783 Quotes by George MacDonald

She could now be sad without losing a jot of hope. Nay, rather, the least approach of sadness would begin at once to wake her hope. She regretted nothing that had come, nothing that had gone. She believed more and more that not anything worth having is ever lost; that even the most evanescent shades of feeling are safe for those who grow after their true nature, toward that for which they were made – in other and higher words, after the will of God.

In the windowless tomb of a blind mother, in the dead of the night, under feeble rays of a lamp in an alabaster globe, a girl came into the darkness with a wail.

There had been a time in Godfrey’s life when, had she stood before him in all her splendor, he would have turned from her, because of her history, with a sad disgust. Was he less pure now? He was more pure, for he was humbler.

No one can say he is himself, until first he knows that he is, and then what himself is. In fact, nobody is himself, and himself is nobody.

One day it had rained before sunrise, and a soft spring wind had been blowing ever since, a soothing and persuading wind, that seemed to draw out the buds from the secret places of the dry twigs, and whisper to the roots of the rose-trees that their flowers would be wanted by and by.

You ought to have principles of your own, Mr Walton.” “I hope I have. And one of them is, not to make mountains of molehills; for a molehill is not a mountain. A man ought to have too much to do in obeying his conscience and keeping his soul’s garments clean, to mind whether he wears black or white when telling his flock that God loves them, and that they will never be happy till they believe it.

I can but pray the Father o’ a’ to haud his e’e upon her, an’ his airms aboot her, an’ keep aff the hardenin’ o’ the hert ’at despises coonsel!

Either there is a God, and that God the perfect heart of truth and loveliness, or all poetry and art is but an unsown, unplanted, rootless flower, crowning a somewhat symmetrical heap of stones.

When a man dreams his own dream, he is the sport of his dream; when Another gives it him, that Other is able to fulfill it.