Top 382 Quotes & Sayings by George MacDonald

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

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.

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

Attitudes are more important than facts.

Love is the opener as well as closer of eyes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The principle part of faith is patience.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

To keep a lamp burning we have to keep putting oil in it.

Afflictions are but the shadows of God's wings.

To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved.

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

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

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

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

there is no harm in being afraid. The only harm is in doing what Fear tells you. Fear is not your master! Laugh in his face and he will run away.

In whatever man does without God, he must fail miserably, or succeed more miserably.

Those Christians who are very strict in their observances, think a good deal more of the Sabbath than of man, a great deal more of the Bible than of the truth, and ten times more of their creed than of the will of God. Of course, if they heard anyone utter such words as I have just written, they would say he was and atheist.

Past tears are present strength.

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.

God left the world unfinished for man to work his skill upon. He left the electricity still in the cloud, the oil still in the earth. 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.

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.

"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?"

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.

God is nearer to you than any thought or feeling of yours... Do not be afraid.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

To be kind neither hurts nor compromises.

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

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

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.

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

Do not measure God's mind by your own.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.