All a man has to do, is to better what he can. And if he will settle it with himself, that even renown and success are in themselves of no great value, and be content to be defeated, if so be that the fault is not his; and so go to his work with a cool brain and a strong will, he will get it done; and fare none the worse in the end, that he was not burdened with provision and precaution.

— George MacDonald

George MacDonald Quotes

How many of the judgments we are told not to judge and yet do judge, must make the angels of the judging and the judged turn and look at each other and smile a sad smile, ere they set themselves to forget that which so sorely needs to be forgotten.

— George MacDonald

But the use of the other books seemed free; and day after day I came to the library, threw myself on one of the many sumptuous eastern carpets, which lay here and there on the floor, and read, and read, until weary; if that can be designated as weariness, which was rather the faintness of rapturous delight.

— George MacDonald

Where there is no truth there can be no faith.

— George MacDonald

Either there is a God, and that God the perfect heart of truth and loveliness, or all poetry and art is but an unsown, unplanted, rootless flower, crowning a somewhat symmetrical heap of stones. The man who sees no beauty in its petals, finds no perfume in its breath, may well accord it the parentage of the stones; the man whose heart swells beholding it will be ready to think it has roots that reach below them.

— George MacDonald

I could hardly say whether women were happy or not. I knew one who had not been happy; and for my part, I had often longed for Fairy Land, as she now longed for the world of men. But then neither of us had lived long, and perhaps people grew happier as they grew older. Only I doubted it.

— George MacDonald

Thy red lips, like worms, Travel over my cheek.

— George MacDonald

Man doth usurp all space, Stares thee, in rock, bush, river, in the face. Never thine eyes behold a tree; ‘Tis no sea thou seest in the sea, ‘Tis but a disguised humanity. To avoid thy fellow, vain thy plan; All that interests a man, is man.” HENRY SUTTON.

— George MacDonald

Nothing is so ruinous to progress in which effort is needed, as satisfaction with apparent achievement. It always stops momentum.

— George MacDonald

You say you didn’t mean any harm: did you mean any good, Curdie?

— George MacDonald

Joy cannot unfold the deepest truths, although deepest truth must be deepest joy. Cometh white-robed Sorrow, stooping and wan, and flingeth wide the doors she may not enter. Almost we linger with Sorrow for very love.

— George MacDonald

There can be no better auxiliary against our own sins than to help our neighbour in the encounter with his.

— George MacDonald

All a man has to do, is to better what he can. And if he will settle it with himself, that even renown and success are in themselves of no great value, and be content to be defeated, if so be that the fault is not his; and so go to his work with a cool brain and a strong will, he will get it done; and fare none the worse in the end, that he was not burdened with provision and precaution.

— George MacDonald

Chained is the Spring. The night-wind bold Blows over the hard earth; Time is not more confused and cold, Nor keeps more wintry mirth. “Yet blow, and roll the world about; Blow, Time – blow, winter’s Wind! Through chinks of Time, heaven peepeth out, And Spring the frost behind.

— George MacDonald

They who believe in the influences of the stars over the fates of men, are, in feeling at least, nearer the truth than they who regard the heavenly bodies as related to them merely by a common obedience to an external law.

— George MacDonald

Come then, sore heart, and see whether his heart cannot heal thine. He knows what sighs and tears are, and if he knew no sin in himself, the more pitiful must it have been to him to behold the sighs and tears that guilt wrung from the tortured hearts of his brethren and sisters. Brothers, sisters, we MUST get rid of this misery of ours. It is slaying us. It is turning the fair earth into a hell, and our hearts into its fuel.

— George MacDonald

Do what he might, however, his thoughts WOULD wander back to the great gothic gulf into which he had been pouring out his soul, and the greater human gulfs that opened into the ancient pile, whose mouths were the faces that hid the floor beneath them – until at length he was altogether vexed with himself for being interested in what he had done, instead of absorbed in what he had yet to do.

— George MacDonald

As through the hard rock go the branching silver veins; as into the solid land run the creeks and gulfs from the unresting sea; as the lights and influences of the upper worlds sink silently through the earth’s atmosphere; so doth Faerie invade the world of men, and sometimes startle the common eye with an association as of cause and effect, when between the two no connecting links can be traced.

— George MacDonald

The man, I repeat, who loves God with his very life, and his neighbour as Christ loves him, is the man who alone is capable of grand, perfect, glorious love to any woman.

— George MacDonald

The little prophet’s head as he stood, did not reach the level of the draper’s as he sat, but at this Drew dropped his head on his hands upon the table, as if bowed down by a weight of thought and feeling and worship. “I say not,” Polwarth went on, “that so doing you will grow a rich man, but I say that so doing you will be saved from growing too rich, and that you will be a fellow-worker with God for the salvation of his world.

— George MacDonald

Everything, dreaming and all, has got a soul in it, or else it’s worth nothing, and we don’t care a bit about it. Some of our thoughts are worth nothing, because they’ve got no soul in them.

— George MacDonald
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