“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.”
— George MacDonald
“I do not write for children, but for the childlike, whether of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.”
— George MacDonald
“The back door of every tomb opens on a hilltop.”
— George MacDonald
“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.”
— George MacDonald
“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.”
— George MacDonald
“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.”
— George MacDonald
“Seeing is not believing, it is only seeing,”George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin”
— George MacDonald
“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 love’s kind, must be destroyed. And our God is a consuming fire.”
— George MacDonald
“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.”
— George MacDonald
“I want to help you to grow as beautiful as God meant you to be when He thought of you first.”
— George MacDonald
“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.”
— George MacDonald
“All that is not God is death.”
— George MacDonald
“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.”
– George MacDonald
“Few delights can equal the presence of one whom we trust utterly.”
– George MacDonald
“To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved.”
– George MacDonald
“When we are out of sympathy with the young, then I think our work in this world is over.”
– George MacDonald
“To have what we want is riches but to be able to do without is power.”
– George MacDonald
“The best preparation for the future is the present well seen to, and the last duty done.”
– George MacDonald
“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.”
– George MacDonald
“Forgiveness is the giving, and so the receiving, of life.”
– George MacDonald
“The principle part of faith is patience.”
– George MacDonald
“How strange this fear of death is! We are never frightened at a sunset.”
– George MacDonald
“It is our best work that God wants, not the dregs of our exhaustion. I think he must prefer quality to quantity.”
– George MacDonald
“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.”
– George MacDonald
“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.”
– George MacDonald
“Attitudes are more important than facts.”
– George MacDonald
“Age is not all decay it is the ripening, the swelling, of the fresh life within, that withers and bursts the husk.”
– George MacDonald