Top 382 Quotes & Sayings by George MacDonald - Page 2

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

To try too hard to make people good is one way to make them worse. The only way to make them good is to be good, remembering well the beam and the mote.

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

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.

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.

I am so tried by the things said about God. I understand God's patience with the wicked, but I do wonder how he can be so patient with the pious!

The word doctrine, as used in the Bible, means teaching of duty, not theory.

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

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.

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.

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.

As Christ is the blossom of humanity, so the blossom of every man is Christ perfected in him.

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

Beauty and sadness always go together.

The first thing in all progress is to leave something behind.

Anything big enough to occupy our minds is big enough to hang a prayer on.

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

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.

[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."

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

We are not made for law, we are made for love.

You've got to save your own soul first, and then the souls of your neighbors if they will let you; and for that reason you must cultivate, not a spirit of criticism, but the talents that attract people to the hearing of the Word.

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.

In low theologies, hell is invariably the deepest truth, and the love of God is not so deep as hell.

Never be discouraged because good things get on so slowly here; and never fail daily to do that good which lies next to your hand.

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.

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

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.

You must learn to be strong in the dark as well as in the day, else you will always be only half brave.

You doubt because you love truth.

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

People must not choose their neighbors; they must take the neighbors that God sends them. The neighbor is just the person who is next to you at the moment, the person with whom any business has brought you into contact.

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.

The ruin of a man's teaching comes of his followers, such as having never touched the foundation he has laid, build upon it wood, hay, and stubble, fit only to be burnt. Therefore, if only to avoid his worst foes, his admirers, a man should avoid system. The more correct a system the worse will it be misunderstood; its professed admirers will take both its errors and their misconceptions of its truths, and hold them forth as its essence.

One of the good things that come of a true marriage is, that there is one face on which changes come without your seeing them; or rather there is one face which you can still see the same, through all the shadows which years have gathered upon 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.

Every truth must be accompanied by some corresponding act.

I came from God, and I'm going back to God, and I won't have any gaps of death in the middle of my life.

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.

I am an optimistic fatalist. This world and all its beginnings will pass on into something better.

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

We are often unable to tell people what they need to know, because they want to know something else, and would therefore only misunderstand what we said.

Half of the misery in the world comes from trying to look, instead of trying to be, what one is not.

God hides nothing. His very work from the beginning is revelation--a casting aside of veil after veil, a showing unto men of truth after truth. On and on from fact Divine He advances, until at length in His Son Jesus He unveils His very face.

If there be a God and one has never sought him, it will be small consolation to remember that one could not get proof of his existence.

What God may hereafter require of you, you must not give yourself the least trouble about. Everything He gives you to do, you must do as well as ever you can, and that is the best possible preparation for what He may want you to do next. If people would but do what they have to do, they would always find themselves ready for what came next.

Fear is faithlessness.

...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.

Where did you get your eyes so blue? Out of the sky as I came through.

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.

The Root of All Rebellion: It is because we are not near enough to Thee to partake of thy liberty that we want a liberty of our own different from thine.

If we knew as much about heaven as God does, we would clap our hands every time a Christian dies.

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.

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.

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.

Not only then has each man his individual relation to God, but each man has his peculiar relation to God.

No man can make haste to be rich without going against the will of God, in which case it is the one frightful thing to be successful.

But we believe – nay, Lord we only hope, That one day we shall thank thee perfectly For pain and hope and all that led or drove Us back into the bosom of thy love.

I do not myself believe there is any misfortune. What men call such is merely the shadowside of a good.

Endurance must conquer, where force could not reach.