783 Quotes by George MacDonald

Sweet sounds can go where kisses may not enter.

Then I remembered that night is the fairies’ day, and the moon their sun; and I thought—Everything sleeps and dreams now: when the night comes, it will be different.

A ghost grew out of the shadowy air,And sat in the midst of her moony hair.In her gleamy hair she sat and wept;In the dreamful moon they lay and slept;The shadows above, and the bodies below,Lay and slept in the moonbeams slow.And she sang, like the moan of an autumn windOver the stubble left behind.

Twilight-kind, oppressing the heart as with a condensed atmosphere of dreamy undefined love and longing.

It was evening. The sun was below the horizon; but his rosy beams yet illuminated a feathery cloud, that floated high above the world. I arose, I reached the cloud; and, throwing myself upon it, floated with it in sight of the sinking sun. He sank, and the cloud grew gray; but the grayness touched not my heart. It carried its rose-hue within; for now I could love without needing to be loved again.

For essential beauty is infinite, and, as the soul of Nature needs an endless succession of varied forms to embody her loveliness, countless faces of beauty springing forth, not any two the same, at every one of her heart-throbs, so the individual form needs an infinite change of its environments, to enable it to uncover all the phases of its loveliness.

Thy beauty filleth the very air,Never saw I a woman so fair.

Or, if needing years to wake theeFrom thy slumbrous solitudes,Come, sleep-walking, and betake theeTo the friendly, sleeping woods.Sweeter dreams are in the forest,Round thee storms would never rave;And when need of rest is sorest,Glide thou then into thy cave.

From Eden’s bowers the full-fed rivers flow,To guide the outcasts to the land of woe:Our Earth one little toiling streamlet yields.To guide the wanderers to the happy fields.