By all means tell people, when you are busy about something that must be done, that you cannot spare the time for them except they want of you something of yet more pressing necessity; but tell them, and do not get rid of them by the use of the instrument commonly called the cold shoulder. It is a wicked instrument.

— George MacDonald

George MacDonald Quotes

There is a childhood into which we have to grow, just as there is a childhood which we must leave behind; a childlikeness which is the highest gain of humanity, and a childishness from which but few of those who are counted the wisest among men, have freed themselves in their imagined progress towards the reality of things.

— George MacDonald

My prayers, my God, flow from what I am not; I think thy answers make me what I am. Like weary waves thought follows upon thought, But the still depth beneath is all thine own, And there thou mov’st in paths to us unknown.

— George MacDonald

She did not even trouble herself much to show Godfrey her gratitude. We may spoil gratitude as we offer it, by insisting on its recognition. To receive honestly is the best thanks for a good thing.

— George MacDonald

I am sorry I cannot think of a compliment to pay you-without lying, that is.

— George MacDonald

For the country was so rejoiced at the death of the giants, and so many of their lost friends had been restored to the nobility and men of wealth, that the gladness surpassed the grief. “Ye have indeed left your lives to your people, my great brothers!

— George MacDonald

I will attempt no historical or theological classification of MacDonald’s thought, partly because I have not the learning to do so, still more because I am no great friend to such pigeonholing. One very effective way of silencing the voice of conscience is to impound in an Ism the teacher through whom it speaks: the trumpet no longer seriously disturbs our rest when we have murmured “Thomist,” “Barthian,” or “Existentialist.

— George MacDonald

I have never concealed the fact that I regarded him as my master; indeed I fancy I have never written a book in which I did not quote from him.

— George MacDonald

Our Selves are like some little children who will be happy enough so long as they are left to their own games, but when we begin to interfere with them, and make them presents of too nice playthings, or too many sweet things, they begin at once to fret and spoil.

— George MacDonald

Perhaps his only vice was self-satisfaction – which few will admit to be a vice; remonstrance never reached him; to himself he was ever in the right, judging himself only by his sentiments and vague intents, never by his actions; that these had little correspondence never struck him; it had never even struck him that they ought to correspond.

— George MacDonald

Truth is one, and he who does the truth in the small thing is of the truth; he who will do it only in a great thing, who postpones the small thing near him to the great farther from him, is not of the truth.

— George MacDonald

Nor will God force any door to enter in. He may send a tempest about the house; the wind of His admonishment may burst doors and windows, yea, shake the house to its foundations; but not then, not so, will He enter. The door must be opened by the willing hand, ere the foot of Love will cross the threshold.

— George MacDonald

There are not many people who can think about beautiful things and do common work at the same time. But then there are not many people who have been to the back of the north wind.

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

Would it not be better to reject it altogether if it not be fit to be believed heart and soul?

— George MacDonald

But there must be some poor!” I said. “I suppose there must be, but we never think of such people. When one goes poor, we forget him. That is how we keep rich. We mean to be rich always.

— George MacDonald

Her intercourse with Andrew had as yet failed to open her eyes to the fact that the faith required of us is faith in a person, and not in the truest of statements concerning anything, even concerning him; or to the fact, that faith in the living One, the very essence of it, consists in obedience to Him. A man can obey before he is sure, and except he obey the command he knows to be right, wherever it may come from, he will never be sure. To find the truth, man or woman must be true.

— George MacDonald

It seemed quite natural that the little lady should be there; for many things we never could believe, have only to happen, and then there is nothing strange about them.

— George MacDonald

It is like his Father, too, not to withhold good wine because men abuse it. Enforced virtue is unworthy of the name. That men may rise above temptation, it is needful that they should have temptation. It is the will of him who makes the grapes and the wine.

— George MacDonald

It was a troubled night, the last they spent in the castle. Not many slept. But the lord of it had long understood that what could cease to be his never had been his, and slept like a child.

— George MacDonald

There are who never learn to see anything except in its relation to themselves, nor that relation except as fancied by themselves; and, this being a withering habit of mind, they keep growing drier, and older, and smaller, and deader, the longer they live – thinking less of other people, and more of themselves and their past experience, all the time as they go on withering.

— George MacDonald
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