Inspirational Quotes by George MacDonald

“Heed not thy feeling. Do thy work.”

“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!”

“God is easy to please, but hard to satisfy.”

“...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.”

“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.”

“… 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.”

“To give truth to him who loves it not is to only give him more multiplied reasons for misinterpretation.”

“the truth she gathered, enlarging her strength, enlarged likewise the composure that comes of strength.”

“She did not even trouble herself much to show Godfrey her gratitude. We may spoil gratitude as we offer it, by insisting on its recognition. To receive honestly is the best thanks for a good thing.”

“Perhaps his only vice was self-satisfaction--which few will admit to be a vice; remonstrance never reached him; to himself he was ever in the right, judging himself only by his sentiments and vague intents, never by his actions; that these had little correspondence never struck him; it had never even struck him that they ought to correspond.”

“Like some of the rest of us, she never reflected how balefully her evil mood might operate; and that all things work for good in the end, will not cover those by whom come the offenses. Another night's rest, it is true, sent the evil mood to sleep again for a time, but did not exorcise it; for there are demons that go not out without prayer, and a bad temper is one of them--a demon as contemptible, mean-spirited, and unjust, as any in the peerage of hell--much petted, nevertheless, and excused, by us poor lunatics who are possessed by him.”

“Never pupil was more humble, never pupil more obedient; thinking nothing of himself or of anything he had done or could do, his path was open to the swiftest and highest growth. It matters little where a man may be at this moment; the point is whether he is growing. The next point will be, whether he is growing at the ratio given him. The key to the whole thing is _obedience_, and nothing else.”

“The day will one day come--or what of the long-promised kingdom of heaven?--when a woman, instead of spending anxious thought on the adornment of her own outward person, will seek with might the adornment of the inward soul of another, and will make that her crown of rejoicing. Nay, are there none such even now? The day will come when a man, rather than build a great house for the overflow of a mighty hospitality, will give himself, in the personal labor of outgoing love, to build spiritual houses like St. Paul--a higher art than any of man's invention. O my brother, what were it not for thee to have a hand in making thy brother beautiful!”

“Then, with a horror of pitiful amazement, she saw a great cross marked in two cruel stripes on his back; and the thoughts that thereupon went coursing through her loving imagination, it would be hard to set forth. Could it be that the Lord was still, child and man, suffering for his race, to deliver his brothers and sisters from their sins? -- wandering, enduring, beaten, blessing still? accepting the evil, slaying it, and returning none? his patience the one rock where the evil word finds no echo; his heart the one gulf into which the dead-sea wave rushes with no recoil -- from which ever flows back only purest water, sweet and cool; the one abyss of destroying love, into which all wrong tumbles, and finding no reaction, is lost, ceases for evermore?”

“What Gibbie made of Mr. Sclater's prayers, either in congregational or family devotion, I am at some loss to imagine. Beside his memories of the direct fervid outpouring and appeal of Janet, in which she seemed to talk face to face with God, they must have seemed to him like the utterances of some curiously constructed wooden automaton, doing its best to pray, without any soul to be saved, any weakness to be made strong, any doubt to be cleared, any hunger to be filled. What can be less like religion than the prayers of a man whose religion is his profession, and who, if he were not "in the church," would probably never pray at all?”

“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.”

“Nothing that could be got from the heart of the earth could have been put to better purposes than the silver the king's miners got for him. There were people in the country who, when it came into their hands, degraded it by locking it up in a chest, and then it grew diseased and was called mammon, and bred all sorts of quarrels; but when first it left the king's hands it never made any but friends, and the air of the world kept it clean.”

“Not for years and years had Janet been to church; she had long been unable to walk so far; and having no book but the best, and no help to understand it but the highest, her faith was simple, strong, real, all-pervading. Day by day she pored over the great gospel -- I mean just the good news according to Matthew and Mark and Luke and John -- until she had grown to be one of the noble ladies of the kingdom of heaven -- one of those who inherit the earth, and are ripening to see God. For the Master, and his mind in hers, was her teacher. She had little or no theology save what he taught her, or rather, what he is. And of any other than that, the less the better; for no theology, except the Theou logos, is worth the learning, no other being true. To know him is to know God. And he only who obeys him, does or can know him; he who obeys him cannot fail to know him. To Janet, Jesus Christ was no object of so-called theological speculation, but a living man, who somehow or other heard her when she called to him, and sent her the help she needed.”

“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.”

“It was a profound pleasure to her not to know what was coming next, provided some one whom she loved did.”