George MacDonald Quotations

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.

Above all things, I delight in listening to stories, and sometimes in telling them.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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.