It is our best work that God wants, not the dregs of our exhaustion. I think he must prefer quality to quantity.
– George Macdonald
Achievement | Work
All growth that is not toward God is growing to decay.
– George Macdonald
Apathy | Growth
A perfect faith would lift us absolutely above fear.
– George Macdonald
Faith | Fear
How strange this fear of death is! We are never frightened at a sunset.
– George Macdonald
Death | Fear
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.
– George Macdonald
Believing
The principle part of faith is patience.
– George Macdonald
Faith
Afflictions are but the shadows of God’s wings.
– George Macdonald
Affliction
When we are out of sympathy with the young, then I think our work in this world is over.
– George Macdonald
Children | Youth
Forgiveness is the giving, and so the receiving, of life.
– George Macdonald
Forgiveness
When a man argues for victory and not for truth, he is sure of just one ally that is the devil. Not the defeat of the intellect, but the acceptance of the heart is the only true object in fighting with the sword of the spirit.
– George Macdonald
Victory | Truth | The Heart
God’s thoughts, his will, his love, his judgments are all man’s home. To think his thoughts, to choose his will, to love his loves, to judge his judgments, and thus to know that he is in us, is to be at home.
– George Macdonald
Faithful | Home
The first thing a kindness deserves is acceptance, the second, transmission.
– George Macdonald
Kindness
To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved.
– George Macdonald
Honesty
The seed dies into a new life, and so does man.
– George Macdonald
Character
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.
– George Macdonald
Worry | Trust | Strength
The more I work with the body, keeping my assumptions in a temporary state of reservation, the more I appreciate and sympathize with a given disease. The body no longer appears as a sick or irrational demon, but as a process with its own inner logic and wisdom.
– George Macdonald
Health | Wisdom
It is not by driving away our brother that we can be alone with God.
– George Macdonald
Kindness
The hell that a lie would keep a man from, is doubtless the very best place for him to go.
– George Macdonald
Lying
Attitudes are more important than facts.
– George Macdonald
Attitude | Truth
That man is perfect in faith who can come to God in the utter dearth of his feelings and 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.’
– George Macdonald
Trials | Feelings
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
Discretion | Freedom | Liberty
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.
– George Macdonald
Prayer
They are not the best students who are most dependent on books. What can be got out of them is at best only material; a man must build his house for himself.
– George Macdonald
Books | Education
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
Contentment | Life
Certainly work is not always required of a man. There is such a thing as a sacred idleness-the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected.
– George Macdonald
Idleness | Work | Idleness
We die daily. Happy those who daily come to life as well.
– George Macdonald
Life
Many a thief is a better man than many a clergyman, and miles nearer to the gate of the kingdom.
– George Macdonald
Character
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.
– George Macdonald
Encouragement
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.
– George Macdonald
Faith
Where there is no choice, we do well to make no difficulty.
– George Macdonald
Anxiety | Choices
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.
– George Macdonald
Doctrine
As you grow ready for it, somewhere or other, you will find what is needful for you in a book.
– George Macdonald
Books
It matters little where a man may be at this moment; the point is whether he is growing.
– George Macdonald
Character
God chooses that men should be tried, but let a man beware of tempting his neighbor. God knows how and how much, and where and when. Man is his brother’s keeper, and must keep him according to his knowledge.
– George Macdonald
Temptation
Anything large enough for a wish to light upon, is large enough to hang a prayer upon.
– George Macdonald
Prayer
No one is likely to remember what is entirely uninteresting to him.
– George Macdonald
Apathy
Fear is faithlessness.
– George Macdonald
Faith | Fear
God never gave a man a thing to do, concerning which it were irreverent to ponder how the Son of God would have done it.
– George Macdonald
Service
If we do not die to ourselves, we cannot live to God, and he that does not live to God, is dead.
– George Macdonald
Self-denial
One of the grandest things in having rights is that though they are your rights you may give them up.
– George Macdonald
Humility
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
Friendship | Money
This is a sane, wholesome, practical, working faith: That it is a man’s business to do the will of God; second, that God himself takes on the care of that man; and third, that therefore that man ought never to be afraid of anything.
– George Macdonald
Service | Perseverance
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.
– George Macdonald
Ignorance
Few delights can equal the presence of one whom we trust utterly.
– George Macdonald
Trust
Do the truth ye know, and you shall learn the truth you need to know.
– George Macdonald
Truth
There are many things in which one and the other loses; but if it is essential to any transaction that only one side shall gain, the thing is not of God.
– George Macdonald
Honesty
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
Truth | Unbelief
To have what we want is riches; but to be able to do without is power.
– George Macdonald
Finances
I find that doing of the will of God leaves me no time for disputing about His plans.
– George Macdonald
Obedience
If I can put one touch of a rosy sunset into the life of any man or woman, I shall feel that I have worked with God.
– George Macdonald
Encouragement
Not only then has each man his individual relation to God, but each man has his peculiar relation to God.
– George Macdonald
God
Age is not all decay; it is the ripening, the swelling, of the fresh life within, that withers and bursts the husk.
– George Macdonald
Life | Age
Timely service, like timely gifts, is doubled in value.
– George Macdonald
Service
To keep a lamp burning we have to keep putting oil in it.
– George Macdonald
Perseverance
Emulation is the devil-shadow of aspiration. To excite it is worthy only of the commonplace vulgar schoolmaster, whose ambition is to show what fine scholars he can turn out, that he may get the more pupils.
– George Macdonald
Examples
Alas! How easily things go wrong; a sigh too much or a kiss too long, and there follows a mist and a weeping rain, and life is never the same again.
– George Macdonald
Life
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.
– George Macdonald
Politics
Friends, if we be honest with ourselves, we shall be honest with each other.
– George Macdonald
Character
Love is the opener as well as closer of eyes.
– George Macdonald
Love
There are thousands willing to do great things for one willing to do a small thing.
– George Macdonald
Achievement
I could never draw the line between meanness and dishonesty. What is mean, so far as I can see, slides by indistinguishable gradations into what is dishonest.
– George Macdonald
Honesty
Progress is the real cure for an over estimate of ourselves.
– George Macdonald
Achievement
To the dim and bewildered vision of humanity, God’s care is more evident in some instances than in others; and upon such instances men seize, and call them providences. It is well that they can; but it would be gloriously better if they could believe that the whole matter is one grand providence.
– George Macdonald
Faith | Providence
The best preparation for the future is the present well seen to, and the last duty done.
– George Macdonald
Perseverance | The Future
My prayers, my God, flow from what I am not; I think Thy answers make me what I am.
– George Macdonald
Prayer
One thing is clear to me, that no indulgence of passion destroys the spiritual nature so much as respectable selfishness.
– George Macdonald
Selfishness | Passion
You can’t live on amusement. It is the froth on water – an inch deep and then the mud.
– George Macdonald
Life
Division has done more to hide Christ from the view of men than all the infidelity that has ever been spoken.
– George Macdonald
Christ
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
Marriage
If, instead of a gem or even a flower, we could cast the gift of a lovely thought into the heart of a friend, that would be giving as the angels give.
– George Macdonald
Encouragement | Friendship
Trust to God to weave your thread into the great web, though the pattern shows it not yet.
– George Macdonald
Trust