71 George Macdonald Quotes

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

All growth that is not toward God is growing to decay.

A perfect faith would lift us absolutely above fear.

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

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.

Afflictions are but the shadows of God's wings.

The principle part of faith is patience.

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

When a man argues for victory and not for truth, he is sure of just one ally that is the devil. Not the defeat of the intellect, but the acceptance of the heart is the only true object in fighting with the sword of the spirit.

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

God's thoughts, his will, his love, his judgments are all man's home. To think his thoughts, to choose his will, to love his loves, to judge his judgments, and thus to know that he is in us, is to be at home.

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

To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved.

The seed dies into a new life, and so does man.

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.

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.

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 not by driving away our brother that we can be alone with God.

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

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.

The hell that a lie would keep a man from, is doubtless the very best place for him to go.

Attitudes are more important than facts.

God chooses that men should be tried, but let a man beware of tempting his neighbor. God knows how and how much, and where and when. Man is his brother's keeper, and must keep him according to his knowledge.

That man is perfect in faith who can come to God in the utter dearth of his feelings and 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.'

Free will is not the liberty to do whatever one likes, but the power of doing whatever one sees ought to be done, even in the very face of otherwise overwhelming impulse. There lies freedom, indeed.

How often we look upon God as our last and feeblest resource! We go to him because we have nowhere else to go. And then we learn that the storms of life have driven us, not upon the rocks, but into the desired haven.

There are many things in which one and the other loses; but if it is essential to any transaction that only one side shall gain, the thing is not of God.

They are not the best students who are most dependent on books. What can be got out of them is at best only material; a man must build his house for himself.

If I can put one touch of a rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.

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.

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

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

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.

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

I firmly believe people have hitherto been a great deal too much taken up about doctrine and far too little about practice. The word "doctrine," as used in the Bible, means teaching of duty, not theory.

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

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

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

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

Fear is faithlessness.

God never gave a man a thing to do, concerning which it were irreverent to ponder how the Son of God would have done it.

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

One of the grandest things in having rights is that though they are your rights you may give them up.

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.

This is a sane, wholesome, practical, working faith: That it is a man's business to do the will of God; second, that God himself takes on the care of that man; and third, that therefore that man ought never to be afraid of anything.

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.

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

Do the truth ye know, and you shall learn the truth you need to know.

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.

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