783 Quotes by George MacDonald

Nobody who has not been tried knows how difficult it is; but whoever has come out well of it – and those who do not overcome never do come out of it – always looks back with horror, not on what she has come through, but on the very idea of the possibility of having failed and being still the same miserable creature as before.

Jesus tells us we must leave the self altogether-yield it, deny it, refuse it, lose it. Thus only shall we save it... The self is given us that we may sacrifice it. It is ours in order that we, like Christ, may have something to offer- not that we should torment it, but that we should deny it; not that we should cross it, but that we should abandon it utterly.

I’ve been thinking about it a great deal, and it seems to me that although one sixpence is as good as another sixpence, not twenty lambs would do instead of one sheep whose face you knew. Somehow, when once you’ve looked into anybody’s eyes, right deep down into them, I mean, nobody will do for that one anymore. Nobody, ever so beautiful or so good, will make up for that one going out of sight.

There is no forgetting of ourselves but in the finding of our deeper, our true self – God’s idea of us when he devised us – the Christ in us. Nothing but that self can displace the false, greedy, whining self, of which, most of us are so fond and proud. And that self no man can find for himself; seeing of himself he does not even know what to search for. “But as many as received him, to them gave he power to become the sons of God.

When I am out of sight, he may think of me again and want to see me – as Job said his maker would.” “I don’t remember,” said Barbara. “Tell me.” “He says to God – I was reading it the other day – ‘I wish you would hide me in the grave till you’ve done being angry with me! Then you would want to see again the creature you had made; you would call me, and I would answer!’ God’s not like that, of course, but my father might be.

It’s not good at all – mind that, Diamond – to do everything for those you love, and not give them a share in the doing. It’s not kind. It’s making too much of yourself.

The library, although duly considered in many alterations of the house and additions to it, had nevertheless, like an encroaching state, absorbed one room after another until it occupied the greater part of the ground floor.

The next hour, the next moment, is as much beyond our grasp and as much in God’s care, as that a hundred years away. Care for the next minute is just as foolish as care for the morrow, or for a day in the next thousand years – in neither can we do anything, in both God is doing everything. Those claims only of the morrow which have to be prepared today are of the duty of today: the moment which coincides with work to be done, is the moment to be minded; the next is nowhere till God has made it.

If you know you are yourself, you know that you are not somebody else; but do you know that you are yourself? Are you sure you are not your own father? – or, excuse me, your own fool? – Who are you, pray?” I.