110+ George Macdonald Quotes On Prayer, Death And Truth

George Macdonald was a Scottish novelist, poet and Christian minister. He is known for his influential works of fantasy, such as The Princess and the Goblin and Phantastes. He was also a pioneer in the field of fantasy literature and the mentor of fellow writer Lewis Carroll. Following is our collection on famous quotes by George Macdonald on prayer, death, love.

Top 10 George Macdonald Quotes

1. 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.
2. Forgiveness unleashes joy. It brings peace. It washes the slate clean. It sets all the highest values of love in motion.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. How strange this fear of death is! We are never frightened at a sunset.
6. God left the world unfinished for man to work his skill upon. He left the electricity still in the cloud, the oil still in the earth.
7. Man finds it hard to get what he wants, because he does not want the best; God finds it hard to give, because He would give the best, and man will not take it.
8. Work is not always required. There is such a thing as sacred idleness.
9. If we do not die to ourselves, we cannot live to God, andhe that does not live to God, is dead.
10. In whatever man does without God, he must fail miserably, or succeed more miserably.

George Macdonald Short Quotes

• Few delights can equal the presence of one whom we trust utterly.
• You can't live on amusement. It is the froth on water -- an inch deep and then the mud.
• You can't live on amusement. It is the froth on water - an inch deep and then the mud.
• Afflictions are but the shadows of God's wings.
• Nothing makes one feel so strong as a call for help.
• There are women who fly their falcons at any game, little birds and all.
• Friends, if we be honest with ourselves, we shall be honest with each other.
• The principal part of faith is patience.
• Obedience is the key to every door.
• The best preparation for the future is the present well seen to, and the last duty done.

George Macdonald Quotes About Prayer

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

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

Anything large enough for a wish to light upon, is large enough to hang a prayer upon. — George Macdonald

Anything big enough to occupy our minds is big enough to hang a prayer on. — George Macdonald

My prayers, my God, flow from what I am not; I think thy answers make me what I am. — George Macdonald

George Macdonald Quotes About Death

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

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

Blessed be the true life that the pauses between its throbs are not death! — 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

I rose as from the death that wipes out the sadness of life, and then dies itself in the new morrow. — 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

All that is not God is death. — 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

George Macdonald Quotes About Love

Love makes everything lovely; hate concentrates itself on the one thing hated. — George Macdonald

It is by loving and not by being loved that one can come nearest to the soul of another. — George Macdonald

To give truth to him who loves it not is but to give him more plentiful material for misinterpretation. — George Macdonald

Beauty and sadness always go together. — 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

You doubt because you love truth. — 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

Beauty and sadness always go together. Nature thought beauty too rich to go forth Upon the earth without a meet alloy. — 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

The doing of things from duty is but a stage on the road to the kingdom of truth and love. — George Macdonald

George Macdonald Quotes About Truth

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

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

Joy cannot unfold the deepest truths. Cometh white-robed Sorrow, stooping and wan, and flingeth wide the door she must not enter. — George Macdonald

But there is no veil like light--no adamantine armor against hurt like the truth. — George Macdonald

Do the things you know, and you shall learn the truth you need to know. — 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

In low theologies, hell is invariably the deepest truth, and the love of God is not so deep as hell. — George Macdonald

There is no cheating in nature and the simple unsought feelings of the soul. There must be a truth involved in it, though we may but in part lay hold of the meaning. — George Macdonald

To be humbly ashamed is to be plunged in the cleansing bath of truth. — 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

George Macdonald Quotes About Imagination

There is no water in oxygen, no water in hydrogen: it comes bubbling fresh from the imagination of the living God, rushing from under the great white throne of the glacier. The very thought of it makes one gasp with an elemental joy no metaphysician can analyse. — 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

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

George Macdonald Quotes About Life

Forgiveness is the giving, and so the receiving, of life. — 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

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

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

All that is made seems planless to the darkened mind, because there are more plans than it looked for...There seems no plan because it is all plan: there seems no centre because it is all centre. — 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

Not even nothingness preceded life. Nothingness owes its very idea to existence. — George Macdonald

The seed dies into a new life, and so does man. — 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

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. — George Macdonald

George Macdonald Quotes About Work

The holy spirit of the Spring Is working silently. — 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

If we will but let our God and Father work His will with us, there can be no limit to His enlargement of our existence — 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

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

The possession of wealth is, as it were, prepayment, and involves an obligation of honor to the doing of correspondent work. — George Macdonald

When we are out of sympathy with the young, then I think our work in this world is over. — 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

This is and has been the Father's work from the beginning-to bring us into the home of His heart. — 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

George Macdonald Quotes About World

Half of the misery in the world comes from trying to look, instead of trying to be, what one is not. — George Macdonald

The Bible is to me the most precious thing in the world, because it tells me his story; and what good men thought about him who knew him and accepted him. — 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

I am an optimistic fatalist. This world and all its beginnings will pass on into something better. — 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

He (God) can be revealed only to the child; perfectly, to the pure child only. All the discipline of the world is to make men children, that God may be revealed to them. — 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

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 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

I tell you, there are more worlds, and more doors to them, than you will think of in many years! — George Macdonald

George Macdonald Quotes About Giving

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

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

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

In Giving, a man receives more than he gives; and the more is in proportion to the worth of the thing given. — George Macdonald

One of the grandest things in having rights is, that though they are your rights you may give them up — 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

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

Forgiveness is the giving and so the receiving of life. the latter may be an impulse of a moment of heat; whereas the former is a cold and deliberate choice of the heart. — 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

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

George Macdonald Famous Quotes And Sayings

Now I want you to think that in life troubles will come, which seem as if they never would pass away. The night and storm look as if they would last forever; but the calm and the morning cannot be stayed; the storm in its very nature is transient. The effort of nature, as that of the human heart, ever is to return to its repose, for God is Peace. — George Macdonald

Those Christians who are very strict in their observances, think a good deal more of the Sabbath than of man, a great deal more of the Bible than of the truth, and ten times more of their creed than of the will of God. Of course, if they heard anyone utter such words as I have just written, they would say he was and atheist. — 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

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

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

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

...it is so silly of people to fancy that old age means crookedness and witheredness and feebleness and sticks and spectacles and rheumatism and forgetfulness! It is so silly! Old age has nothing whatever to do with all that. The right old age means strength and beauty and mirth and courage and clear eyes and strong painless limbs. — George Macdonald

Not only then has each man his individual relation to God, but each man has his peculiar relation to God. — 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

To judge religion we must have it--not stare at it from the bottom of a seemingly interminable ladder. — 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

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

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

Doubts are the messengers of the Living One to the honest. They are the first knock at our door of things that are not yet, but have to be, understood. . . . Doubts must precede every deeper assurance; for uncertainties are what we first see when we look into a region hitherto unknown, unexplored, unannexed. — 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

No man has the mind of Christ, except him who makes it his business to obey him. — 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 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

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

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

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

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

God's finger can touch nothing but to mold it into loveliness. — George Macdonald

To have what we want is riches; but to be able to do without is power. — George Macdonald

The whole trouble is that we won't let God help us. — George Macdonald

Faith is obedience, not compliance. — George Macdonald

No, there is no escape. There is no heaven with a little of hell in it--no plan to retain this or that of the devil in our hearts or our pockets. Out Satan must go, every hair and feather! — 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

It is a happy thing for us that this is really all we have to concern ourselves about--what to do next. No man can do the second thing. He can do the first. — 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

Moderation is the basis of justice. — George Macdonald

Real good-breeding is independent of the forms and refinements of what has assumed to itself the name of society. — 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

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

All haste implies weakness. — George Macdonald

Good souls many will one day be horrified at the things they now believe of God. — George Macdonald

Where did you come from, baby dear? Out of the everywhere and into here. — George Macdonald

God never gave man a thing to do concerning which it were irreverent to ponder how the Son of God would have done it. — George Macdonald

No man can make haste to be rich without going against the will of God, in which case it is the one frightful thing to be successful. — 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

One thing is clear to me, that no indulgence of passion destroys the spiritual nature so much as respectable selfishness. — 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

Only he knew that to be left alone is not always to be forsaken. — George Macdonald

I want to help you grow as beautiful as God meant you to be when he thought of you first. — 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

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

To receive honestly is the best thanks for a good thing. — George Macdonald

I find that doing of the will of God leaves me no time for disputing about His plans. — George Macdonald

Affliction is but the shadow of God's wing. — 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 an aching that is worse than any pain. — George Macdonald

But when we are following the light, even its extinction is a guide. — George Macdonald

And so all growth that is not towards God Is growing to decay. — George Macdonald

Ah, what is it we send up thither, where our thoughts are either a dissonance or a sweetness and a grace? — George Macdonald

It is not the cares of today, but the cares of tomorrow, that weigh a man down. — George Macdonald

In the hearts of witches, love and hate lie close together and often tumble over each other. — George Macdonald

It is when people do wrong things wilfully that they are the more likely to do them again. — George Macdonald

Division has done more to hide Christ from the view of all men than all the infidelity that has ever been spoken. — George Macdonald

I am an emptiness for Thee to fill; my soul a cavern for Thy sea — George Macdonald

Where did you get your eyes so blue? Out of the sky as I came through. — George Macdonald

A fairytale is not an allegory. There may be allegory in it, but it is not an allegory. — 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

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

Life Lessons by George Macdonald

1. George Macdonald's writing emphasizes the importance of faith, hope, and love, and teaches us to focus on the beauty of life and the joy of living.
2. He encourages us to be kind and generous to others, to trust in God, and to be humble and honest in our dealings.
3. He also reminds us to be thankful for the blessings we have and to be patient and forgiving when faced with difficult circumstances.