George MacDonald Quotations

George MacDonald was a Scottish author and Christian minister best known for his poetry, fairy tales and fantasy novels.

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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. I preached a sermon about this. We are far too anxious to be definite and to have finished, well-polished, sharp-edged systems - forgetting that the more perfect a theory about the infinite, the surer it is to be wrong, the more impossible it is to be right.
- From a letter to his father, quoted in George MacDonald and His Wife by Greville MacDonald (son)

After a few days, Willie got tired of [the water-wheel] — and no blame to him, for it was no earthly use beyond amusement, and that which can only amuse can never amuse long. I think the reason children get tired of their toys so soon is just that it is against human nature to be really interested in what is of no use. If you say that a beautiful thing is always interesting, I answer, that a beautiful thing is of the highest use. Is not the diamond that flashes all its colours into the heart of a poet as useful as the diamond with which the glazier divides the sheets of glass into panes for our windows?
- The History of Gutta Percha Willie, the Working Genius (1873)

Two people may be at the same spot in manners and behaviour, and yet one may be getting better, and the other worse, which is the greatest of differences that could possibly exist between them.
- The Princess and Curdie (1883)

But God lets men have their playthings, like the children they are, that they may learn to distinguish them from true possessions. If they are not learning that he takes them from them, and tries the other way: for lack of them and its misery, they will perhaps seek the true!
- Donal Grant (1883)

Afflictions are but the shadow of His wings.
- Paul Faber, Surgeon (1886), chapter XXV

If sin must be kept alive, then hell must be kept alive; but while I regard the smallest sin as infinitely loathsome, I do not believe that any being, never good enough to see the essential ugliness of sin, could sin so as to deserve such punishment. I am not now, however, dealing with the question of the duration of punishment, but with the idea of punishment itself; and would only say in passing, that the notion that a creature born imperfect, nay, born with impulses to evil not of his own generating, and which he could not help having, a creature to whom the true face of God was never presented, and by whom it never could have been seen, should be thus condemned, is as loathsome a lie against God as could find place in heart too undeveloped to understand what justice is, and too low to look up into the face of Jesus.
- From ‘’Justice’’ in Unspoken Sermons Series III (1889)

Alas! how easily things go wrong!
A sigh too deep or a kiss too long,
And then comes a mist and a weeping rain,
And life is never the same again.

What we call evil, is the only and best shape, which, for the person and his condition at the time, could be assumed by the best good.

We must do the thing we must
Before the thing we may;
We are unfit for any trust
Till we can and do obey.
- Willie's Question

You would not think any duty small,
If you yourself were great.
- Willie's Question

The man that feareth, Lord, to doubt,
In that fear doubteth thee.
- The Disciple

...the regions where there is only life, and therefore all that is not music is silence.
- ‘’The Hands of the Father’’

A condition which of declension would indicate a devil, may of growth indicate a saint.
- ‘’The Consuming Fire’’

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.
- ‘’It Shall Not Be Forgiven’’

We are and remain such creeping Christians, because we look at ourselves and not at Christ; because we gaze at the marks of our own soiled feet, and the trail of our own defiled garments....Each, putting his foot in the footprint of the Master, and so defacing it, turns to examine how far his neighbor’s footprint corresponds with that which he still calls the Master’s, although it is but his own.
- ‘’The Eloi’’

Where did you come from baby dear?
Out of the everywhere into the here....
Where did you get your eyes so blue?
Out of the skies as I came through.

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.

For that great Love speaks in the most wretched and dirty hearts; only the tone of its voice depends on the echoes of the place in which it sounds.
- Chapter 18

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

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.

Were I asked, what is a fairytale? I should reply, Read Undine: that is a fairytale ... of all fairytales I know, I think Undine the most beautiful.

A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean. If my drawing, on the other hand, is so far from being a work of art that it needs THIS IS A HORSE written under it, what can it matter that neither you nor your child should know what it means? It is there not so much to convey a meaning as to wake a meaning. — But a man may then imagine in your work what he pleases, what you never meant! — Not what he pleases, but what he can. If he be not a true man, he will draw evil out of the best; we need not mind how he treats any work of art! If he be a true man, he will imagine true things; what matter whether I meant them or not?

We are often unable to tell people what they need to know because they want to know something else.
- Chapter 9

That which is in a man, not that which lies beyond his vision is the main factor in what is about to befall him: the operation upon him is the event.
- Chapter 16