George macdonald quotes

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

It is by loving, and not by being loved, that one can come nearest the soul of another; yea, that, where two love, it is the loving of each other, that originates and perfects and assures their blessedness. I knew that love gives to him that loveth, power over any soul beloved, even if that soul know him not, bringing him inwardly close to that spirit; a power that cannot be but for good; for in proportion as selfishness intrudes, the love ceases, and the power which springs therefrom dies. Yet all love will, one day, meet with its return.

We are often unable to tell people what they need to know, because they want to know something else, and would therefore only misunderstand what we said.

Never tell a child 'you have a soul.' Teach him, you are a soul; you have a body.

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.

Doubt may be a poor encouragement to do anything, but it is a bad reason for doing nothing.

Few delights can equal the presence of one whom we trust utterly.

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.

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.

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.

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.

But we believe – nay, Lord we only hope, That one day we shall thank thee perfectly For pain and hope and all that led or drove Us back into the bosom of thy love.

You doubt because you love truth.

It is our best work that God wants, not the dregs of our exhaustion. I think he must prefer quality to quantity.

For when is the child the ideal child in our eyes and to our hearts? Is it not when with gentle hand he takes his father by the beard, and turns that father's face up to his brothers and sisters to kiss? when even the lovely selfishness of love-seeking has vanished, and the heart is absorbed in loving?

The first thing in all progress is to leave something behind.

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.

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.

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.

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

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!

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

You must learn to be strong in the dark as well as in the day, else you will always be only half brave.

Timely service, like timely gifts, is doubled in value.

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.'

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

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.

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

The truly wise talk little about religion and are not given to taking sides on doctrinal issues. When they hear people advocating or opposing the claims of this or that party in the church, they turn away with a smile such as men yield to the talk of children. They have no time, they would say, for that kind of thing. They have enough to do in trying to faithfully practice what is beyond dispute.

To try to be brave is to be brave.

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.

A man is as free as he chooses to make himself, never an atom freer.

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

You can't live on amusement. It is the froth on water - an inch deep and then the mud.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Do not measure God's mind by your own.

It is not the cares of today, but the cares of tomorrow, that weigh a man down. For the needs of today we have corresponding strength given. For the morrow we are told to trust. It is not ours yet. It is when tomorrow's burden is added to the burden of today that the weight is more than a man can bear.

All things are possible with God, but all things are not easy.

Each is but a means to an end; in the perfected end we find the intent, and there God — not in the laws themselves, except as his means of revealing himself. For that same reason, human science cannot discover God. For human science is but the backward undoing of the tapestry-web of God's science, it works with its back to him, and is always leaving him — his intent.

God is nearer to you than any thought or feeling of yours... Do not be afraid.

Trust to God to weave your thread into the great web, though the pattern shows it not yet.

The perfection of His relation to us swallows up all our imperfections, all our defeats, all our evils; for our childhood is born of His fatherhood. That man is perfect in faith who can come to God in the utter dearth of his feelings and his 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, because Thou art my home”.

To be kind neither hurts nor compromises.

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

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

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.

To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved.

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.

The Lord never came to deliver men from the consequences of their sins while yet those sins remained...Yet men, loving their sins and feeling nothing of their dread hatefulness, have, consistent with their low condition, constantly taken this word concerning the Lord to mean that he came to save them from the punishment of their sins.

Beauty and sadness always go together.

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.

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

I write, not for children,but for the child-like, whether they be of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.

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.

It is simply absurd to say you believe, or even want to believe, in Him, if you do not do anything He tells you.

Obedience is the key to every door.

We die daily. Happy those who daily come to life as well.

In whatever man does without God, he must fail miserably, or succeed more miserably.

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

Sad, indeed, would the whole matter be if the Bible had told us everything God meant us to believe. But herein is the Bible greatly wronged. It nowhere lays claim to be regarded as the Word, the Way, the Truth. The Bible leads us to Jesus, the inexhaustible, the ever-unfolding Revelation of God. It is Christ "in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge," not the Bible, save as leading to Him.

Any faith in Him, however small, is better than any belief about Him, however great.

Every truth must be accompanied by some corresponding act.

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.

The principle part of faith is patience.

A man's real belief is that which he lives by. What a man believes is the thing he does, not the thing he thinks.

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 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.

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

The word doctrine, as used in the Bible, means teaching of duty, not theory.

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.

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.

Attitudes are more important than facts.

As Christ is the blossom of humanity, so the blossom of every man is Christ perfected in him.

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.

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.

The first thing a kindness deserves is acceptance, the second, transmission.

...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.

Work is not always required. There is such a thing as sacred idleness.

"But if God is so good as you represent Him, and if He knows all that we need, and better far than we do ourselves, why should it be necessary to ask Him for anything?" I answer, "What if He knows prayer to be the thing we need first and most? What if the main object in God's idea of prayer be the supplying of our great, our endless need - the need of Himself?"

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.

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.

Past tears are present strength.

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

No words can express how much the world owes to sorrow. Most of the Psalms were born in the wilderness. Most of the Epistles were written in a prison. The greatest thoughts of the greatest thinkers have all passed through fire. The greatest poets have "learned in suffering what they taught in song." In bonds Bunyan lived the allegory that he afterwards wrote, and we may thank Bedford Jail for the Pilgrim's Progress. Take comfort, afflicted Christian! When God is about to make pre-eminent use of a person, He put them in the fire.

The mind of the many is not the mind of God.

We are not made for law, we are made for love.

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

If we knew as much about heaven as God does, we would clap our hands every time a Christian dies.

[God desires] not that He may say to them, "Look how mighty I am, and go down upon your knees and worship," for power alone was never yet worthy of prayer; but that He may say thus: "Look, my children, you will never be strong but with my strength. I have no other to give you. And that you can get only by trusting in me. I can not give it you any other way. There is no other way."

The ruin of a man's teaching comes of his followers, such as having never touched the foundation he has laid, build upon it wood, hay, and stubble, fit only to be burnt. Therefore, if only to avoid his worst foes, his admirers, a man should avoid system. The more correct a system the worse will it be misunderstood; its professed admirers will take both its errors and their misconceptions of its truths, and hold them forth as its essence.

He may delay because it would not be safe to give us at once what we ask: we are not ready for it. To give ere we could truly receive, would be to destroy the very heart and hope of prayer, to cease to be our Father. The delay itself may work to bring us nearer to our help, to increase the desire, perfect the prayer, and ripen the receptive condition.

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

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.

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.

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.

Age is not all decay; it is the ripening, the swelling, of the fresh life within, that withers and bursts the husk.

To try too hard to make people good is one way to make them worse. The only way to make them good is to be good, remembering well the beam and the mote.

The love of our neighbor is the only door out of the dungeon of self.

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

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. How often we look upon God as our last and feeblest resource! We go to Him because we have nowhere else to go. And then we learn that the storms of life have driven us, not upon the rocks, but into the desired haven.

All about us, in earth and air, wherever the eye or ear can reach, there is a power ever breathing itself forth in signs, now in daisy, now in a wind-waft, a cloud, a sunset; a power that holds constant and sweetest relation with the dark and silent world within us. The same God who is in us, and upon whose tree we are the buds, if not yet the flowers, also is all about us- inside, the Spirit; outside, the Word. And the two are ever trying to meet in us.

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.

Forgiveness unleashes joy. It brings peace. It washes the slate clean. It sets all the highest values of love in motion.

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.

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.

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.

Love is the opener as well as closer of eyes.

Endurance must conquer, where force could not reach.

Fear is faithlessness.

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.

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.

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.

I find the doing of the will of God leaves me no time for disputing about his plans — I do not say for thinking about them.

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.

I do not myself believe there is any misfortune. What men call such is merely the shadowside of a good.

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.

It has been well said that 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. Never load yourselves so, my friends. If you find yourselves so loaded, at least remember this: it is your own doing, not God's. He begs you to leave the future to Him, and mind the present.

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.

If we do not die to ourselves, we cannot live to God, andhe that does not live to God, is dead.