783 Quotes by George MacDonald

Mary was one who possessed power over her own spirit--rare gift, given to none but those who do something toward the taking of it. She was able in no small measure to order her own thoughts. Without any theory of self-rule, she yet ruled her Self. She was not one to slip about in the saddle, or let go the reins for a kick and a plunge or two. There was the thing that should be, and the thing that should not be; the thing that was reasonable, and the thing that was absurd.

Annihilation itself is no death to evil. Only good where evil was, is evil dead. An evil thing must live with its evil until it chooses to be good. That alone is the slaying of evil.

What heart in the kingdom of heaven would ever dream of constructing a metaphysical system of what we owed to God and why we owed it?

She got very tired, so tired that even her toys could no longer amuse her. You would wonder at that if I hadtime to describe to you one half of the toys she had. But then, youwouldn't have the toys themselves, and that makes all the difference: you can't get tired of a thing before you have it.

She got very tired, so tired that even her toys could no longer amuse her. You would wonder at that if I had time to describe to you one half of the toys she had. But then, you wouldn't have the toys themselves, and that makes all the difference: you can't get tired of a thing before you have it.

No gift unrecognized as coming from God is at its own best: therefore many things that God would gladly give us, things even that we need because we are, must wait until we ask for them, that we may know whence they come: when in all gifts we find Him, then in Him we shall find all things.

There are who never learn to see anything except in its relation to themselves, nor that relation except as fancied by themselves; and, this being a withering habit of mind, they keep growing drier, and older, and smaller, and deader, the longer they live--thinking less of other people, and more of themselves and their past experience, all the time as they go on withering.

There was no pride, pomp, or circumstance of glorious war in this poor, domestic strife, this seemingly sordid and unheroic, miserably unheroic, yet high, eternal contest!

I should not be surprised," said Mr. Graham, "that the day should come when men will refuse to believe in God simply on the ground of the apparent injustice of things. They would argue that there might be either an omnipotent being who did not care, or a good being who could not help, but that there could not be a being both all good and omnipotent or else he would never have suffered things to be as they are.