clergyman, and miles nearer to the gate of the kingdom.

When we are out of sympathy with the young, then I think our work in this world is over

It is not the cares of today, but the cares of tomorrow, that weigh a man down.

Nothing makes one feel so strong as a call for help.

A beast does not know that he is a beast, and the nearer a man gets to being a beast, the less he knows it.

Afflictions are but the shadows of God's wings.

It is not in the nature of politics that the best men should be elected. The best men do not want to govern their fellowmen.

To have what we want is riches; but to be able to do without is power.

I find that doing of the will of God leaves me no time for disputing about His plans.

How strange this fear of death is! We are never frightened at a sunset.

Age is not all decay; it is the ripening, the swelling, of the fresh life within, that withers and bursts the husk.

Love is the opener as well as closer of eyes.

The best preparation for the future is the present well seen to, and the last duty done.

Where there is no choice, we do well to make no difficulty.

We die daily. Happy those who daily come to life as well.

The more I work with the body, keeping my assumptions in a temporary state of reservation, the more I appreciate and sympathize with a given disease. The body no longer appears as a sick or irrational demon, but as a process with its own inner logic and wisdom.

It matters little where a man may be at this moment; the point is whether he is growing.

It is our best work that God wants, not the dregs of our exhaustion. I think he must prefer quality to quantity.

Anything large enough for a wish to light upon, is large enough to hang a prayer upon.

Man finds it hard to get what he wants, because he does not want the best; God finds it hard to give, because He would give the best, and man will not take it.

You can't live on amusement. It is the froth on water - an inch deep and then the mud.

There are thousands willing to do great things for one willing to do a small thing.

Friends, if we be honest with ourselves, we shall be honest with each other.

Forgiveness is the giving, and so the receiving, of life.

The first thing a kindness deserves is acceptance, the second, transmission.

If, instead of a gem, or even a flower, we should cast the gift of a loving thought into the heart of a friend, that would be giving as the angels give

It is not the cares of today, but the cares of tomorrow that weigh a man down. For the needs of today we have corresponding strength given. For the morrow we are told to trust. It is not ours yet.

We've done a better job at getting more complete representation.

To be trusted is a greater complement than to be loved.

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

Sad, indeed, would the whole matter be if the Bible had told us everything God meant us to believe. But herein is the Bible greatly wronged. It nowhere lays claim to be regarded as the Word, the Way, the Truth. The Bible leads us to Jesus, the inexhaustible, the ever-unfolding Revelation of God. It is Christ "in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge," not the Bible, save as leading to Him.

Do not measure God's mind by your own.

This is and has been the Fathers work from the beginning-to bring us into the home of His heart.

Certainly work is not always required of a man. There is such a thing as a sacred idleness - the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected.

No words can express how much the world owes to sorrow. Most of the Psalms were born in the wilderness. Most of the Epistles were written in a prison. The greatest thoughts of the greatest thinkers have all passed through fire. The greatest poets have "learned in suffering what they taught in song." In bonds Bunyan lived the allegory that he afterwards wrote, and we may thank Bedford Jail for the Pilgrim's Progress. Take comfort, afflicted Christian! When God is about to make pre-eminent use of a person, He put them in the fire.

Any faith in Him, however small, is better than any belief about Him, however great.

A man's real belief is that which he lives by. What a man believes is the thing he does, not the thing he thinks.

"But if God is so good as you represent Him, and if He knows all that we need, and better far than we do ourselves, why should it be necessary to ask Him for anything?" I answer, "What if He knows prayer to be the thing we need first and most? What if the main object in God's idea of prayer be the supplying of our great, our endless need - the need of Himself?"

Forgiveness unleashes joy. It brings peace. It washes the slate clean. It sets all the highest values of love in motion.

Never tell a child 'you have a soul.' Teach him, you are a soul; you have a body.

He may delay because it would not be safe to give us at once what we ask: we are not ready for it. To give ere we could truly receive, would be to destroy the very heart and hope of prayer, to cease to be our Father. The delay itself may work to bring us nearer to our help, to increase the desire, perfect the prayer, and ripen the receptive condition.

Now I want you to think that in life troubles will come, which seem as if they never would pass away. The night and storm look as if they would last forever; but the calm and the morning cannot be stayed; the storm in its very nature is transient. The effort of nature, as that of the human heart, ever is to return to its repose, for God is Peace.

Oh, I believe that there is no away; that no love, no life, goes ever from us; it goes as He went, that it may come again, deeper and closer and surer, and be with us always, even to the end of the world.

It is not the cares of today, but the cares of tomorrow, that weigh a man down. For the needs of today we have corresponding strength given. For the morrow we are told to trust. It is not ours yet. It is when tomorrow's burden is added to the burden of today that the weight is more than a man can bear.

Instead of asking yourself whether you believe or not, ask yourself whether you have, this day, done one thing because He said, Do it! or once abstained because He said, Do not do it! It is simply absurd to say you believe, or even want to believe, in Him, if you do not do anything He tells you.

To be kind neither hurts nor compromises.

Love makes everything lovely; hate concentrates itself on the one thing hated.

The truly wise talk little about religion and are not given to taking sides on doctrinal issues. When they hear people advocating or opposing the claims of this or that party in the church, they turn away with a smile such as men yield to the talk of children. They have no time, they would say, for that kind of thing. They have enough to do in trying to faithfully practice what is beyond dispute.

On Good Friday Jesus died But rose again at Eastertide.....Lord, teach us to understand that your Son died to save us not from suffering but from ourselves, not from injustice...but from being unjust. He died that we might live - but live as he lives, by dying as he died who died to himself.

The principle part of faith is patience.

The Son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like His.

The purposes of God point to one simple end-that we should be as he is, think the same thoughts, mean the same things, possess the same blessedness.

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.

No one is likely to remember what is entirely uninteresting to him.

He who seeks the Father more than anything He can give, is likely to have what he asks, for he is not likely to ask amiss.

It is not the high summer alone that is God's. The winter also is His. And into His winter He came to visit us. And all man's winters are His - the winter of our poverty, the winter of our sorrow, the winter of our unhappiness - even 'the winter of our discontent.

Trust to God to weave your thread into the great web, though the pattern shows it not yet.

[God desires] not that He may say to them, "Look how mighty I am, and go down upon your knees and worship," for power alone was never yet worthy of prayer; but that He may say thus: "Look, my children, you will never be strong but with my strength. I have no other to give you. And that you can get only by trusting in me. I can not give it you any other way. There is no other way."

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.

It has been well said that no man ever sank under the burden of the day. It is, when tomorrow's burden is added to the burden of today, that the weight is more than a man can bear. Never load yourselves so, my friends. If you find yourselves so loaded, at least remember this: it is your own doing, not God's. He begs you to leave the future to Him, and mind the present.

Work is not always required. There is such a thing as sacred idleness.

If we do not die to ourselves, we cannot live to God, andhe that does not live to God, is dead.

I am perplexed at the stupidity of the ordinary religious being. In the most practical of all matters he will talk and speculate and try to feel, but he will not set himself to do.

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.

When we understand the outside of things, we think we have them. Yet the Lord puts his things in subdefined, suggestive shapes, yielding no satisfactory meaning to the mere intellect, but unfolding themselves to the conscience and heart.

To give truth to him who loves it not is but to give him more plentiful material for misinterpretation.

This is and has been the Father's work from the beginning-to bring us into the home of His heart.

No man has the mind of Christ, except him who makes it his business to obey him.

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

There is this difference between the growth of some human beings and that of others: in the one case it is a continuous dying, in the other a continuous resurrection.

Above all things, I delight in listening to stories, and sometimes in telling them.

Doubts are the messengers of the Living One to the honest. They are the first knock at our door of things that are not yet, but have to be, understood. . . . Doubts must precede every deeper assurance; for uncertainties are what we first see when we look into a region hitherto unknown, unexplored, unannexed.

We profess to think Jesus the grandest and most glorious of men, yet hardly care to be like him. When we are offered his Spirit, that is, his very nature within us, for the asking, we will hardly take the trouble to ask for it.

The miracles of Jesus were the ordinary works of his Father, wrought small and swift that we might take them in.

Right gladly would He free them from their misery, but He knows only one way: He will teach them to be like himself, meek and lowly, bearing with gladness the yoke of His Father's will. This in the one, the only right, the only possible way of freeing them from their sin, the cause of their unrest.

You doubt because you love truth.

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

I would rather be what God chose to make me than the most glorious creature that I could think of; for to have been thought about, born in God's thought, and then made by God, is the dearest, grandest and most precious thing in all thinking.

It is by loving and not by being loved that one can come nearest to the soul of another.

Past tears are present strength.

We can walk without fear, full of hope and courage and strength to do His will, waiting for the endless good which He is always giving as fast as He can get us able to take it in.

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.

All about us, in earth and air, wherever the eye or ear can reach, there is a power ever breathing itself forth in signs, now in daisy, now in a wind-waft, a cloud, a sunset; a power that holds constant and sweetest relation with the dark and silent world within us. The same God who is in us, and upon whose tree we are the buds, if not yet the flowers, also is all about us- inside, the Spirit; outside, the Word. And the two are ever trying to meet in us...

Endurance must conquer, where force could not reach.

The perfection of His relation to us swallows up all our imperfections, all our defeats, all our evils; for our childhood is born of His fatherhood. That man is perfect in faith who can come to God in the utter dearth of his feelings and his desires, without a glow or an aspiration, with the weight of low thoughts, failures, neglects, and wandering forgetfulness, and say to Him, “Thou art my refuge, because Thou art my home”.

One who not merely beholds the outward shows of things, but catches a glimpse of the soul that looks out of them, whose garment and revelation they are-if he be such, I say, he will stand, for more than a moment, speechless with something akin to that which made the morning stars sing together.

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.

All things are possible with God, but all things are not easy.

Come, then, affliction, if my Father wills, and be my frowning friend. A friend that frowns is better than a smiling enemy.

If you will not determine to be pure, you will grow more and more impure.

Come, come to Him who made thy heart; Come weary and oppressed; To come to Jesus is thy part; His part, to give thee rest.

The mind of the many is not the mind of God.

God will not take shelter behind a jugglery of logic or metaphysics. He is neither a schoolman nor theologian, but our Father in Heaven.

Man's rank is his power to uplift.

The love of our neighbor is the only door out of the dungeon of self.

But for money and the need of it, there would not be half the friendship in the world. It is powerful for good if divinely used. Give it plenty of air and it is sweet as the hawthorn; shut it up and it cankers and breeds worms.

In joy or sorrow, feebleness or might, Peace or commotion, be thou, Father, my delight.