783 Quotes by George MacDonald

It’s right to trust in God; but, if you don’t stand to your halliards your craft’ll miss stays, and your faith’ll be blown out of the bolt-ropes in the turn of a marlinspike.

Our Selves are like some little children who will be happy enough so long as they are left to their own games, but when we begin to interfere with them, and make them presents of too nice playthings, or too many sweet things, they begin at once to fret and spoil.

He rebelled against the highest as if the highest were the lowest – as if the power that could create a heart for bliss, might gloat on its sufferings.

A voice is in the wind I do not know A meaning on the face of the high hills Whose utterance I cannot comprehend. A something is behind them: that is God.

I learned that it is better, a thousand-fold, for a proud man to fall and be humbled, than to hold up his head in his pride and fancied innocence.

Do not measure God’s mind by your own.

The thing most alien to the true idea of humanity is the notion that our well-being lies in surpassing our fellows. We have to rise above ourselves, not above our neighbors, to take all the good of them not from them, and give them all our good in return. That which cannot be freely shared can never be possessed.

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.

Humility is essential greatness, the inside of grandeur.