“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.”
Source: MacDonalds’ Fairy-Tale Treasure Chest
“Seeing is not believing - it is only seeing.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of George MacDonald (Illustrated)
“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.' Yes, grandmother. I must be fair - for if I'm not fair to other people, I'm not worth being understood myself. I see.”
Source: George MacDonald: The Complete Fantasy Collection - 8 Novels & 30+ Short Stories and Fairy Tales (Illustrated): The Princess and the Goblin, Lilith, Phantastes, The Princess and Curdie, At the Back of the North Wind, Portent, The Lost Princess, Adela Cathcart, Dealings with the Fairies and many more
“Here I should like to remark, for the sake of princes and princesses in general, that it is a low and contemptible thing to refuse to confess a fault, or even an error. If a true princess has done wrong, she is always uneasy until she has had an opportunity of throwing the wrongness away from her by saying: 'I did it; and I wish I had not; and I am sorry for having done it.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of George MacDonald (Illustrated)
“No story ever really ends, and I think I know why.”
“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.”
Source: The Complete Works of George MacDonald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Theological Writings & Essays (Illustrated): The Princess and the Goblin, Phantastes, At the Back of the North Wind, Lilith, England’s Antiphon, David Elginbrod, Malcolm, The Light Princess, The Golden Key and many more
“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.”
“Love me, beloved; Hades and Death Shall vanish away like a frosty breath; These hands, that now are at home in thine, Shall clasp thee again, if thou art still mine; And thou shalt be mine, my spirit's bride, In the ceaseless flow of eternity's tide, If the truest love thy heart can know Meet the truest love that from mine can flow. Pray God, beloved, for thee and me, That our sourls may be wedded eternally.”
“A Baby Sermon- The lighting and thunder, they go and they come: But the stars and the stillness are always at home”
Source: Violin songs. Songs of the days and nights. A book of dreams. Roadside poems. Poems for children
“...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.”
Source: At the Back of the North Wind (Illustrated): Children's Classic Fantasy Novel from the Author of Adela Cathcart, Phantastes, The Princess and the Goblin, Lilith, England’s Antiphon, The Light Princess & Dealings with the Fairies
“I learned that it is better, a thousandfold , for a proud man to fall and be humbled, than to hold up his head in his pride and fancied innocence. 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. In nothing was my ideal lowered, or dimmed, or grown less precious; I only saw it too plainly, to set myself for a moment beside it.”
“To love righteousness is to make it grow, not to avenge it. Throughout his life on earth, Jesus resisted every impulse to work more rapidly for a lower good.”
Source: The Complete Works of George MacDonald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Theological Writings & Essays (Illustrated): The Princess and the Goblin, Phantastes, At the Back of the North Wind, Lilith, England’s Antiphon, David Elginbrod, Malcolm, The Light Princess, The Golden Key and many more
“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.”
Source: The Complete Works of George MacDonald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Theological Writings & Essays (Illustrated): The Princess and the Goblin, Phantastes, At the Back of the North Wind, Lilith, England’s Antiphon, David Elginbrod, Malcolm, The Light Princess, The Golden Key and many more
“I write, not for children,but for the child-like, whether they be of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.”
Source: The Day Boy and the Night Girl (Fantasy and Horror Classics)
“A man is as free as he chooses to make himself, never an atom freer.”
Source: The Complete Novels of George Macdonald (Illustrated): The Princess and the Goblin, The Princess and Curdie, Phantastes, At the Back of the North Wind, Lilith, David Elginbrod, Malcolm, Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood, Wilfrid Cumbermede and many more
“All that is not God is death.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of George MacDonald (Illustrated)
“To try to be brave is to be brave.”
Source: Greatest Christmas Novels in One Volume: Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, Heidi, The Romance of a Christmas Card, The Little City of Hope, The Wonderful Life, Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, Little Lord Fauntleroy, Peter Pan…
“Philosophy is really homesickness.”
Source: A Dish of Orts
“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.”
Source: The Heart of George MacDonald: A One-Volume Collection of His Most Important Fiction, Essays, Sermons, Drama, and Biographical Information
“There is this difference between the growth of some human beings and that of others: in the one case it is a continuous dying, in the other a continuous resurrection.”
Source: The Heart of George MacDonald: A One-Volume Collection of His Most Important Fiction, Essays, Sermons, Drama, and Biographical Information
“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.”
Source: The Heart of George MacDonald: A One-Volume Collection of His Most Important Fiction, Essays, Sermons, Drama, and Biographical Information
“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.”
Source: The Complete Novels of George Macdonald (Illustrated): The Princess and the Goblin, The Princess and Curdie, Phantastes, At the Back of the North Wind, Lilith, David Elginbrod, Malcolm, Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood, Wilfrid Cumbermede and many more
“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.”
Source: Phantastes
“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)”
“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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of George MacDonald (Illustrated)
“Only he knew that to be left alone is not always to be forsaken.”
Source: At the Back of the North Wind
“What distressed me most - more even than my own folly - was the perplexing question - How can beauty and ugliness dwell so near? Even with her altered complexion and face of dislike; disenchanted of the belief that clung around her; known for a living, walking sepulcher, faithless, deluding, traitorous; I felt, notwithstanding all this, that she was beautiful. Upon this I pondered with undiminished perplexity.”
Source: The Complete Works of George MacDonald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Theological Writings & Essays (Illustrated): The Princess and the Goblin, Phantastes, At the Back of the North Wind, Lilith, England’s Antiphon, David Elginbrod, Malcolm, The Light Princess, The Golden Key and many more
“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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of George MacDonald (Illustrated)
“And her life will perhaps be the richer, for holding now within it the memory of what came, but could not stay.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of George MacDonald (Illustrated)
“I rose as from the death that wipes out the sadness of life, and then dies itself in the new morrow.”
Source: Phantastes
“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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of George MacDonald (Illustrated)
“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.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of George MacDonald (Illustrated)
“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.”
Source: Unspoken Sermons Series I, II, and III
“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.”
Source: George MacDonald: The Complete Fantasy Collection - 8 Novels & 30+ Short Stories and Fairy Tales (Illustrated): The Princess and the Goblin, Lilith, Phantastes, The Princess and Curdie, At the Back of the North Wind, Portent, The Lost Princess, Adela Cathcart, Dealings with the Fairies and many more
“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.”
Source: The Complete Fairy Tales
“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.”
Source: Unspoken Sermons Series I, II, and III
“We are and remain such creeping Christians, because we look at ourselves and not at Christ; because we gaze at the marks of our own soiled feet, and the trail of our own defiled garments.... Each, putting his foot in the footprint of the Master, and so defacing it, turns to examine how far his neighbor’s footprint corresponds with that which he still calls the Master’s, although it is but his own.”
Source: Creation in Christ: Unspoken Sermons
“We must do the thing we must Before the thing we may; We are unfit for any trust Till we can and do obey.”
Source: The Complete Poetry of George MacDonald: A Book of Strife, in the Form of the Diary of an Old Soul + Rampolli: Growths from a Long-planted Root + A Hidden Life Collection and Other Poems
“You would not think any duty small, If you yourself were great.”
Source: The poetical works of George MacDonald in two volumes —
“My prayers, my God, flow from what I am not; I think thy answers make me what I am.”
Source: A Book of Strife in the Form of the Diary of an Old Soul
“Could you not give me some sign, or tell me something about you that never changes, or some other way to know you, or thing to know you by?" — "No, Curdie: that would be to keep you from knowing me. You must know me in quite another way from that. It would not be the least use to you or me either if I were to make you know me in that way. It would be but to know the sign of me — not to know me myself.”
Source: Down the Chimney: 100+ Most Treasured Christmas Novels & Stories in One Volume (Illustrated): The Tailor of Gloucester, Little Women, Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, The Gift of the Magi, A Christmas Carol, The Three Kings, Little Lord Fauntleroy, The Heavenly Christmas Tree…
“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.”
Source: The Complete Works of George MacDonald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Theological Writings & Essays (Illustrated): The Princess and the Goblin, Phantastes, At the Back of the North Wind, Lilith, England’s Antiphon, David Elginbrod, Malcolm, The Light Princess, The Golden Key and many more
“I tell you, there are more worlds, and more doors to them, than you will think of in many years!”
Source: The Complete Novels of George Macdonald (Illustrated): The Princess and the Goblin, The Princess and Curdie, Phantastes, At the Back of the North Wind, Lilith, David Elginbrod, Malcolm, Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood, Wilfrid Cumbermede and many more
“The part of the philanthropist is indeed a dangerous one; and the man who would do his neighbour good must first study how not to do him evil, and must begin by pulling the beam out of his own eye.”
Source: The Complete Works of George MacDonald: Novels, Short Stories, Poetry, Theological Writings & Essays (Illustrated): The Princess and the Goblin, Phantastes, At the Back of the North Wind, Lilith, England’s Antiphon, David Elginbrod, Malcolm, The Light Princess, The Golden Key and many more
“Doubt may be a poor encouragement to do anything, but it is a bad reason for doing nothing.”
Source: The Complete Novels of George Macdonald (Illustrated): The Princess and the Goblin, The Princess and Curdie, Phantastes, At the Back of the North Wind, Lilith, David Elginbrod, Malcolm, Ranald Bannerman's Boyhood, Wilfrid Cumbermede and many more
“Thou art beautiful because God created thee, but thou art a slave to sin... wickedness has made you ugly.”
“There is no slave but the creature that wills against its Creator.”
Source: Delphi Complete Works of George MacDonald (Illustrated)
“What God may hereafter require of you, you must not give yourself the least trouble about. Everything He gives you to do, you must do as well as ever you can, and that is the best possible preparation for what He may want you to do next. If people would but do what they have to do, they would always find themselves ready for what came next.”
Source: Cheerful Words
“I've been thinking about it a great deal, and it seems to me that although any one sixpence is as good as any other sixpence, not twenty lambs would do instead of one sheep whose face you knew. Somehow, when once you've looked into anybody's eyes, right deep down into them, I mean, nobody will do for that one any more . Nobody, ever so beautiful or so good, will make up for that one going out of sight.”
“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.”
Source: George MacDonald: The Complete Fantasy Collection - 8 Novels & 30+ Short Stories and Fairy Tales (Illustrated): The Princess and the Goblin, Lilith, Phantastes, The Princess and Curdie, At the Back of the North Wind, Portent, The Lost Princess, Adela Cathcart, Dealings with the Fairies and many more
