Quotes by George MacDonald

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

“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.”

“Those you trust the most can steal the most.”

“Earth changes, but thy soul and God stand sure.”

“What difference does it make to you what someone else becomes, or says, or does? You do not need to answer for others, only for yourself.”

“The difference between something good and something great is attention to detail.”

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

“What can I give him,Poor as I am?If I were a shepherd,I would bring a lamb;If I were a wise man,I would do my part;Yet what I can I give him—Give my heart.”

“The virtue of deeds lies in completing them.”

“The greatest works are done by the ones. The hundreds do not often do much, the companies never; it is the units, the single individuals, that are the power and the might.”

“No great achievement is possible without persistent work.”

One of my greatest difficulties in consenting to think of religion was that I thought I should have to give up my beautiful thoughts and my love for the things God has made. But I find that the happiness springing from all things not in themselves sinful is much increased by religion. God is the God of the Beautiful—Religion is the love of the Beautiful, and Heaven is the Home of the Beautiful—-Nature is tenfold brighter in the Sun of Righteousness, and my love of Nature is more intense since I became a Christian—-if indeed I am one. God has not given me such thoughts and forbidden me to enjoy them.

Love loves unto purity. Love has ever in view the absolute loveliness of that which it beholds. Therefore all that is not beautiful in the beloved, all that comes between and is not of loves kind, must be destroyed. And our God is a consuming fire.

Seeing is not believing, it is only seeing,”George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin

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

She could now be sad without losing a jot of hope. Nay, rather, the least approach of sadness would begin at once to wake her hope. She regretted nothing that had come, nothing that had gone. She believed more and more that not anything worth having is ever lost; that even the most evanescent shades of feeling are safe for those who grow after their true nature, toward that for which they were made—in other and higher words, after the will of God.

You have tasted of death now,” said the old man. “Is it good?” “It is good,” said Mossy. “It is better than life.”“No,” said the old man: “it is only more life.

The back door of every tomb opens on a hilltop.

I do not write for children, but for the childlike, whether of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.

Anybody with leisure can do that who is willing to begin where everything ought to be begun--that is, at the beginning. Nothing worth calling good can or ever will be started full grown. The essential of any good is life, and the very body of created life, and essential to it, being its self operant, is growth. The larger start you make, the less room you leave for life to extend itself. You fill with the dead matter of your construction the places where assimilation ought to have its perfect work, building by a life-process, self-extending, and subserving the whole. Small beginnings with slow growings have time to root themselves thoroughly--I do not mean in place nor yet in social regard, but in wisdom. Such even prosper by failures, for their failures are not too great to be rectified without injury to the original idea.