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Of all things let us avoid the false refuge of a weary collapse, a hopeless yielding to things as they are. It is the life in us that is discontented: we need more of what is discontented, not more of the cause of its discontent. -- George Macdonald
Afterwards I learned, that the best way to manage some kinds of pain fill thoughts, is to dare them to do their worst; to let them lie and gnaw at your heart till they are tired; and you find you still have a residue of life they cannot kill. -- George Macdonald
A shudder ran through her from head to foot when she found that the thread was actually taking her into the hole out of which the stream ran. -- George Macdonald
The man who recognizes the truth of any human relation and neglects the duty involved is not a true man.... A man may be aware of the highest truths of many things, and yet not be a true man, inasmuch as the essentials of manhood are not his aim: he has not come into the flower of his own being. -- George Macdonald
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. -- George Macdonald
We have to do with God, to whom no one can look without the need of being good waking up in his heart; to think about God is to begin to be good. -- George Macdonald
In Giving, a man receives more than he gives; and the more is in proportion to the worth of the thing given. -- George Macdonald
Who knows what harm may be done to a man by hurrying a spiritual process in him? -- George Macdonald
My soul was like a summer evening, after a heavy fall of rain, when the drops are yet glistening on the trees in the last rays of the down-going sun, and the wind of the twilight has begun to blow. -- George Macdonald
In the midst of death we are in life. Life is the only reality; what men call death is but a shadow ... -- George Macdonald
If those who had set themselves to explain the various theories of Christianity had set themselves instead to do the will of the Master, how different the world would be now! -- 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
She got very tired, so tired that even her toys could no longer amuse her. You would wonder at that if I had time to describe to you one half of the toys she had. But then, you wouldn't have the toys themselves, and that makes all the difference: you can't get tired of a thing before you have it. -- George Macdonald
Theologians have done more to hide the Gospel of Christ than any of its adversaries. -- George Macdonald
No one, however strong he may feel his obligations, will ever be man
enough to fulfill them except that he be a Christian-that is,one who,
like Christ, cares first for the will of the Father. -- George Macdonald
A flush of anger crimsoned the old lady's pale face. It looked dead no longer. "Hold your tongue," she said. "You are rude." And Miss Gladwyn did hold her tongue, but nothing else, for she was laughing all over. -- George Macdonald
Heaven ... a place where everything that is not music is silence. -- George Macdonald
A Baby Sermon-
The lighting and thunder, they go and they come: But the stars and the stillness are always at home -- George Macdonald
In moments of doubt I cry, 'Could God Himself create such lovely things as I dreamed?'
'Whence then came thy dream?' answers Hope. -- George Macdonald
O, lack and doubt and fear can only come
Because of plenty, confidence, and love!
They are the shadow-forms about their feet,
Because they are not perfect crystal-clear
To the all-searching sun in which they live.
Dread of its loss is Beauty's certain seal! -- George Macdonald
It is not the hysterical alone for whom the great dash of cold water is good.
All who dream life, instead of living it,
require some similar shock. -- George Macdonald
Better to sit at the waters birth,
Than a sea of waves to win;
To live in the love that floweth forth,
Than the love that cometh in.
Be thy a well of love, my child,
Flowing, and free, and sure;
For a cistern of love, though undefiled,
Keeps not the spirit pure. -- George Macdonald
Whether the lightning bewildered me and made me take a false turn, I cannot tell; for the hardest thing to understand, in intellectual as well as moral mistakes, is - how we came to go wrong. -- George Macdonald
Truly, if ignorance is the foundation of any man's goodness, it is not worth the wind that upsets it, but in its mere self, ignorance of evil is a negative good. -- George Macdonald
Never, my little one, hide anything from those that love you. Never let anything that makes itself a nest in your heart, grow into a secret, for then at once it will begin to eat a hole in it. -- George Macdonald
She alone is free who would make free; she loves not freedom who would enslave: she is herself a slave. Every life, every will, every heart that came within your ken, you have sought to subdue: you are the slave of every slave you have made--such a slave that you do not know it!--See your own self! -- George Macdonald
Only a pure heart can understand, and a pure heart is one that sends out ready hands. -- George Macdonald
The direst foe of courage is the fear itself, not the object of it; and the man who can overcome his own terror is a hero and more. -- George Macdonald
When the Lord is known as the heart of every joy, as well as the refuge from every sorrow, then the altar will be known for what it is - an ecclesiastical antique. The Father permitted but never ordained sacrifice; in tenderness to his children he ordered the ways of their unbelieving belief. -- George Macdonald
When I look like this into the blue sky, it seems so deep, so peaceful, so full of a mysterious tenderness, that I could lie for centuries and wait for the dawning of the face of God out of the awe-inspiring loving-kindness. -- George Macdonald
Her dark eyes looked as if they found repose there, so quietly did they rest on the face of the old man, -- George Macdonald
How old are you?"
"Ten," answered Tangle.
"You don't look like it," said the lady.
"How old are you, please?" returned Tangle.
"Thousands of years old," answered the lady.
"You don't look like it," said Tangle.
"Don't I? I think I do. Don't you see how beautiful I am! -- George Macdonald
Except the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ Jesus make a man sick of his opinions, he may hold them to doomsday for me; for no opinion, I repeat is Christianity, and no preaching of any plan of salvation is the preaching of the glorious gospel of the living God. -- George Macdonald
She would wonder what had hurt her when she found her face wet with tears, and then would wonder how she could have been hurt without knowing it. -- George Macdonald
Many a wrong, and it's curing song,
many a road, and many an inn,
Room to roam, but only one home,
for all the world to win.
George MacDonald, (Lilith) -- George Macdonald
O Christ, my life, possess me utterly.
Take me and make a little Christ of me.
If I am anything but thy father's son,
'Tis something not yet from the darkness won.
Oh, give me light to live with open eyes.
Oh, give me life to hope above all skies. -- George Macdonald
Truth is a very different thing from fact; it is the loving contact of the soul with spiritual fact, vital and potent. It does not work in the soul independently of all faculty or qualification there for setting it forth or defending it. Truth in the inward parts is a power, not an opinion. -- George Macdonald
In low theologies, hell is invariably the deepest truth, and the love of God is not so deep as hell. -- George Macdonald
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. -- George Macdonald
One day it had rained before sunrise, and a soft spring wind had been blowing ever since, a soothing and persuading wind, that seemed to draw out the buds from the secret places of the dry twigs, and whisper to the roots of the rose-trees that their flowers would be wanted by and by. -- George Macdonald
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. -- George Macdonald
But in after days Cosmo repented of having so completely dropped the old gentleman's acquaintance; he was under obligation to him; and if a man will have to do only with the perfect, he must needs cut himself first, and go out of the world. -- George Macdonald
But he remembered that even if she did box his ears, he musn't box hers again, for she was a girl, and all that boys must do, if girls are rude, is to go away and leave them. -- George Macdonald
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. -- George Macdonald
To know that she could not be near God in peace and love without fulfilling certain mental conditions - that he would not have her just as she was now, filled her with an undefined but terribly real misery ... -- George Macdonald
It would hardly be kindness if he didn't punish sin, not to use every means to put the evil thing far from us. Whatever may be meant by the place of misery Mr. Sutherland, it's only another form of his love. Love shining through the fogs of evil, and thus made to look very different. -- George Macdonald
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. -- George Macdonald
I am sometimes almost terrified at the scope of the demands made upon me, at the perfection of the self-abandonment required of me; yet outside of such absoluteness can be no salvation. -- George Macdonald
Few delights can equal the mere presence of one whom we trust utterly. -- George Macdonald
My teacher taught me that the way for me to help others was not to tell them their duty, but myself to learn of Him who bore our griefs and carried our sorrows. As -- 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
But her mother was one of those weakest of women who can never forget the beauty they once possessed, or quite believe they have lost it, remaining, even after the very traces of it have vanished, as greedy as ever of admiration. -- George Macdonald
Alas! this time is never the time for self-denial, it is always the next time. Abstinence is so much more pleasant to contemplate upon the other side of indulgence. -- George Macdonald
However strange it may well seem, to do one's duty will make anyone conceited who only does it sometimes. Those who do it always would as soon think of being conceited of eating their dinner as of doing their duty. What honest boy would pride himself on not picking pockets? -- George Macdonald
At length she gently pushed me away, and with the words, "Go, my son, and do something worth doing," turned back, and, entering the cottage, closed the door behind her. I felt very desolate as I went. CHAPTER -- George Macdonald
Doing the will of God leaves me no time for disputing about His plans. -- George Macdonald
she was one of the lights of the world - one of the wells of truth, whose springs are fed by the rains on the eternal hills. -- George Macdonald
But there are victories far worse than defeats; and to overcome an angel too gentle to put out all his strength, and ride away in triumph on the back of a devil, is one of the poorest. -- George Macdonald
Endurance must conquer, where force could not reach. -- George Macdonald
For repose is not the end of education; its end is a noble unrest, an ever renewed awaking from the dead, a ceaseless questioning of the past for the interpretation of the future, an urging on of the motions of life, which had better far be accelerated into fever, than retarded into lethargy. -- George Macdonald
Really he was not an interesting man: short, broad, stout, red-faced, with an immense amount of mental inertia, discharging itself in constant lingual activity about little nothings. -- George Macdonald
Mrs Oldcastle was silent - why, I could not tell, -- George Macdonald
Suffering While the cup of blessing may and often does run over, I doubt if the cup of suffering is ever more than filled to the brim. -- George Macdonald
Life eternal, this lady of thine hath a sore heart, and we cannot help her. Thou art help, O Mighty Love. Speak to her, and let her know thy will, and give her strength to do it, O Father of Jesus Christ, Amen. -- George Macdonald
Obedience is the opener of eyes. -- George Macdonald
When I can no more stir my soul to move, and life is but the ashes of a fire; when I can but remember that my heart once used to live and love, long and aspire- O, be thou then the first, the one thou art; be thou the calling, before all answering love, and in me wake hope, fear, boundless desire. -- George Macdonald
be. - I had been refused a few months before, -- George Macdonald
We should teach our children to think no more of their bodies when dead than they do of their hair when cut off, or of their old clothes when they have done with them. -- George Macdonald
We can walk without fear, full of hope and courage and strength to do His will, waiting for the endless good which He is always giving as fast as He can get us able to take it in. -- George Macdonald
It's right to trust in God; but, if you don't stand to your halliards your craft'll miss stays, and your faith'll be blown out of the bolt-ropes in the turn of a marlinspike. -- George Macdonald
There can hardly be a plainer proof of the lowness of our nature, until we have laid hold of the higher nature that belongs to us by birthright, than this, that even a just anger tends to make us unjust and unkind. -- George Macdonald
But in the meantime, you must be content, I say, to be misunderstood for a while. 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. -- George Macdonald
Whose work is it but your own to open your eyes? But indeed the business of the universe is to make such a fool out of you that you will know yourself for one, and begin to be wise. -- George Macdonald
I am an optimistic fatalist. This world and all its beginnings will pass on into something better. -- George Macdonald
How often do we look upon God as our last and feeblest resource! We
go to Him because we have nowhere else to go. And when we learn that
the storms of life have not driven us upon the rocks but into the
desired heaven. -- George Macdonald
Immeasurably imperfect it was, but false the impression could not be, for she saw with the eyes made for seeing, and saw indeed what many men are too wise to see. -- George Macdonald
There had been a time in Godfrey's life when, had she stood before him in all her splendor, he would have turned from her, because of her history, with a sad disgust. Was he less pure now? He was more pure, for he was humbler. -- George Macdonald
Nobody does anything bad all at once. Wickedness needs an apprenticeship as well as more difficult trades. -- George Macdonald
God is just!' said a carping theologian to me the other day. 'Yes,' I answered, 'and he cannot be pleased that you should call that justice which is injustice, and attribute it to him! -- George Macdonald
No; I'm not bad. But sometimes beautiful things grow bad by doing bad, and it takes some time for their badness to spoil their beauty. So little boys may be mistaken if they go after things because they beautiful. -- George Macdonald
You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it himself. (Quoted by C.S.Lewis in Mere Christianity) -- George Macdonald
But Mrs. Wingfold had developed a great aptitude for liking people. Surely more people would allow themselves to be thus changed if they realized how greatly the coming of the kingdom of God is slowed by a simple lack of courtesy. -- George Macdonald
That's right, grannie! And the rich have to look down on the poor." "No, my dear. I did not say that. The rich have to be KIND to the poor. -- George Macdonald
Understanding is the reward of obedience. Obedience is the key to every door. I am perplexed at the stupidity of the ordinary religious being. In the most practical of all matters he will talk and speculate and try to feel, but he will not set himself to do. -- George Macdonald
But there is a light that goes deeper than the will, a light that lights up the darkness behind it: that light can change your will, can make it truly yours and not another's - not the Shadow's. Into the created can pour itself the creating will, and so redeem it! -- George Macdonald
To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved. -- George Macdonald
The love of our neighbor is the only door out of the dungeon of self, where we mope and mow, striking sparks, and rubbing phosphorescences out of the walls, and blowing our own breath in our own nostrils, instead of issuing to the fair sunlight of God, the sweet winds of the universe. -- George Macdonald
If the Lord were to appear this day in England as once in Palestine, He would not come in the halo of the painters or with that wintry shine of effeminate beauty, of sweet weakness, in which it is their helpless custom to represent Him. -- George Macdonald
But I don't quite understand, Father: is nobody your friend but the one that does something for you? -- 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
Love makes everything lovely; hate concentrates itself on the one thing hated. -- George Macdonald
I might here find the magic word of power to banish the demon and set me free, so that I should no longer be a man beside myself. -- George Macdonald
God, and not woman, is the heart of all. But she, as priestess of the visible earth, Holding the key, herself most beautiful, Had come to him, and flung the portals wide. He entered in: each beauty was a glass That gleamed the woman back upon his view. -- George Macdonald
what is the love of child, or mother, or dog, but the love of God, shining through another being - which is a being just because he shines through it. -- George Macdonald
In joy or sorrow, feebleness or might,
Peace or commotion, be thou, Father, my delight. -- George Macdonald
He who is faithful over a few things is a lord of cities. It does not matter whether you preach in Westminster Abbey or teach a ragged class, so you be faithful. The faithfulness is all. -- George Macdonald
To give truth to him who loves it not is but to give him more plentiful material for misinterpretation. -- George Macdonald
But more impressive than the facts and figures as to height, width, age, etc., are the entrancing beauty and tranquility that pervade the forest, the feelings of peace, awe and reverence that it inspires. -- George Macdonald
Twilight-kind, oppressing the heart as with a condensed atmosphere of dreamy undefined love and longing. -- George Macdonald
... leaning with her back bowed into the back of the chair, her head hanging down and her hands in her lap, very miserable as she would say herself, not even knowing what she would like, except to go out and get very wet, catch a particularly nice cold and have to go to bed and take gruel. -- George Macdonald
Let us then arise and live - arise even in the darkest moments of spiritual stupidity, when hope itself sees nothing to hope for. Let us go at once to the Life. Let us comfort ourselves in the thought of the Father and the Son. -- George Macdonald
Her face was fair and pretty, with eyes like two bits of night sky, each with a star dissolved in the blue. -- George Macdonald
The heavens and the earth are around us that it may be possible for us to speak of the unseen by the seen, for the outermost husk of creation has correspondence with the deepest things of the Creator.
He is not a God that hides himself, but a God who made all that he might reveal himself. -- George Macdonald
There is no strength in unbelief. Even the unbelief of what is false is no source of might. It is the truth shining from behind that gives the strength to disbelieve. -- George Macdonald
Many a life has been injured by the constant expectation of death. It is life we have to do with, not death. The best preparation for the night is to work diligently while the day lasts. The best preparation for death is life. -- George Macdonald
Where did you come from, baby dear? Out of the everywhere and into here. -- George Macdonald
And we had met at last in this same cave of greenery, while the summer night hung round us heavy with love, and the odours that crept through the silence from the sleeping woods were the only signs of an outer world that invaded our solitude. -- George Macdonald
...when the children had made sparrows of clay,
Thou mad'st them birds, with wings to flutter and fold:
Take, Lord, my prayer in thy hand, and make it pray. -- 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
A man may sink by such slow degrees that, long after he is a devil, he may go on being a good churchman or a good dissenter and thinking himself a good Christian. -- George Macdonald
A man is in bondage to whatever he cannot part with that is less than
himself. -- George Macdonald
Friends, if we be honest with ourselves, we shall be honest with each other. -- George Macdonald
But for money and the need of it, there would not be half the friendship in the world. It is powerful for good if divinely used. Give it plenty of air and it is sweet as the hawthorn; shut it up and it cankers and breeds worms. -- George Macdonald
Our minds are small because they are faithless,' I said to myself.
'If we had faith in God our hearts would share in His greatness and
peace for we should not then be shut up in ourselves, but would walk
abroad in him -- George Macdonald
Is it not time I lost a few things when I care for them so unreasonably? This losing of things is of the mercy of God: It comes to teach us to let them go. -- George Macdonald
We weep for gladness, weep for grief;
The tears they are the same;
We sigh for longing, and relief;
The sighs have but one name,
And mingled in the dying strife,
Are moans that are not sad
The pangs of death are throbs of life,
Its sighs are sometimes glad. -- George Macdonald
Grave doubts as to whether I was in my place in the church, would keep rising and floating about, like rain-clouds within me. -- George Macdonald
What is the matter with your master?" George asked Dawtie as they bounced along toward Potlurg.
"God knows, sir."
"What is the use of telling me that? I want you to tell me what YOU know."
"I don't know anything, sir. -- George Macdonald
Possessed by the power of the gorgeous night, she seemed at one and the same moment annihilated and glorified. -- George Macdonald
Light-leaved acacias, by the door,
Stood up in balmy air,
Clusters of blossomed moonlight bore,
And breathed a perfume rare. -- George Macdonald
The poetry of life, the inner side of nature, rises near the surface to meet the eyes of the man who makes. The advantage gained by the carpenter of Nazareth at his bench is the inheritance of every workman as he imitates his maker in the divine - that is, honest - work. -- George Macdonald
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! -- 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
Fear is faithlessness. -- George Macdonald
It is the vile falsehood and miserable unreality of Christians, their faithlessness to their Master, their love of their own wretched sects, their worldliness and unchristianity, their talking and not doing, that has to answer, I suspect, for the greater part of our present atheism. -- George Macdonald
The darkness knows neither the light nor itself; only the light knows itself and the darkness also. None but God hates evil and understands it. -- 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. -- George Macdonald
There is an aching that is worse than any pain. -- George Macdonald
Joy cannot unfold the deepest truths. Cometh white-robed Sorrow, stooping and wan, and flingeth wide the door she must not enter. -- George Macdonald
A true friend is forever a friend. -- George Macdonald
For others, as for ourselves, we must trust him. If we could thoroughly understand anything, that would be enough to prove it undivine; and that which is but one step beyond our understanding must be in some of its relations as mysterious as if it were a hundred. -- George Macdonald
The minister was an honest man so far as he knew himself and honesty, and did not relish this form of submission. But he did not ask himself where was the difference between accepting the word of man and accepting man's explanation of the word of God! -- George Macdonald
Some thinkers would feel sorely hampered if at liberty to use no forms but such as existed in nature, or to invent nothing save in accordance with the laws of the world of the senses; but
it must not therefore be imagined that they desire escape from the region of law. -- George Macdonald
The best preparation for the future is the present well seen to, and the last duty done. -- George Macdonald
You must learn to be strong in the dark as well as in the day, else you will always be only half brave. -- George Macdonald
The library, although duly considered in many alterations of the house and additions to it, had nevertheless, like an encroaching state, absorbed one room after another until it occupied the greater part of the ground floor. -- George Macdonald
That man is perfect in faith who can come to God in the utter dearth of his feelings and desires, without a glow or an aspiration, with the weight of low thoughts, failures, neglects, and wandering forgetfulness, and say to Him, "Thou art my refuge. -- George Macdonald
No man knows it when he is making an idiot of himself. -- George Macdonald
She had now no inclination to trouble Gibbie's heart with what men call the plan of salvation. It was enough to her to find that he followed her Master. Being in the light she understood the light, and had no need of system, either true or false, to explain it to her. -- George Macdonald
One who not merely beholds the outward shows of things, but catches a glimpse of the soul that looks out of them, whose garment and revelation they are-if he be such, I say, he will stand, for more than a moment, speechless with something akin to that which made the morning stars sing together. -- George Macdonald
to teach is the best way to learn, but that the imperfect are the best teachers of the imperfect. -- George Macdonald
does my Anerew's hert guid to hae a crack wi' ane 'at kens something o' what the Maister wad be at. Mony ane 'll ca' him Lord, but feow 'ill tak the trible to ken what he wad hae o' them. -- George Macdonald
Things come to the poor that can't get in at the door of the rich. Their money somehow blocks it up. It is a great privilege to be poor
one that no man covets, and brat a very few have sought to retain, but one that yet many have learned to prize. -- George Macdonald
It is because the young cannot recognize the youth of the aged, and the old will not acknowledge the experience of the young, that they repel each other. -- George Macdonald
Sorrow herself will reveal one day that she was only the beneficent shadow of Joy. Will Evil ever show herself the beneficent shadow of Good? -- George Macdonald
What I would say is this, that the light is not blinding because God would hide, but because the truth is too glorious for our vision. -- George Macdonald
Free will is not the liberty to do whatever one likes, but the power of doing whatever one sees ought to be done, even in the very face of otherwise overwhelming impulse. There lies freedom, indeed. -- George Macdonald
You must give him time,' said her grandmother;'and you must be content not to be believed for a while. It is very hard to bear; but I have had to bear it, and shall have to bear it yet. I will take care of what Curdie thinks of you in the end. You must let him go now. -- George Macdonald
Those are not the tears of repentance! ... Self-loathing is not sorrow. Yet it is good, for it marks a step in the way home, and in the father's arms the prodigal forgets the self he abominates. -- George Macdonald
Then the Old Man of the Earth stooped over the floor of the cave, raised a huge stone from it, and left it leaning. It disclosed a great hole that went plumb-down.
"That is the way," he said.
"But there are no stairs."
"You must throw yourself in. There is no other way. -- George Macdonald
My prayers, my God, flow from what I am not;
I think thy answers make me what I am. -- George Macdonald
God will not take shelter behind a jugglery of logic or metaphysics. He is neither a schoolman nor theologian, but our Father in Heaven. -- George Macdonald
God is nearer to you than any thought or feeling of yours ... Do not be afraid. -- George Macdonald
Remember, then, that whoever does not mean good is always in danger of harm. But I try to give everybody fair play, and those that are in the wrong are in far more need of it always than those who are in the right: they can afford to do without it. -- George Macdonald
The back door of every tomb opens on a hilltop. -- George Macdonald
For the greatest fool and rascal in creation there is yet a worse condition; and that is, not to know it, but to think himself a respectable man. -- George Macdonald
Those who are content with what they are, have the less concern about what they seem. -- George Macdonald
The greatest forces lie in the region of the uncomprehended. -- George Macdonald
As soon as a man begins to make excuses, the time has come when he might be doing that from which he excuses himself. -- George Macdonald
The winter drew on - a season as different from the summer in those northern latitudes, as if it belonged to another solar system. Cold and stormy, it is yet full of delight for all beings that can either romp, sleep, or think it through. -- George Macdonald
Those whose business it is to open doors, so often mistake and shut them! -- George Macdonald
I would rather be what God chose to make me than the most glorious creature that I could think of; for to have been thought about, born in God's thought, and then made by God, is the dearest, grandest and most precious thing in all thinking. -- George Macdonald
The boy should enclose and keep, as his life, the old child at the heart of him, and never let it go. He must still, to be a right man, be his mother's darling, and more, his father's pride, and more. The child is not meant to die, but to be forever fresh born. -- George Macdonald
From Eden's bowers the full-fed rivers flow,
To guide the outcasts to the land of woe:
Our Earth one little toiling streamlet yields.
To guide the wanderers to the happy fields. -- George Macdonald
Because we easily imagine ourselves in want, we imagine God ready to forsake us. -- George Macdonald
Think not to make me afraid, for I fear nothing in the universe but that which I love the best.
I spake of the eyes of the Lord Jesus.
Then -- George Macdonald
I begin to suspect," said the curate, after a pause, "that the common transactions of life are the most sacred channels for the spread of the heavenly leaven. -- George Macdonald
Every soul has a landscape that changes with the wind that sweeps the sky, with the clouds that return after its rain. -- George Macdonald
Mankind had disappointed him, but here was a dog! -- George Macdonald
Affliction is but the shadow of God's wing. -- George Macdonald
Most powerful of all powers in its holy insinuation is _being_. _To be_ is more powerful than even _to do_. Action _may_ be hypocrisy, but being is the thing itself, and is the parent of action. -- George Macdonald
For I suspect the next world will more plainly be a going on with this than most people think - only it will be much better for some, and much worse for others, as the Lord has taught us in the parable of the rich man and the beggar. -- George Macdonald
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. -- George Macdonald
And in thy own sermon, thou
That the sparrow falls dost allow,
It shall not cause me any alarm;
For neither so comes the bird to harm,
Seeing our Father, thou hast said,
Is by the sparrow's dying bed;
Therefore it is a blessed place,
And the sparrow in high grace. -- George Macdonald
Annie said her prayers, read her Bible, and tried not to forget God. Ah! could she only have known that God never forgot her, whether she forgot him or not, giving her sleep in her dreary garret, gladness even in Murdoch Malison's school-room, and the light of life everywhere! -- George Macdonald
Timely service, like timely gifts, is doubled in value. -- George Macdonald
Take my advice, my dear Mr Walton, and don't make too much of your poor, or they'll soon be too much for you to manage. - Come, Pet: it's time to go home to lunch. - And for the surplice, take your own way and wear it. I shan't say anything more about it. -- 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
There are thousands willing to do great things for one willing to do a small thing. -- George Macdonald
God is the God of the animals in a far lovelier way, I suspect, than many of us dare to think, but he will not be the God of a man by making a good beast of him. -- George Macdonald
good common heavenly sense to my people, -- George Macdonald
Here lies David Elginbrod
Have mercy on my soul, dear God,
As I would ye if I were God
And ye were David Elginbrod. -- George Macdonald
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. -- George Macdonald
Letty's first false step was here: she said to herself _I can not_, and did not. She lacked courage--a want in her case not much to be wondered at, but much to be deplored, for courage of the true sort is just as needful to the character of a woman as of a man. -- George Macdonald
It is a great privilege to be poor, Peter. You must not mistake, however, and imagine it a virtue; it is but a privilege, and one also that may be terribly misused. -- George Macdonald
Contempt is murder committed by the intellect, as hatred is murder committed by the heart. -- George Macdonald
When one says to the great Thinker:
"Here is one of thy thoughts: I am thinking it now!" that is a prayer
a word to the big heart from one of its own little hearts.
Look, there is another! -- George Macdonald
The more people trust in God, the less will they trust their own judgments, or interfere with the ordering of events. -- George Macdonald
But God lets men have their playthings, like the children they are, that they may learn to distinguish them from true possessions. If they are not learning that he takes them from them, and
tries the other way: for lack of them and its misery, they will perhaps seek the true! -- George Macdonald
When we are out of sympathy with the young, then I think our work in this world is over. -- George Macdonald
I hurried away to the white hall of Phantasy heedless of the innumerable forms of beauty that crowded my way: these might cross my eyes, but the unseen filled my brain. -- George Macdonald
I can but pray the Father o' a' to haud his e'e upon her, an' his airms aboot her, an' keep aff the hardenin' o' the hert 'at despises coonsel! -- George Macdonald
Every truth must be accompanied by some corresponding act. -- George Macdonald
It is one of the poorest of human weaknesses that a man would be ashamed of saying he has done wrong instead of so ashamed of having done wrong that he cannot rest till he has said so. For the shame cleaves fast until the confession removes it. -- George Macdonald
To keep a lamp burning we have to keep putting oil in it. -- George Macdonald
People are so ready to think themselves changed when it is only their mood that is changed. Those who are good-tempered because it is a fine day will be ill-tempered when it rains: their selves are just the same both days; only in one case the fine weather has got into them, in the other the rainy. -- George Macdonald
It is not betrayal of feeling, but avoidance of duty, that constitutes weakness. -- George Macdonald
What a man is lies as certainly upon his countenance as in his heart, though none of his acquaintances may be able to read it. The very intercourse with him may have rendered it more difficult. -- George Macdonald
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. -- George Macdonald
But it is not the rich person only who is under the domination of things; they too are slaves who, having no money, are unhappy from the lack of it. -- George Macdonald
But indeed the business of the universe is to make such a fool of you that you will know yourself for one, and so begin to be wise! -- George Macdonald
I did not want to quarrel with her, although I thought her both presumptuous and rude. -- George Macdonald
The honour is to be a servant of men, whom God thought worth making, worth allowing to sin, and worth helping out of it at such a cost. -- George Macdonald
There is but one thing that can free a man from superstition, and that is belief. All history proves it. The most sceptical have ever been the most credulous. -- George Macdonald
In whatever man does without God, he must fail miserably, or succeed more miserably. -- George Macdonald
[350] 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. [351] Two Silly Young Women -- George Macdonald
A man must learn to love his children, not because they are his, but because they are children, else his love will be scarcely a better thing at last than the party-spirit of the faithful politician. -- George Macdonald
There is a great deal more to be got out of things than is generally got out of them, whether the thing be a chapter of the Bible or a yellow turnip, and the marvel is that those who use the most material should so often be those that show the least result in strength or character. -- George Macdonald
Seeing is not believing - it is only seeing. -- George Macdonald
The causing of the little ones to offend hangs a fearful woe about the neck of the causer. -- George Macdonald
The things that come out of a man are they that defile him, and to get rid of them a man must go into himself, be a convict, and scrub the floor of his cell. -- George Macdonald
You would not think any duty small, If you yourself were great. -- George Macdonald
The birds, the poets of the animal creation - what though they never get beyond the lyrical! - awoke to utter their own joy, and awake like joy in others of God's children. -- George Macdonald
As cold as everything looks in winter, the sun has not forsaken us. He has only drawn away for a little, for good reasons, one of which is that we may learn that we cannot do without him. -- George Macdonald
Beauty and sadness always go together. -- George Macdonald
I do not myself believe there is any misfortune. What men call such is merely the shadowside of a good. -- George Macdonald
One chief cause of the amount of unbelief in the world is tha tthose who have seen something of the glory of Christ set themselves to theorize concerning him rather than to obey him. -- George Macdonald
The fear of man, the trust in man, the deference to the opinion of man, is the merest worship of a rag-stuffed idol. -- George Macdonald
He was in fact a poet without words, the more absorbed and endangered, that the springing waters were dammed back in his soul, where, finding no utterance, they grew, and swelled, and undermined. -- George Macdonald
Faith is that which, knowing the Lord's will, goes and does it; or, not knowing it, stands and waits, content in ignorance as in knowledge, because God wills - neither pressing into the hidden future, nor careless of the knowledge which opens the path of action -- George Macdonald
Winna ye be gaein' awa', to write buiks, an' gar fowk fin' oot what's the maitter wi' them? -- George Macdonald
Better to have the poet's heart than brain,
Feeling than song. -- George Macdonald
Bees and butterflies, moths and dragonflies, the flowers and the brooks and the clouds. -- George Macdonald
Yes, grannie, you are right. You remember how old dame Hope wouldn't take the money you offered her, and dropped such a disdainful courtesy. It was SO greedy of her, wasn't it? -- George Macdonald
There is hardly a limit to the knowledge and sympathy a man may have in respect of the finest things, and yet be a fool. Sympathy is not harmony. A man may be a poet even, and speak with the tongue of an angel, and yet be a very bad fool. -- George Macdonald
whoever is diligent will soon be cheerful, -- George Macdonald
[35] Caelum non animum mutant The man who is not content where he is, would never have been content somewhere else, though he might have complained less. Donal Grant, ch. 31 -- George Macdonald
To try to be brave is to be brave. -- George Macdonald
People must believe what they can, and those who believe more must not be hard upon those who believe less. I doubt if you would have believed it all yourself if you hadn't seen some of it. -- George Macdonald
I saw thee ne'er before; I see thee never more; But love, and help, and pain, beautiful one, Have made thee mine, till all my years are done. -- George Macdonald
Instead of automatically blaming the person who does not believe in God, we should ask first if his notion of God is a God that ought to be believed in. -- George Macdonald
But may not one sometimes make a mistake without being able to help it?' 'Yes. But so long as he is not after his own ends, he will never make a serious mistake. -- George Macdonald
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. -- George Macdonald
The seed dies into a new life, and so does man. -- George Macdonald
The kingdom of heaven is not come even when God's will is our law; it is fully come when God's will is our will. -- George Macdonald
You had better not open that door. -- George Macdonald
Thy beauty filleth the very air,
Never saw I a woman so fair. -- George Macdonald
To inquire into what God has made is the main function of the imagination. It is aroused by facts, is nourished by facts; seeks for higher and yet higher laws in those facts; but refuses to regard science as the sole interpreter of nature, or the laws of science as the only region of discovery. -- George Macdonald
The question is not at present, however, of removing mountains, a thing that will one day be simple to us, but of waking and rising from the dead now. -- George Macdonald
To receive honestly is the best thanks for a good thing. -- George Macdonald
The whole trouble is that we won't let God help us. -- George Macdonald
there is plenty of room for meeting in the universe. -- George Macdonald
Never tell a child 'you have a soul.' Teach him, you are a soul; you have a body. -- George Macdonald
The holy spirit of the Spring
Is working silently. -- George Macdonald
A devil - "A power that lives against its life -- George Macdonald
Certainly work is not always required of a man. There is such a thing as a sacred idleness, the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected. -- George Macdonald
The time for speaking seldom arrives, the time for being never departs. -- George Macdonald
There is nothing eternal but that which loves and can be loved, and love is ever climbing towards the consummation when such shall be the universe, imperishable, divine. -- George Macdonald
I am a beast until I love as God doth love. -- George Macdonald
Then she would laugh like the very spirit of fun; only in her laugh there was something missing. What it was, I
find myself unable to describe. I think it was a certain tone, depending upon the possibility of sorrow
MORBIDEZZA, perhaps. She never smiled. -- George Macdonald
Pious people in general seem to regard religion as a necessary accompaniment of life; to Wingfold it was life itself; with him religion must be all, or could be nothing. -- George Macdonald
Sweet sounds can go where kisses may not enter. -- George Macdonald
No; but you came, and found the riddles waiting for you! Indeed you are yourself the only riddle. What you call riddles are truths, and seem riddles because you are not true. -- George Macdonald
Why should my love be powerless to help another? -- George Macdonald
Annihilation itself is no death to evil. Only good where evil was, is evil dead. An evil thing must live with its evil until it chooses to be good. That alone is the slaying of evil. -- George Macdonald
This is a wise, sane Christian faith: that a man commit himself, his life, and his hopes to God; that God undertakes the special protection of that man; that therefore that man ought not to be afraid of anything. -- George Macdonald
How much time is wasted in what is called thought, but is merely care--an anxious idling over the fancied probabilities of result -- George Macdonald
I'm your father's mother's father's mother.' 'Oh, dear! I can't understand that,' said the princess. 'I dare say not. I didn't expect you would. But that's no reason why I shouldn't say it. -- George Macdonald
The church grew very lonely about him, and he began to feel like a child whose mother has forsaken it. Only he knew that to be left alone is not always to be forsaken. -- George Macdonald
Therefore I have been training him for a work that must soon be done. I was near losing him, and had to send my pigeon. Had he not shot it, that would have been better; but he repented, and that shall be as good in the end. -- George Macdonald
We are not made for law, we are made for love. -- George Macdonald
That's all nonsense," said Curdie. "I don't know what you mean."
"Then if you don't know what I mean, what right have you to call it nonsense? -- George Macdonald
Trust is born in love, and our need is to love God, not apprehend
facts concerning him. -- George Macdonald
Real good-breeding is independent of the forms and refinements of what has assumed to itself the name of society. -- George Macdonald
Of all teachings that which presents a far distant God is the nearest to absurdity. Either there is none, or he is nearer to every one of us than our nearest consciousness of self. An unapproachable divinity is the veriest of monsters, the most horrible of human imaginations. -- George Macdonald
Faith is obedience, not compliance. -- George Macdonald
The possession of wealth is, as it were, prepayment, and involves an obligation of honor to the doing of correspondent work. -- George Macdonald
... for nothing is ever so mischievous in its own place as it is out of it; -- George Macdonald
It was foolish indeed - thus to run farther and farther from all who could help her, as if she had been seeking a fit spot for the goblin creature to eat her in at his leisure; but that is the way fear serves us: it always sides with the thing we are afraid of. -- George Macdonald
Work is not always required. There is such a thing as sacred idleness. -- George Macdonald
To be kind neither hurts nor compromises. -- George Macdonald
Where did you get your eyes so blue? Out of the sky as I came through. -- George Macdonald
It is greed and laziness and selfishness, not hunger or weariness or cold, that take the dignity out of a man, and make him look mean. -- George Macdonald
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. -- George Macdonald
No man has the mind of Christ, except him who makes it his business to obey him. -- George Macdonald
One of the grandest things in having rights is, that though they are your rights you may give them up -- George Macdonald
There is no way of making three men right but by making right each one of the three; but a cure in one man who repents and turns, is a beginning of the cure of the whole human race. -- George Macdonald
It needs brains to be a real fool. -- George Macdonald
Let death do what it can, there is just one thing it cannot destroy, and that is life. Never in itself, only in the unfaith of man, does life recognize any sway of death. -- George Macdonald
Oh, father!" he said, "how the fear and oppression of ages are gone like a cloud swallowed up of space. Oh, father! are not all human ills doomed thus to vanish at last in the eternal fire of the love-burning God? - An -- George Macdonald
A beast does not know that he is a beast, and the nearer a man gets to being a beast, the less he knows it. -- George Macdonald
The world is a fine thing to save, but a wretch to worship. -- George Macdonald
Man's rank is his power to uplift. -- George Macdonald
The first thing in all progress is to leave something behind. -- George Macdonald
And Summer, dear Summer, hath years of June,
With large white clouds, and cool showers at noon;
And a beauty that grows to a weight like grief,
Till a burst of tears is the heart's relief. -- George Macdonald
Diamond, however, had not been out so late before in all his life, and things looked so strange about him! - just as if he had got into Fairyland, of which he knew quite as much as anybody;
for his mother had no money to buy books to set him wrong on the subject. -- George Macdonald
Instead of asking yourself whether you believe or not, ask yourself whether you have, this day, done one thing because He said, Do it! or once abstained because He said, Do not do it! It is simply absurd to say you believe, or even want to believe, in Him, if you do not do anything He tells you. -- George Macdonald
In a word, why were they not men at worst, when at best they ought to be more of men than other men?
And here lay the difficulty: by no effort could I get the face before me to fit into the clerical mould which I had all ready in my own mind for it. -- George Macdonald
No good ever comes of pride, for it is the meanest of mean things, and no one but he who is full of it thinks it grand. -- George Macdonald
For that great Love speaks in the most wretched and dirty hearts; only the tone of its voice depends on the echoes of the place in which it sounds. -- George Macdonald
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. -- George Macdonald
How kind is weariness sometimes! It is like the Father's hand laid a little heavy on the heart to make it still. -- George Macdonald
Joy's a subtil elf. I think man's happiest when he forgets himself. -- George Macdonald
His little heart was so full of merriment that it could not hold it all, and it ran over into theirs. -- George Macdonald
But I begin to think the chief difficulty in writing a book must be to keep out what does not belong to it. -- George Macdonald
The very fact that anything can die, implies the existence of something that cannot die; which must either take to itself another form, as when the seed that is sown dies, and arises again; or, in conscious existence, may, perhaps, continue to lead a purely spiritual life. -- George Macdonald
No, there is no escape. There is no heaven with a little of hell in it - no place to retain this or that of the devil in our hearts or our pockets. Out Satan must go, every hair and feather. -- George Macdonald
But the man of independent feeling, except he be thus your friend, will not unlikely resent your compassion, while the beggar will accept it chiefly as a pledge for something more to be got from you; and so it will tend to keep him in beggary. -- George Macdonald
LET A MAN THINK AND CARE ever so little about God, he does not therefore exist without God. God is here with him, upholding, warming, delighting, teaching him-making life a good thing to him. God gives him himself, though the man knows it not. -- George Macdonald
she might have seen that she was not bound to measure God by the way her father talked to him - that the form of the prayer had to do with her father, not immediately with God - that God might be altogether adorable, notwithstanding the prayers of all heathens and of all saints. -- George Macdonald
Ah, let a man beware, when his wishes, fulfilled, rain down upon him, and his happiness is unbounded. -- George Macdonald
A voice is in the wind I do not know
A meaning on the face of the high hills
Whose utterance I cannot comprehend.
A something is behind them: that is God. -- George Macdonald
I do not write for children, but for the childlike, whether of five, or fifty, or seventy-five. -- George Macdonald
Whatever belonging to the region of thought and feeling is uttered in words, is of necessity uttered imperfectly. For thought and feeling are infinite, and human speech, although far-reaching in scope, and marvelous in delicacy, can embody them after all but approximately and suggestively. -- George Macdonald
By all means rid yourself of an impoverished faith. -- George Macdonald
Her heart - like every heart, if only its fallen sides were cleared away - was an inexhaustible fountain of love: she loved everything she saw. -- George Macdonald
Indeed, a man is rather being thought than thinking, when a new thought arises in his mind. -- George Macdonald
There are women who fly their falcons at any game, little birds and all. -- George Macdonald
So there was but one way of setting matters right, as Mr Malison had generosity enough left in him to perceive; and that was, to make a friend of his adversary. Indeed there is that in the depths of every human breast which makes a reconciliation the only victory that can give true satisfaction. -- George Macdonald
But there is no veil like light
no adamantine armor against hurt like the truth. -- George Macdonald
There is no harm in being afraid. The only harm is in doing what Fear tells you. Fear is not your master! Laugh in his face and he will run away. -- George Macdonald
On Good Friday Jesus died But rose again at Eastertide ... Lord, teach us to understand that your Son died to save us not from suffering but from ourselves, not from injustice ... but from being unjust. He died that we might live - but live as he lives, by dying as he died who died to himself. -- George Macdonald
If we speak of direct means for the culture of the imagination, the whole is comprised in two words
food and exercise. -- George Macdonald
Were I asked, what is a fairytale? I should reply, Read Undine: that is a fairytale. -- George Macdonald
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. -- George Macdonald
She had not yet such a love of wisdom as to be able to bear with folly. The foolish and weak are the most easily disgusted with folly and weakness which is not of their own sort, and are the last to make allowances for them. -- George Macdonald
To deny oneself is to act no more from the standing ground of self.... No longing after the praise of men influence a single throb of the heart.
Right deeds, and not the judgment thereupon; true words, and not what reception they may have, shall be our concern. -- George Macdonald
No gift unrecognized as coming from God is at its own best: therefore many things that God would gladly give us, things even that we need because we are, must wait until we ask for them, that we may know whence they come: when in all gifts we find Him, then in Him we shall find all things. -- George Macdonald
There is no law that sermons shall be the preacher's own, but there is an eternal law against all manner of humbug. Pardon the word. -- George Macdonald
It is to the man who is trying to live, to the man who is obedient to the word of the Master, that the word of the Master unfolds itself. -- George Macdonald
And her life will perhaps be the richer, for holding now within it the memory of what came, but could not stay. -- George Macdonald
If there be music in my reader, I would gladly wake it. -- George Macdonald
The whole history of the Christian life is a series of resurrections ... Every time we find our hearts are troubled, that we are not rejoicing in God, a resurrection must follow; a resurrection out of the night of troubled thought into the gladness of the truth. -- George Macdonald
Set any one to talk about himself, instead of about other people, and you will have a seam of the precious mental metal opened up to you at once; only ore, most likely, that needs much smelting and refining; or it may be, not gold at all, but a metal which your mental alchemy may turn into gold. -- George Macdonald
If a man keeps the law, I know he is a lover of his neighbour. But he is not a lover because he keeps the law: he keeps the law because he is a lover. No heart will be content with the law for love. The law cannot fulfil love. -- 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
It is not by driving away our brother that we can be alone with God. -- George Macdonald
Therefore all that is not beautiful in the beloved, all that comes between and is not of love's kind, must be destroyed. -- George Macdonald
A slave will amuse himself in his dungeon; a free man must file through his chains and dig through his prison-walls before he can frolic. -- George Macdonald
Afflictions are but the shadow of His wings. -- George Macdonald
Ambition is but the evil shadow of aspiration. -- George Macdonald
The doing of things from duty is but a stage on the road to the kingdom of truth and love. -- George Macdonald
sweeter than joy itself, for the heart of the laugh was love. -- George Macdonald
To hear one talk is better than to see one. -- George Macdonald
He has not yet learned that the day begins with sleep!" said the woman, turning to her husband. "Tell him he must rest before he can do anything! -- George Macdonald
And if we believe that God is everywhere, why should we not think Him present even in the coincidences that sometimes seem so strange? For, if He be in the things that coincide, He must be in the coincidence of those things. -- George Macdonald
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. -- George Macdonald
I thank thee, Lord, for forgiving me, but I prefer staying in the darkness: forgive me that too." - "No; that cannot be. The one thing that cannot be forgiven is the sin of choosing to be evil, of refusing deliverance. It is impossible to forgive that. It would be to take part in it. -- George Macdonald
What if I should look ugly without being bad - look ugly myself because I am making ugly things beautiful? - What then? -- George Macdonald
is it not better to complain if one but complain to God himself? Does he not then draw nigh to God with what truth is in him? And will he not then fare as Job, to whom God drew nigh in return, and set his heart at rest? -- George Macdonald
It is not the cares of today, but the cares of tomorrow, that weigh a man down. -- George Macdonald
I was a bookworm then, but when I came to know it, I woke among the butterflies. -- George Macdonald
Love makes all safe. -- George Macdonald
I rose as from the death that wipes out the sadness of life, and then dies itself in the new morrow. -- George Macdonald
Suppose you didn't know him, would that make any difference?'
'No,' said Willie, after thinking a little. 'Other people would know
him if I didn't.'
'Yes, and if nobody knew him, God would know him, and anybody God has
thought worth making, it's an honor to do anything for. -- George Macdonald
I say again, if I cannot draw a horse, I will not write THIS IS A HORSE under what I foolishly meant for one. -- George Macdonald
I had chosen the dead rather than the living, the thing thought rather than the thing thinking. -- George Macdonald
Two people may be at the same spot in manners and behaviour, and yet one may be getting better, and the other worse, which is the greatest of differences that could possibly exist between them. -- George Macdonald
heaven is high and deep, and its lower air is music; in the upper regions the music may pass, who knows, merging unlost, into something endlessly better! -- George Macdonald
No one can say he is himself, until first he knows that he is, and then what himself is. In fact, nobody is himself, and himself is nobody. -- George Macdonald
It is amazing from what a mere fraction of a fact concerning him a man will dare judge the whole of another man -- George Macdonald
The man that feareth, Lord, to doubt,
In that fear doubteth thee. -- George Macdonald
A man is as free as he chooses to make himself, never an atom freer. -- George Macdonald
I looked, and saw: before her, cast from an unseen heavenly mirror, stood the reflection of herself, and beside it a form of splendent beauty. She trembled, and sank again on the floor helpless. She knew the one that God had intended her to be, the other that she had made herself. -- George Macdonald
Division has done more to hide Christ from the view of men than all the infidelity that has ever been spoken. -- George Macdonald
God chooses that men should be tried, but let a man beware of tempting his neighbor. -- George Macdonald
Blessed be the true life that the pauses between its throbs are not death! -- George Macdonald
She was a mother. One who is mother only to her own children is not a mother; she is only a woman who has borne children. But here was one of God's mothers. -- George Macdonald
the truth she gathered, enlarging her strength, enlarged likewise the composure that comes of strength. -- George Macdonald
The first thing a kindness deserves is acceptance, the second, transmission. -- George Macdonald
To say on the authority of the Bible that God does a thing no honourable man would do, is to lie against God; to say that it is therefore right, is to lie against the very spirit of God. -- George Macdonald
Ignorance is no reason with a fool for holding his tongue. -- George Macdonald
As many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God. -- George Macdonald
Alas! how easily things go wrong! -- George Macdonald
Let us comfort ourselves in the thought of the Father and the Son. So long as there dwells harmony, so long as the Son loves the Father with all the love the Father can welcome, all is well with the little ones. -- George Macdonald
Love is the opener as well as closer of eyes. -- George Macdonald
We should never wish our children or friends to do what we would not do ourselves if we were in their positions. We must accept righteous sacrifices as well as make them. -- George Macdonald
They will pressure you into doing things that may be unsafe, use your good judgment, and remember, 'I would rather be laughed at, than cried for.' -- George Macdonald
There is no leveller like Christianity - but it levels by lifting to a lofty table-land, accessible only to humility. He only who is humble can rise, and rising lift. -- George Macdonald
In truth, they were not given to quarrelling. Many couples who love each other more, quarrel more, and with less politeness. -- George Macdonald
I am sorry I cannot think of a compliment to pay you-without lying, that is. -- George Macdonald
I don't know how to thank you.'
Then I will tell you. There is only one way I care for. Do better, and grow better, and be better. -- George Macdonald
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. -- George Macdonald
Oh the folly of any mind that would explain God before obeying Him! That would map out the character of God instead of crying, Lord, what wouldst thou have me to do? -- George Macdonald
Might have been enough for a warning - it looked so like a human being dried up and distorted with age and suffering, with cares instead of loves, and things instead of thoughts. -- George Macdonald
The righteousness that makes a man visit the sins of a father upon his children, is the righteousness of a devil, not the righteousness of God. When God visits the sins of a father on his children, it is to deliver the child from his own sins through yielding to inherited temptation. -- George Macdonald
Why, you don't seem even to know the good of the things you are constantly doing. Now don't mistake me. I don't mean you are good for doing them. It is a good thing to eat your breakfast, but you don't fancy it's very good of you to do it. The thing is good, not you. -- George Macdonald
That which is within a man, not that which lies beyond his vision, is the main factor in what is about to befall him: -- George Macdonald
He had come to think that so long as a man wants to do right he may go where he can: when he can go no further, then it is not the way. -- George Macdonald
Half of the misery in the world comes from trying to look, instead of trying to be, what one is not. -- George Macdonald
His marriage was of infinitely more salvation to the laird than if it had set him free from all his worldly embarrassments, for it set him growing again - and that is the only final path out of oppression. -- George Macdonald
Forgiveness unleashes joy. It brings peace. It washes the slate clean. It sets all the highest values of love in motion. -- George Macdonald
Until a man has love, it is well he should have fear. So long as there are wild beasts about, it is better to be afraid than secure. -- George Macdonald
There are a great many more good things than bad things to do. -- George Macdonald
Work done is of more consequence for the future than the foresight of an angel. -- George Macdonald
The nearer persons come to each other, the greater is the room and the more are the occasions for courtesy; but just in proportion to their approach the gentleness of most men diminishes. -- George Macdonald
Verily the God that knows how not to reveal himself, must also know how best to reveal himself! If there be a calling child, there must be an answering Father! -- George Macdonald
In short, a man must be set free from the sin he is , which makes him do the sin he does . -- George Macdonald
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. -- George Macdonald
I begin indeed to fear that I have undertaken an impossibility, undertaken to tell what I cannot tell because no speech at my command will fit the forms in my mind. -- George Macdonald
She who is even once unjust can not complain if the like is expected of her again. -- George Macdonald
No story ever really ends, and I think I know why. -- George Macdonald
Who obeys, shines. -- George Macdonald
He did not accept the good news of God; he strained it to his heart, and was jubilant over it. -- George Macdonald
It was not, she said, confessing to her husband her sleeplessness, that she was afraid. She was only "keepin' them company, an' haudin' the yett open," she said. The latter phrase was her picture-periphrase for praying. She never said she prayed; she held the gate open. -- George Macdonald
Let a man do right, not trouble himself about worthless opinion; the less he heeds tongues, the less difficult will he find it to love men. -- George Macdonald
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. -- George Macdonald
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. -- George Macdonald
VISITORS FROM THE HALL. -- George Macdonald
What is called a good conscience is often but a dull one that gives no trouble when it ought to bark loudest; -- George Macdonald
And earth was given back to earth, to mingle with the rest of the stuff the great workman works withal. -- George Macdonald
The main secret of his progress, the secret of all wisdom, was, that with him action was the beginning and end of thought. -- George Macdonald
If we knew as much about heaven as God does, we would clap our hands every time a Christian dies. -- George Macdonald
The best thing you can do for your fellow, next to rousing his conscience, is - not to give him things to think about, but to wake things up that are in him; or say, to make him think things for himself. -- George Macdonald
respectability to good impulses -- George Macdonald
I must accept my fate! But how was life to be lived in a world of which I had all the laws to learn? There would, however, be adventure! that held consolation; and whether I found my way home or not, I should at least have the rare advantage of knowing two worlds! -- George Macdonald
A fairytale is not an allegory. There may be allegory in it, but it is not an allegory. -- George Macdonald
Wherever there is anything to love, there is beauty in some form. -- George Macdonald
Who can give a man this, his own name? -- George Macdonald
He believed in God and he believed that when the human is still, the Divine speaks to it, because it is its own. -- George Macdonald
I don't believe that he thinks about His glory except for the sake
of truth and men's hearts dying for the lack of it. -- George Macdonald
If you know you are yourself, you know that you are not somebody else; but do you know that you are yourself? Are -- 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
her - nobody but Sarah; -- George Macdonald
Not even nothingness preceded life. Nothingness owes its very idea to existence. -- George Macdonald
God's finger can touch nothing but to mold it into loveliness. -- George Macdonald
For this, deep waters whelm the fruitful lea, Wars ravage, famine wastes, plague withers, nor Shall cease till men have chosen the better part. -- George Macdonald
It is only by loving a thing that you can make it yours. -- George Macdonald
You can't live on amusement. It is the froth on water - an inch deep and then the mud. -- George Macdonald
The well-meaning woman was in fact possessed by two devils--the one the stiff-necked devil of pride, the other the condescending devil of benevolence. She was kind, but she must have credit for it -- George Macdonald
The good man never wrote or read a sermon, but talked to his people as one who would meet what was in them with what was in him. -- George Macdonald
It is always the way. Until a man knows God, he seeks to obey him by doing things he neither commands nor cares about; -- George Macdonald
I forced my way to the brink, stepped into the boat, pushed it, with the help of the tree-branches, out into the stream, lay down in the bottom, and let my boat and me float whither the stream would carry us. -- George Macdonald
I only know when I don't know a thing ... wisdom lies in that. -- George Macdonald
As to the pure all things are pure, so the common mind sees far more vulgarity in others than the mind developed in genuine refinement. -- George Macdonald
Moderation is the basis of justice. -- George Macdonald
But words are vain; reject them all
They utter but a feeble part:
Hear thou the depths from which they call,
The voiceless longing of my heart. -- George Macdonald
If man could do what in his wildest self-worship he can imagine, the grand result would be that he would be his own God, which is the Hell of Hells. -- George Macdonald
When a man dreams his own dream, he is the sport of his dream; when Another gives it him, that Other is able to fulfill it. -- George Macdonald
To judge religion we must have it
not stare at it from the bottom of a seemingly interminable ladder. -- George Macdonald
Thou art beautiful because God created thee, but thou art a slave to sin ... wickedness has made you ugly. -- George Macdonald
The miracles of Jesus were the ordinary works of his Father, wrought small and swift that we might take them in. -- George Macdonald
Common people, whether lords or shop-keepers, are slow to understand that possession, whether in the shape of birth or lands or money or intellect, is a small affair in the difference between men. -- George Macdonald
This
is another to be added to the many proofs that verisimilitude is not
in the least an essential element of verity. -- 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
Then I remembered that night is the fairies' day, and the moon their sun; and I thought - Everything sleeps and dreams now: when the night comes, it will be different. -- George Macdonald
What does it all mean?' I said.
'A good question,' he rejoined: 'nobody knows what anything is; a man can learn only what a thing means. Whether he do, depends on the use he is making of it. -- George Macdonald
God Himself - His thoughts, His will, His love, His judgments are men's home. To think His thoughts, to choose His will, to judge His judgments, and thus to know that He is in us, with us,
is to be at home. -- George Macdonald
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. -- George Macdonald
There is endless room for rebellion against ourselves. -- George Macdonald
The region of the senses is the unbelieving part of the human soul. -- George Macdonald
As no scripture is of private interpretation, so is there no feeling in a human heart which exists in that heart alone - which is not, in some form or degree, in every human heart ... -- George Macdonald
There was no pride, pomp, or circumstance of glorious war in this poor, domestic strife, this seemingly sordid and unheroic, miserably unheroic, yet high, eternal contest! -- George Macdonald
Will is not unfrequently weakness. -- George Macdonald
The person who can not bear with a sick man or a baby is not fit to be a woman. -- George Macdonald
Yet I know that good is coming to me - that good is always coming; though few have at all times the simplicity and the courage to believe it. What we call evil, is the only and best shape, which, for the person and his condition at the time, could be assumed by the best good. And so, FAREWELL. -- George Macdonald
True business can never be left in any shop. It is a care, white or black, that sits behind every horseman. -- George Macdonald
By this edition of HAMLET I hope to help the student of Shakspere to understand the play - and first of all Hamlet himself, whose spiritual and moral nature are the real material of the tragedy, to -- George Macdonald
St. Paul is not yet the man he would be, which he must be. But he, and all they who with him believe that the perfection of Christ is the sole worthy effort of a man's life, are in the region, though not yet at the centre, of perfection. -- George Macdonald
To the dim and bewildered vision of humanity, God's care is more evident in some instances than in others; and upon such instances men seize, and call them providences. It is well that they can; but it would be gloriously better if they could believe that the whole matter is one grand providence. -- George Macdonald
Of all children how can the children of God be old? -- George Macdonald
But a man may then imagine in your work what he pleases, what you never meant!
Not what he pleases, but what he can. -- George Macdonald
I took the guinea, and put it in my purse. -- George Macdonald
All that man sees has to do with man. Worlds cannot be without an intermundane relationship. The community of the centre of all creation suggests an interradiating connection and dependence
of the parts. Else a grander idea is conceivable than that which is already embodied. -- George Macdonald
the road is difficult. - But come; loss now will be gain then! To wait is harder than to run, and its meed is the fuller. -- George Macdonald
There is no inborn longing that shall not be fulfilled. I think that is as certain as the forgiveness of sins. -- George Macdonald
I awoke one morning with the usual perplexity of mind which accompanies the return of consciousness. -- George Macdonald
But it was little to Curdie that men who did not know what he was about should not approve of his proceedings. -- George Macdonald
I would not favour a fiction to keep a whole world out of hell. The hell that a lie would keep any man out of is doubtless the very best place for him to go to. It is truth ... that saves the world. -- George Macdonald
Now Gibbie had been honoured with the acquaintance of many dogs, and the friendship of most of them, for a lover of humanity can hardly fail to be a lover of caninity. -- George Macdonald
Where was God?
In him and his question. -- George Macdonald
Where there is no choice, we do well to make no difficulty. -- George Macdonald
I wondered over again for the hundredth time what could be the principle which, in the wildest, most lawless, fantastically chaotic, apparently capricious work of Nature, always kept it beautiful. -- George Macdonald
A name is one of those things one can give away and keep all the same. -- George Macdonald
Anything large enough for a wish to light upon, is large enough to hang a prayer upon. -- George Macdonald
A condition which of declension would indicate a devil, may of growth indicate a saint. -- George Macdonald
But there are not a few who would be indignant at having their belief in God questioned, who yet seem greatly to fear imagining Him better than He is. -- George Macdonald
Humility is essential greatness, the inside of grandeur. -- George Macdonald
punishment had not been spared--with best results in patience and purification -- George Macdonald
I need a God; and if there be none how did I come to need one? -- George Macdonald
Now and then, when I look round on my books, they seem to waver as if a wind rippled their solid mass, and another world were about to break through. -- George Macdonald
Come, then, affliction, if my Father wills, and be my frowning friend. A friend that frowns is better than a smiling enemy. -- George Macdonald
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. -- George Macdonald
From the neglect of a real duty, she became the slave of a false one. -- George Macdonald
When one has to seek the honour that comes from God only, he will take the withholding of the honour that comes from men very quietly indeed. -- George Macdonald
It is the heart that is unsure of its God that is afraid to laugh. -- George Macdonald
...the loves of the noble wife, the great-souled mother, and the true sister flow from a single root.... they are all but glints on the ruffled waters of humanity of the one, changeless, enduring Light. -- George Macdonald
Primarily, God is not bound to punish sin; he is bound to destroy sin.
The only vengeance worth having on sin
is to make the sinner himself its executioner. -- George Macdonald
This is in the very nature of things: obedience alone places a man in the position in which he can see so as to judge that which is above him. -- George Macdonald
The year's fruit must fall that the next year's may come, and the winter is the only way to the spring. -- George Macdonald
Even in the matter of stealing we must think of our own beam before our neighbour's mote. It is not easy to be honest. There is many a thief who is less of a thief than many a respectable member of society. -- George Macdonald
I am his, and he shall do with me just as he likes. -- George Macdonald
I could not help feeling a little annoyed, (which was very foolish, I know,) -- George Macdonald
Worlds cannot be without an intermundane relationship. The community of the centre of all creation suggests an interradiating connection and dependence of the parts. -- George Macdonald
If it were not for the outside world, we would have no inside world to understand things by. Least of all could we understand God without these millions of sights and sounds and scents and motions, weaving their endless harmonies. They come out of His heart to let us know a little of what is in it. -- George Macdonald
Then his heart and imagination were more in the ascendency. Now he had begun to admire the intellectual qualities of that literature more, and its imaginative less; for he had begun to think truth attainable through the forces of the brain, sole and supreme. -- George Macdonald
In the hearts of witches, love and hate lie close together and often tumble over each other. -- George Macdonald
How can beauty and ugliness dwell so near? Even with her altered complexion and her face of dislike; disenchanted of the belief that clung around her; known for a living, walking sepulchre, faithless, deluding, traitorous; I felt notwithstanding all this, that she was beautiful. -- George Macdonald
The road to the next duty is the only straight one, -- George Macdonald
God grant our new may inwrap our old! -- George Macdonald
his mother, who had never been able to manage him, sent him to school to get rid of him, lamented his absence till he returned, then writhed and fretted under his presence until again he went. -- George Macdonald
Past tears are present strength. -- George Macdonald
Alas, how easily things go wrong! A sigh too much, a kiss too long And there follows a mist and a weeping rain And life is never the same again -- George Macdonald
If we do not die to ourselves, we cannot live to God, andhe that does not live to God, is dead. -- George Macdonald
To have what we want is riches; but to be able to do without is power. -- George Macdonald
There is little hope of the repentance and redemption of certain some until they have committed one or another of the many wrong things of which they are daily, through a course of unrestrained selfishness, becoming more and more capable. -- 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
In the windowless tomb of a blind mother, in the dead of the night, under feeble rays of a lamp in an alabaster globe, a girl came into the darkness with a wail. -- George Macdonald
The ideal is the only absolute real; and it must become the real in the individual life as well, however impossible they may count it who never tried it. -- George Macdonald
Our moon," he answered, "is not like yours-the old cinder of a burnt-out world; her beams embalm the dead, not corrupt them. -- George Macdonald
I believe in fate, never in chance. -- George Macdonald
The mind of the many is not the mind of God. -- George Macdonald
Not only then has each man his individual relation to God, but each man has his peculiar relation to God. -- George Macdonald
It is when people do wrong things wilfully that they are the more likely to do them again. -- George Macdonald
Come, come to Him who made thy heart; Come weary and oppressed; To come to Jesus is thy part; His part, to give thee rest. -- George Macdonald
Sad-hearted, be at peace: the snowdrop lies Buried in sepulchre of ghastly snow; -- George Macdonald
He would perhaps have known that to try too hard to make people good, is one way to make them worse; that the only way to make them good is to be good
remembering well the beam and the mote; that the time for speaking comes rarely, the time for being never departs. -- George Macdonald
We die daily. Happy those who daily come to life as well. -- George Macdonald
Religion is life essential. -- George Macdonald
All those evil doctrines about God that work misery and madness have their origin in the brains of the wise and prudent, not in the hearts of children. -- George Macdonald
Books are but dead bodies to you, and a library nothing but a catacomb! -- George Macdonald
Would it not be better to reject it altogether if it not be fit to be believed heart and soul? -- George Macdonald
To will not from self, but with the Eternal, is to live. -- George Macdonald
I repent me of the ignorance wherein I ever said that God made man out of nothing: there is no nothing out of which to make anything; God is all in all, and he made us out of himself. -- George Macdonald
Somehow, I can't say how, it tells me that all is right; that it is coming to swallow up all cries. -- George Macdonald
She began to learn that nothing is dead, that there cannot be a physical abstraction, that nothing exists for the sake of the laws of its phenomena. -- George Macdonald
What can money do to console a man with a headache? -- George Macdonald
To cease to wonder is to fall plumb-down from the childlike to the commonplace - the most undivine of all moods intellectual. Our nature can never be at home among things that are not wonderful to us. -- George Macdonald
Nobody knows what anything is; a man can only learn what a thing means! -- George Macdonald
You doubt because you love truth. -- George Macdonald
Which of us is other than a secret to all but God! -- George Macdonald
God is God to us not that we may say he is, but that we may know him; and when we know him, then we are with him, at home, at the heart of the universe, the heirs of all things. -- George Macdonald
Cleverness is cheap. It is faith that He praises. -- George Macdonald
Above all things, I delight in listening to stories, and sometimes in telling them. -- George Macdonald
Am I mystical again, reader? Then I hope you are too, or will be before you have done with this same beautiful mystical life of ours. -- George Macdonald
A perfect faith would lift us absolutely above fear -- George Macdonald
No one is likely to remember what is entirely uninteresting to him. -- George Macdonald
That God only whom Christ reveals to the humble seeker, can ever satisfy human soul. -- George Macdonald
There are as many kinds of anger as there are of the sunsets with which they ought to end. -- George Macdonald
Foreseeing is not understanding, else surely the prophecy latent in man would come oftener to the surface! -- George Macdonald
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. -- George Macdonald
The necessary unlikeness between the creator and the created holds within it the equally necessary likeness of the thing made to him who makes it, and so of the work of the made to the work of the maker ... The imagination of man is made in the image of the imagination of God. -- George Macdonald
How many who love never come nearer than to behold each other as in a mirror; seem to know and yet never know the inward life; never enter the other soul; and part at last, with but the vaguest notion of the universe on the borders of which they have been hovering for years? -- George Macdonald
As in all sweetest music, a tinge of sadness was in every note. Nor do we know how much of the pleasures even of life we owe to the intermingled sorrows. Joy cannot unfold the deepest truths, although deepest truth must be deepest joy. -- George Macdonald
What would the Living One have me do? -- George Macdonald
I write, not for children,but for the child-like, whether they be of five, or fifty, or seventy-five. -- George Macdonald
All things are possible with God, but all things are not easy. -- George Macdonald
I learned that he that will be a hero, will barely be a man; that he that will be nothing but a doer of his work, is sure of his manhood. -- 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
Then the great old, young, beautiful princess turned to Curdie.
'Now, Curdie, are you ready?' she said.
'Yes ma'am,' answered Curdie.
'You do not know what for.'
'You do, ma'am. That is enough. -- George Macdonald
Similarly, there are multitudes who lose their lives pondering what they ought to believe, while something lies at their door waiting to be done, and rendering it impossible for him who makes it wait, ever to know what to believe. -- George Macdonald
What does God want me to do?", not "What will God do if I do so and so? -- George Macdonald
She did not hesitate. Right into the hole she went, which was high enough to let her walk without stooping. For a little way there was a brown glimmer, but at the first turn it all but ceased, and before she had gone many paces she was in total darkness. -- George Macdonald
It may seem strange that one with whom I had held so little communion should have so engrossed my thoughts, but benefits conferred awaken love in some minds, as surely as benefits received in others. -- George Macdonald
Difficulty adds to result, as the ramming of powder sends the bullet the further. -- George Macdonald
I hear you have been most kind in visiting the poor, -- George Macdonald
I dare not say with Paul that I am the slave of Christ, but my highest aspiration and desire is to be the slave of Christ. -- George Macdonald
For I had long thought that the way to make indifferent things bad, was for good people not to do them. -- George Macdonald
The true man trusts in a strength which is not his, and which he does not feel, does not even always desire. -- George Macdonald
he was more grateful for Truffey's generous forgiveness than he would have been for the richest living in Scotland. Such forgiveness is just giving us back ourselves - clean and happy. And for what gift can we be more grateful? -- George Macdonald
The Bible is to me the most precious thing in the world just because it tells me the story of Jesus. -- George Macdonald
Our Lord speaks of many coming up to His door confident of admission, whom He yet sends away. Faith is obedience, not confidence. -- George Macdonald
Trust to God to weave your thread into the great web, though the pattern shows it not yet. -- George Macdonald
I am an emptiness for Thee to fill; my soul a cavern for Thy sea -- George Macdonald
Forgive me for feeling so cross and proud towards the unhappy old lady - for -- George Macdonald
You allowed me existence, which is the sum of what one can demand of his fellow-beings -- George Macdonald