TOPICS

SEE ALSO

AUTH

BOOKS

Infinite_Library

IN CHAPTERS TITLE

IN CHAPTERS CLASSNAME

IN CHAPTERS TEXT

APPENDIX_I_-_Curriculum_of_A._A.

PRIMARY CLASS

author

SIMILAR TITLES

George MacDonald

TERMS STARTING WITH


TERMS ANYWHERE

KEYS (10k)

   6 George MacDonald

NEW FULL DB (2.4M)

1269 George MacDonald
   81 George MacDonald Fraser
   7 C S Lewis
   2 Terri Windling

1:The greatest forces lie in the region of the uncomprehended." ~ George MacDonald,

2:Work is not always required. There is such a thing as sacred idleness." ~ George MacDonald,

3:It is by loving and not by being loved that one can come nearest to the soul of another." ~ George MacDonald,

4:We are often unable to tell people what they need to know, because they want to know something else, and would therefore only misunderstand what we said. ~ George MacDonald,

5:People must believe what they can, and those who believe more must not be hard upon those who believe less. I doubt if you would have believed it all yourself if you hadn't seen some of it. ~ George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin,

6:If instead of a gem, or even a flower, we should cast the gift of a loving thought into the heart of a friend, that would be giving as the angels give." ~ George MacDonald, (1824 - 1905) Scottish author, poet Christian minister, figure in modern fantasy literature, Wikipedia.,

*** WISDOM TROVE ***

1:An almost perfect relationship with his father was the earthly root of all his wisdom. From his own father, he said, he first learned that Fatherhood must be at the core of the universe. [speaking of George MacDonald] ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove

*** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***

1:rainbow-billow ~ George MacDonald,

2:Who obeys, shines. ~ George MacDonald,

3:Love makes all safe. ~ George MacDonald,

4:her—nobody but Sarah; ~ George MacDonald,

5:Fear is faithlessness. ~ George MacDonald,

6:VISITORS FROM THE HALL. ~ George MacDonald,

7:bloweth where it listeth, ~ George MacDonald,

8:All haste implies weakness. ~ George MacDonald,

9:And in thy own sermon, thou ~ George MacDonald,

10:Religion is life essential. ~ George MacDonald,

11:All that is not God is death. ~ George MacDonald,

12:The holy spirit of the Spring ~ George MacDonald,

13:began to talk about the parish. ~ George MacDonald,

14:He (God) loves what I shall be. ~ George MacDonald,

15:respectability to good impulses ~ George MacDonald,

16:every question is a door-handle. ~ George MacDonald,

17:Obedience is the opener of eyes. ~ George MacDonald,

18:Past tears are present strength. ~ George MacDonald,

19:Alas! how easily things go wrong! ~ George MacDonald,

20:You doubt because you love truth. ~ George MacDonald,

21:A God must have a God for company. ~ George MacDonald,

22:A true friend is forever a friend. ~ George MacDonald,

23:By obeying one learns how to obey. ~ George MacDonald,

24:Heed not thy feeling. Do thy work. ~ George MacDonald,

25:It needs brains to be a real fool. ~ George MacDonald,

26:Light-leaved acacias, by the door, ~ George MacDonald,

27:Man's rank is his power to uplift. ~ George MacDonald,

28:Philosophy is really homesickness. ~ George MacDonald,

29:To try to be brave is to be brave. ~ George MacDonald,

30:Will is not unfrequently weakness. ~ George MacDonald,

31:You had better not open that door. ~ George MacDonald,

32:Faith is obedience, not compliance. ~ George MacDonald,

33:I believe in fate, never in chance. ~ George MacDonald,

34:Moderation is the basis of justice. ~ George MacDonald,

35:Obedience is the key to every door. ~ George MacDonald,

36:A voice is in the wind I do not know ~ George MacDonald,

37:How to be radiant Who obeys, shines. ~ George MacDonald,

38:God grant our new may inwrap our old! ~ George MacDonald,

39:What would the Living One have me do? ~ George MacDonald,

40:Beauty and sadness always go together. ~ George MacDonald,

41:Do not measure God's mind by your own. ~ George MacDonald,

42:O Christ, my life, possess me utterly. ~ George MacDonald,

43:Who can give a man this, his own name? ~ George MacDonald,

44:Courage - and shuffle the cards. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

45:In joy or sorrow, feebleness or might, ~ George MacDonald,

46:Attitudes are more important than facts. ~ George MacDonald,

47:good common heavenly sense to my people, ~ George MacDonald,

48:No one who will not sleep can ever wake. ~ George MacDonald,

49:The principle part of faith is patience. ~ George MacDonald,

50:Those that hope little cannot grow much. ~ George MacDonald,

51:To be kind neither hurts nor compromises. ~ George MacDonald,

52:God is just like Jesus – exactly like him! ~ George MacDonald,

53:I took the guinea, and put it in my purse. ~ George MacDonald,

54:Seeing is not believing—it is only seeing. ~ George MacDonald,

55:To be, or not to be, that is the Question: ~ George MacDonald,

56:whoever is diligent will soon be cheerful, ~ George MacDonald,

57:Affliction is but the shadow of God's wing. ~ George MacDonald,

58:be.—I had been refused a few months before, ~ George MacDonald,

59:Better to have the poet's heart than brain, ~ George MacDonald,

60:God is easy to please, but hard to satisfy. ~ George MacDonald,

61:He never married. But he wrote a good book. ~ George MacDonald,

62:I am a beast until I love as God doth love. ~ George MacDonald,

63:The one principle of hell is – “I am my own ~ George MacDonald,

64:To hear one talk is better than to see one. ~ George MacDonald,

65:Afflictions are but the shadow of His wings. ~ George MacDonald,

66:Seeing is not believing - it is only seeing. ~ George MacDonald,

67:The mind of the many is not the mind of God. ~ George MacDonald,

68:All is loss that comes between us and Christ. ~ George MacDonald,

69:George MacDonald: The Princess and the Goblin ~ Ursula K Le Guin,

70:Love is the opener as well as closer of eyes. ~ George MacDonald,

71:A devil - "A power that lives against its life ~ George MacDonald,

72:A man's real belief is that which he lives by; ~ George MacDonald,

73:Ambition is but the evil shadow of aspiration. ~ George MacDonald,

74:We are not made for law, we are made for love. ~ George MacDonald,

75:Where was God? In him and his question. ~ George MacDonald,

76:You will be dead so long as you refuse to die. ~ George MacDonald,

77:Afflictions are but the shadows of God's wings. ~ George MacDonald,

78:Hell The one principle of hell is—“I am my own! ~ George MacDonald,

79:Mrs Oldcastle was silent—why, I could not tell, ~ George MacDonald,

80:Sweet sounds can go where kisses may not enter. ~ George MacDonald,

81:The back door of every tomb opens on a hilltop. ~ George MacDonald,

82:There is an aching that is worse than any pain. ~ George MacDonald,

83:The seed dies into a new life, and so does man. ~ George MacDonald,

84:you will be dead, so long as you refuse to die. ~ George MacDonald,

85:Whose work is it but your own to open your eyes? ~ George MacDonald,

86:Why should my love be powerless to help another? ~ George MacDonald,

87:Cleverness is cheap. It is faith that He praises. ~ George MacDonald,

88:Mankind had disappointed him, but here was a dog! ~ George MacDonald,

89:man when I see one – and he was the best.7 ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

90:No story ever really ends, and I think I know why. ~ George MacDonald,

91:Which of us is other than a secret to all but God! ~ George MacDonald,

92:A perfect faith would lift us absolutely above fear ~ George MacDonald,

93:By all means rid yourself of an impoverished faith. ~ George MacDonald,

94:I am his, and he shall do with me just as he likes. ~ George MacDonald,

95:Life and religion are one, or neither is any thing. ~ George MacDonald,

96:Of all children how can the children of God be old? ~ George MacDonald,

97:the road to the next duty is the only straight one, ~ George MacDonald,

98:The whole trouble is that we won't let God help us. ~ George MacDonald,

99:What can money do to console a man with a headache? ~ George MacDonald,

100:As I said to Speedicut, it's hell in the diplomatic. ~ George MacDonald,

101:Endurance must conquer, where force could not reach. ~ George MacDonald,

102:I hear you have been most kind in visiting the poor, ~ George MacDonald,

103:Nothing makes one feel so strong as a call for help. ~ George MacDonald,

104:there is plenty of room for meeting in the universe. ~ George MacDonald,

105:No man knows it when he is making an idiot of himself. ~ George MacDonald,

106:There is endless room for rebellion against ourselves. ~ George MacDonald,

107:...The road to the next duty is the only straight one. ~ George MacDonald,

108:The truth Fear tells is not much better than her lies. ~ George MacDonald,

109:Come; come! He who cannot act must make haste to sleep! ~ George MacDonald,

110:If there be music in my reader, I would gladly wake it. ~ George MacDonald,

111:Timely service, like timely gifts, is doubled in value. ~ George MacDonald,

112:To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved. ~ George MacDonald,

113:Humility is essential greatness, the inside of grandeur. ~ George MacDonald,

114:It is only by loving a thing that you can make it yours. ~ George MacDonald,

115:To receive honestly is the best thanks for a good thing. ~ George MacDonald,

116:To will not from self, but with the Eternal, is to live. ~ George MacDonald,

117:A pretend friendship was the vilest of despicable things. ~ George MacDonald,

118:Forgiveness is the giving, and so the receiving, of life. ~ George MacDonald,

119:It seems the way to find some things is to lose yourself. ~ George MacDonald,

120:Truth is truth, whether from the lips of Jesus or Balaam. ~ George MacDonald,

121:We die daily. Happy those who daily come to life as well. ~ George MacDonald,

122:Every truth must be accompanied by some corresponding act. ~ George MacDonald,

123:Ignorance is no reason with a fool for holding his tongue. ~ George MacDonald,

124:It is not where one is, but in what direction he is going. ~ George MacDonald,

125:Religion is nothing if it be not the deepest common-sense. ~ George MacDonald,

126:As I said to Speedicut, it’s hell in the diplomatic. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

127:The world is a fine thing to save, but a wretch to worship. ~ George MacDonald,

128:Where there is no choice, we do well to make no difficulty. ~ George MacDonald,

129:The greatest forces lie in the region of the uncomprehended. ~ George MacDonald,

130:sweeter than joy itself, for the heart of the laugh was love. ~ George MacDonald,

131:The first thing in all progress is to leave something behind. ~ George MacDonald,

132:All things are possible with God, but all things are not easy. ~ George MacDonald,

133:And so all growth that is not towards God Is growing to decay. ~ George MacDonald,

134:answer when she knocked at length at the door of the workroom, ~ George MacDonald,

135:God's finger can touch nothing but to mold it into loveliness. ~ George MacDonald,

136:I need a God; and if there be none how did I come to need one? ~ George MacDonald,

137:It is yet better to perceive a hidden good than a hidden evil. ~ George MacDonald,

138:There are a great many more good things than bad things to do. ~ George MacDonald,

139:Heaven...a place where everything that is not music is silence. ~ George MacDonald,

140:When a man is…one with God, what should he do but live forever? ~ George MacDonald,

141:when the games going against you, stay calm - and cheat. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

142:You would not think any duty small, If you yourself were great. ~ George MacDonald,

143:I am an emptiness for Thee to fill; my soul a cavern for Thy sea ~ George MacDonald,

144:Only he knew that to be left alone is not always to be forsaken. ~ George MacDonald,

145:Thy beauty filleth the very air, Never saw I a woman so fair. ~ George MacDonald,

146:Few delights can equal the presence of one whom we trust utterly. ~ George MacDonald,

147:Wherever there is anything to love, there is beauty in some form. ~ George MacDonald,

148:All the days of my appointed time will I wait till my change come. ~ George MacDonald,

149:And when heart and head go together, nothing can stand before them ~ George MacDonald,

150:It is the heart that is unsure of its God that is afraid to laugh. ~ George MacDonald,

151:There is no slave but the creature that wills against its Creator. ~ George MacDonald,

152:You would not think any duty small, If you yourself were great. ~ George MacDonald,

153:No one is likely to remember what is entirely uninteresting to him. ~ George MacDonald,

154:Our life is no dream; but it ought to become one, and perhaps will. ~ George MacDonald,

155:The region of the senses is the unbelieving part of the human soul. ~ George MacDonald,

156:A man is as free as he chooses to make himself, never an atom freer. ~ George MacDonald,

157:But when we are following the light, even its extinction is a guide. ~ George MacDonald,

158:It is not by driving away our brother that we can be alone with God. ~ George MacDonald,

159:The man that feareth, Lord, to doubt, In that fear doubteth thee. ~ George MacDonald,

160:A man is in bondage to whatever he cannot part with that is less than ~ George MacDonald,

161:From the neglect of a real duty, she became the slave of a false one. ~ George MacDonald,

162:The love of our neighbor is the only door out of the dungeon of self. ~ George MacDonald,

163:To be humbly ashamed is to be plunged in the cleansing bath of truth. ~ George MacDonald,

164:A name is one of those things one can give away and keep all the same. ~ George MacDonald,

165:Doing the will of God leaves me no time for disputing about His plans. ~ George MacDonald,

166:Few delights can equal the mere presence of one whom we trust utterly. ~ George MacDonald,

167:To have what we want is riches, but to be able to do without is power. ~ George MacDonald,

168:To have what we want is riches; but to be able to do without is power. ~ George MacDonald,

169:Where did you get your eyes so blue? Out of the sky as I came through. ~ George MacDonald,

170:Work is not always required. There is such a thing as sacred idleness. ~ George MacDonald,

171:Books are but dead bodies to you, and a library nothing but a catacomb! ~ George MacDonald,

172:Complaint against God is far nearer to God than indifference about Him. ~ George MacDonald,

173:How strange this fear of death is! We are never frightened at a sunset. ~ George MacDonald,

174:It may be infinitely worse to refuse to forgive than to murder, because ~ George MacDonald,

175:Nobody knows what anything is; a man can only learn what a thing means! ~ George MacDonald,

176:The time for speaking seldom arrives, the time for being never departs. ~ George MacDonald,

177:We die daily. Happy those who daily come to life as well. [294] On Duty ~ George MacDonald,

178:What does God want me to do?”, not “What will God do if I do so and so? ~ George MacDonald,

179:Yes,' he answered; 'and you will be dead, so long as you refuse to die. ~ George MacDonald,

180:By God, I wish that spit had been a real one, with me to turn it. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

181:…for nothing is ever so mischievous in its own place as it is out of it; ~ George MacDonald,

182:There are things that must be done in faith, else they never have being. ~ George MacDonald,

183:There are women who fly their falcons at any game, little birds and all. ~ George MacDonald,

184:Where did you come from, baby dear? Out of the everywhere and into here. ~ George MacDonald,

185:As many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God. ~ George MacDonald,

186:Those whose business it is to open doors, so often mistake and shut them! ~ George MacDonald,

187:Anything big enough to occupy our minds is big enough to hang a prayer on. ~ George MacDonald,

188:Blessed be the true life that the pauses between its throbs are not death! ~ George MacDonald,

189:forgive me for feeling so cross and proud towards the unhappy old lady—for ~ George MacDonald,

190:Only because uplifted in song, was I able to endure the blaze of the dawn. ~ George MacDonald,

191:Friends, if we be honest with ourselves, we shall be honest with each other. ~ George MacDonald,

192:I am sorry I cannot think of a compliment to pay you-without lying, that is. ~ George MacDonald,

193:I could not help feeling a little annoyed, (which was very foolish, I know,) ~ George MacDonald,

194:I may love him, I may love him, for he is a man, and I am only a beech-tree. ~ George MacDonald,

195:Joy's a subtil elf.          I think man's happiest when he forgets himself. ~ George MacDonald,

196:Remember, then, that whoever does not mean good is always in danger of harm. ~ George MacDonald,

197:The first thing a kindness deserves is acceptance, the second, transmission. ~ George MacDonald,

198:The word doctrine, as used in the Bible, means teaching of duty, not theory. ~ George MacDonald,

199:A man is in bondage to whatever he cannot part with that is less than himself. ~ George MacDonald,

200:God is nearer to you than any thought or feeling of yours... Do not be afraid. ~ George MacDonald,

201:Love makes everything lovely: hate concentrates itself on the one thing hated. ~ George MacDonald,

202:Love makes everything lovely; hate concentrates itself on the one thing hated. ~ George MacDonald,

203:punishment had not been spared--with best results in patience and purification ~ George MacDonald,

204:It is not the cares of today, but the cares of tomorrow, that weigh a man down. ~ George MacDonald,

205:The person who can not bear with a sick man or a baby is not fit to be a woman. ~ George MacDonald,

206:We don't have a soul. We are a soul. We have a body." George Macdonald, 1892 ~ George MacDonald,

207:Work done is of more consequence for the future than the foresight of an angel. ~ George MacDonald,

208:Because we easily imagine ourselves in want, we imagine God ready to forsake us. ~ George MacDonald,

209:Good souls many will one day be horrified at the things they now believe of God. ~ George MacDonald,

210:In seeking to improve their conditions, might I not do them harm, and only harm? ~ George MacDonald,

211:It is not betrayal of feeling, but avoidance of duty, that constitutes weakness. ~ George MacDonald,

212:I was a bookworm then, but when I came to know it, I woke among the butterflies. ~ George MacDonald,

213:No man has the mind of Christ, except him who makes it his business to obey him. ~ George MacDonald,

214:Not even nothingness preceded life. Nothingness owes its very idea to existence. ~ George MacDonald,

215:That is the way fear serves us. It always sides with the thing we are afraid of. ~ George MacDonald,

216:The only way to come to know where you are is to begin to make yourself at home. ~ George MacDonald,

217:Who knows what harm may be done to a man by hurrying a spiritual process in him? ~ George MacDonald,

218:But there is no veil like light--no adamantine armor against hurt like the truth. ~ George MacDonald,

219:Difficulty adds to result, as the ramming of powder sends the bullet the further. ~ George MacDonald,

220:Never tell a child 'you have a soul.' Teach him, you are a soul; you have a body. ~ George MacDonald,

221:That trick's worth a new hat any day, youngster (hence the term hat trick) ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

222:if I be a child of God, I must be like him, even in the matter of creative energy. ~ George MacDonald,

223:She who is even once unjust can not complain if the like is expected of her again. ~ George MacDonald,

224:Above all things, I delight in listening to stories, and sometimes in telling them. ~ George MacDonald,

225:it wasn't that I'd grown any braver as I got older - the reverse if anything ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

226:My prayers, my God, flow from what I am not; I think thy answers make me what I am. ~ George MacDonald,

227:Then we’re all happy.” “That we are indeed!” answered the princess, sobbing. ~ George MacDonald,

228:There are thousands willing to do great things for one willing to do a small thing. ~ George MacDonald,

229:Walking the plank is a Victorian fiction, and I will not have it on my ship! ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

230:Well, perhaps; but I begin to think there are better things than being comfortable. ~ George MacDonald,

231:Any faith in Him, however small, is better than any belief about Him, however great. ~ George MacDonald,

232:but that is the way fear serves us: it always sides with the thing we are afraid of. ~ George MacDonald,

233:God chooses that men should be tried, but let a man beware of tempting his neighbor. ~ George MacDonald,

234:In whatever man does without God, he must fail miserably, or succeed more miserably. ~ George MacDonald,

235:It is the heart that is not sure of its God that is afraid to laugh in His presence. ~ George MacDonald,

236:Sad-hearted, be at peace: the snowdrop lies     Buried in sepulchre of ghastly snow; ~ George MacDonald,

237:That God only whom Christ reveals to the humble seeker, can ever satisfy human soul. ~ George MacDonald,

238:Theologians have done more to hide the Gospel of Christ than any of its adversaries. ~ George MacDonald,

239:Were I asked, what is a fairytale? I should reply, Read Undine: that is a fairytale. ~ George MacDonald,

240:Only a pure heart can understand, and a pure heart is one that sends out ready hands. ~ George MacDonald,

241:The beauty of love is, that it does not take care of itself, but of the person loved. ~ George MacDonald,

242:Those who are content with what they are, have the less concern about what they seem. ~ George MacDonald,

243:With every morn my life afresh must break The crust of self, gathered about me fresh. ~ George MacDonald,

244:Anything large enough for a wish to light upon, is large enough to hang a prayer upon. ~ George MacDonald,

245:Had God forgotten him? That could not be! that which could forget could not be God. ~ George MacDonald,

246:Hurry Who knows what harm may be done to a man by hurrying a spiritual process in him? ~ George MacDonald,

247:I did not want to quarrel with her, although I thought her both presumptuous and rude. ~ George MacDonald,

248:My prayers, my God, flow from what I am not; I think thy answers make me what I am. ~ George MacDonald,

249:You allowed me existence, which is the sum of what one can demand of his fellow-beings ~ George MacDonald,

250:You can't live on amusement. It is the froth on water - an inch deep and then the mud. ~ George MacDonald,

251:You can't live on amusement. It is the froth on water — an inch deep and then the mud. ~ George MacDonald,

252:A condition which of declension would indicate a devil, may of growth indicate a saint. ~ George MacDonald,

253:A fairytale is not an allegory. There may be allegory in it, but it is not an allegory. ~ George MacDonald,

254:Bees and butterflies, moths and dragonflies, the flowers and the brooks and the clouds. ~ George MacDonald,

255:I only know when I don't know a thing. My uncle has taught me that wisdom lies in that. ~ George MacDonald,

256:Low-sunk life imagines itself weary of life, but it is death, not life, it is weary of. ~ George MacDonald,

257:The man who grounds his action on another's cowardice, is essentially a coward himself. ~ George MacDonald,

258:When we are out of sympathy with the young, then I think our work in this world is over ~ George MacDonald,

259:...as no one can be just without love, so no one can truly report without understanding. ~ George MacDonald,

260:It is by loving and not by being loved that one can come nearest to the soul of another. ~ George MacDonald,

261:It is the heart that is not yet sure of its God that is afraid to laugh in His presence. ~ George MacDonald,

262:It matters little where a man may be at this moment; the point is whether he is growing. ~ George MacDonald,

263:Our crimes are friends that will hunt us either to the bosom of God, or the pit of hell. ~ George MacDonald,

264:The best preparation for the future is the present well seen to, and the last duty done. ~ George MacDonald,

265:I lost my way." "[...]. You wouldn't have lost your way if you hadn't been frightened. ~ George MacDonald,

266:It is by loving and not by being loved, that one can come nearest to the soul of another. ~ George MacDonald,

267:I want to help you grow as beautiful as God meant you to be when he thought of you first. ~ George MacDonald,

268:The best preparation for the future, is the present well seen to, and the last duty done. ~ George MacDonald,

269:There are as many kinds of anger as there are of the sunsets with which they ought to end ~ George MacDonald,

270:Contempt is murder committed by the intellect, as hatred is murder committed by the heart. ~ George MacDonald,

271:How kind you are, North Wind!' 'I am only just. All kindness is but justice. We owe it. ~ George MacDonald,

272:I lost myself, and if I hadn't found the beautiful lady, I should never have found myself. ~ George MacDonald,

273:It is when people do wrong things wilfully that they are the more likely to do them again. ~ George MacDonald,

274:The causing of the little ones to offend hangs a fearful woe about the neck of the causer. ~ George MacDonald,

275:The doing of things from duty is but a stage on the road to the kingdom of truth and love. ~ George MacDonald,

276:There are as many kinds of anger as there are of the sunsets with which they ought to end. ~ George MacDonald,

277:Trust is born in love, and our need is to love God, not apprehend facts concerning him. ~ George MacDonald,

278:Trust to God to weave your thread into the great web, though the pattern shows it not yet. ~ George MacDonald,

279:Doubt may be a poor encouragement to do anything, but it is a bad reason for doing nothing. ~ George MacDonald,

280:Indeed, a man is rather being thought than thinking, when a new thought arises in his mind. ~ George MacDonald,

281:People are so ready to think themselves changed when it is only their mood that is changed. ~ George MacDonald,

282:The secret of your own heart you can never know; but you can know Him who knows its secret. ~ George MacDonald,

283:We are and remain such creeping Christians, because we look at ourselves and not at Christ; ~ George MacDonald,

284:Winna ye be gaein' awa', to write buiks, an' gar fowk fin' oot what's the maitter wi' them? ~ George MacDonald,

285:In the hearts of witches, love and hate lie close together and often tumble over each other. ~ George MacDonald,

286:It’s very original, no doubt, but not for a hot evening. What I need is some trollop. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

287:I want to help you to grow as beautiful as God meant you to be when He thought of you first. ~ George MacDonald,

288:As Christ is the blossom of humanity, so the blossom of every man is Christ perfected in him. ~ George MacDonald,

289:As you grow ready for it, somewhere or other you will find what is needful for you in a book. ~ George MacDonald,

290:If you care to see God, be pure. If you will not be pure, you will grow more and more impure. ~ George MacDonald,

291:Seeing is not believing, it is only seeing,” George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin ~ George MacDonald,

292:He did not accept the good news of God; he strained it to his heart, and was jubilant over it. ~ George MacDonald,

293:Would it not be better to reject it altogether if it not be fit to be believed heart and soul? ~ George MacDonald,

294:I do not write for children, but for the childlike, whether of five, or fifty, or seventy-five. ~ George MacDonald,

295:If we do not die to ourselves, we cannot live to God, andhe that does not live to God, is dead. ~ George MacDonald,

296:I had chosen the dead rather than the living, the thing thought rather than the thing thinking. ~ George MacDonald,

297:She did not cry long, however, for she was as brave as could be expected of a princess her age. ~ George MacDonald,

298:God is Love. Love is the deepest depth, the essence of his nature, at the root of all his being. ~ George MacDonald,

299:I tell you, there are more worlds, and more doors to them, than you will think of in many years! ~ George MacDonald,

300:Many a thief is a better man than many a clergyman, and miles nearer to the gate of the kingdom. ~ George MacDonald,

301:But the praises of father or mother do our Selves good, and comfort them and make them beautiful. ~ George MacDonald,

302:If we knew as much about heaven as God does, we would clap our hands every time a Christian dies. ~ George MacDonald,

303:Now Malcolm was back again, but he came once too often, and was killed at Alnwick in 1093. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

304:This is and has been the Father's work from the beginning-to bring us into the home of His heart. ~ George MacDonald,

305:to teach is the best way to learn, but that the imperfect are the best teachers of the imperfect. ~ George MacDonald,

306:We are dwellers in a divine universe where no desires are in vain - if only they be large enough. ~ George MacDonald,

307:I am an optimistic fatalist. This world and all its beginnings will pass on into something better. ~ George MacDonald,

308:She did not cry long, however, for she was as brave as could be expected of a princess of her age. ~ George MacDonald,

309:Never suspecting what a noble creature he was meant to be, he never saw what a poor creature he was ~ George MacDonald,

310:Somehow, I can't say how, it tells me that all is right; that it is coming to swallow up all cries. ~ George MacDonald,

311:But I don't quite understand, Father: is nobody your friend but the one that does something for you? ~ George MacDonald,

312:Half of the misery in the world comes from trying to look, instead of trying to be, what one is not. ~ George MacDonald,

313:I am ready,' I replied. 'How do you know you can do it?' 'Because you require it,' I answered. ~ George MacDonald,

314:I awoke one morning with the usual perplexity of mind which accompanies the return of consciousness. ~ George MacDonald,

315:In low theologies, hell is invariably the deepest truth, and the love of God is not so deep as hell. ~ George MacDonald,

316:In the midst of death we are in life. Life is the only reality; what men call death is but a shadow. ~ George MacDonald,

317:I rose as from the death that wipes out the sadness of life, and then dies itself in the new morrow. ~ George MacDonald,

318:We are often unable to tell people what they need to know, because they want to know something else. ~ George MacDonald,

319:Ah, let a man beware, when his wishes, fulfilled, rain down upon him, and his happiness is unbounded. ~ George MacDonald,

320:His little heart was so full of merriment that it could not hold it all, and it ran over into theirs. ~ George MacDonald,

321:I believe that no hell will be lacking which would help the just mercy of God to redeem his children. ~ George MacDonald,

322:I suspect there is nothing a man can be so grateful for as that to which he has the most right. There ~ George MacDonald,

323:I write, not for children,but for the child-like, whether they be of five, or fifty, or seventy-five. ~ George MacDonald,

324:One of the grandest things in having rights is, that though they are your rights you may give them up ~ George MacDonald,

325:To do as God does, is to receive God; to do a service to one of his children is to receive the Father. ~ George MacDonald,

326:To judge religion we must have it--not stare at it from the bottom of a seemingly interminable ladder. ~ George MacDonald,

327:And earth was given back to earth, to mingle with the rest of the stuff the great workman works withal. ~ George MacDonald,

328:For I had long thought that the way to make indifferent things bad, was for good people not to do them. ~ George MacDonald,

329:I do not myself believe there is any misfortune. What men call such is merely the shadowside of a good. ~ George MacDonald,

330:just a decent resolve to do a government’s first duty: to protect its people, whatever the cost. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

331:the truth she gathered, enlarging her strength, enlarged likewise the composure that comes of strength. ~ George MacDonald,

332:The year's fruit must fall that the next year's may come, and the winter is the only way to the spring. ~ George MacDonald,

333:To give truth to him who loves it not is but to give him more plentiful material for misinterpretation. ~ George MacDonald,

334:You must learn to be strong in the dark as well as in the day, else you will always be only half brave. ~ George MacDonald,

335:Her dark eyes looked as if they found repose there, so quietly did they rest on the face of the old man, ~ George MacDonald,

336:I came from God, and I'm going back to God, and I won't have any gaps of death in the middle of my life. ~ George MacDonald,

337:Twilight-kind, oppressing the heart as with a condensed atmosphere of dreamy undefined love and longing. ~ George MacDonald,

338:Ah, what is it we send up thither, where our thoughts are either a dissonance or a sweetness and a grace? ~ George MacDonald,

339:It was a profound pleasure to her not to know what was coming next, provided some one whom she loved did. ~ George MacDonald,

340:Not only then has each man his individual relation to God, but each man has his peculiar relation to God. ~ George MacDonald,

341:She was in utter darkness once more. But when we are following the light, even its extinction is a guide. ~ George MacDonald,

342:Thou art beautiful because God created thee, but thou art a slave to sin... wickedness has made you ugly. ~ George MacDonald,

343:We must do the thing we must Before the thing we may; We are unfit for any trust Till we can and do obey. ~ George MacDonald,

344:A beast does not know that he is a beast, and the nearer a man gets to being a beast the less he knows it. ~ George MacDonald,

345:For Christianity does not mean what you think or what I think concerning Christ, but what IS OF Christ. My ~ George MacDonald,

346:Foreseeing is not understanding, else surely the prophecy latent in man would come oftener to the surface! ~ George MacDonald,

347:Nobody does anything bad all at once. Wickedness needs an apprenticeship as well as more difficult trades. ~ George MacDonald,

348:A beast does not know that he is a beast, and the nearer a man gets to being a beast, the less he knows it. ~ George MacDonald,

349:But I begin to think the chief difficulty in writing a book must be to keep out what does not belong to it. ~ George MacDonald,

350:Her face was fair and pretty, with eyes like two bits of night sky, each with a star dissolved in the blue. ~ George MacDonald,

351:People must believe what they can, and those who believe more must not be hard upon those who believe less. ~ George MacDonald,

352:The kingdom of heaven is not come, even when God’s will is our law: it is come when God’s will is our will. ~ George MacDonald,

353:True business can never be left in any shop. It is a care, white or black, that sits behind every horseman. ~ George MacDonald,

354:In Giving, a man receives more than he gives; and the more is in proportion to the worth of the thing given. ~ George MacDonald,

355:Never was there a more injurous mistake than to say it was thebusiness only of the clergy to care for souls. ~ George MacDonald,

356:The true man trusts in a strength which is not his, and which he does not feel, does not even always desire. ~ George MacDonald,

357:Division has done more to hide Christ from the view of men than all the infidelity that has ever been spoken. ~ George MacDonald,

358:I say again, if I cannot draw a horse, I will not write THIS IS A HORSE under what I foolishly meant for one. ~ George MacDonald,

359:There's a point, you know, where treachery is so complete and unashamed that it becomes statesmanship. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

360:What is called a good conscience is often but a dull one that gives no trouble when it ought to bark loudest; ~ George MacDonald,

361:. . . what is thought now, and held to be universal truth, was not thought then, or true of that time. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

362:But it was little to Curdie that men who did not know what he was about should not approve of his proceedings. ~ George MacDonald,

363:Possessed by the power of the gorgeous night, she seemed at one and the same moment annihilated and glorified. ~ George MacDonald,

364:That is, we are responsible only for our actions, not for their results. Trust first in God, then in John Day. ~ George MacDonald,

365:There is no inborn longing that shall not be fulfilled. I think that is as certain as the forgiveness of sins. ~ George MacDonald,

366:These are they who gather grace, as the mountain-tops the snow, to send down rivers of water to their fellows. ~ George MacDonald,

367:All words, then, belonging to the inner world of the mind, are of the imagination, are originally poetic words. ~ George MacDonald,

368:And her life will perhaps be the richer, for holding now within it the memory of what came, but could not stay. ~ George MacDonald,

369:It is amazing from what a mere fraction of a fact concerning him a man will dare judge the whole of another man ~ George MacDonald,

370:Where is the good of planning upon an if? To trust is to get ready, uncle says. Trust is better than foresight. ~ George MacDonald,

371:He cannot find him! Yet is he in his presence all the time, and his words enter into the ear of God his Saviour. ~ George MacDonald,

372:How kind is weariness sometimes! It is like the Father's hand laid a little heavy on the heart to make it still. ~ George MacDonald,

373:If both Church and fairy-tale belong to humanity, they may occasionally cross circles, without injury to either. ~ George MacDonald,

374:It is our best work that God wants, not the dregs of our exhaustion. I think he must prefer quality to quantity. ~ George MacDonald,

375:It is simply absurd to say you believe, or even want to believe, in Him, if you do not do anything He tells you. ~ George MacDonald,

376:Never was there a more injurous mistake than to say it was the business only of the clergy to care for souls. ~ George MacDonald,

377:The kingdom of heaven is not come even when God's will is our law; it is fully come when God's will is our will. ~ George MacDonald,

378:The miracles of Jesus were the ordinary works of his Father, wrought small and swift that we might take them in. ~ George MacDonald,

379:A man's real belief is that which he lives by. What a man believes is the thing he does, not the thing he thinks. ~ George MacDonald,

380:If you know you are yourself, you know that you are not somebody else; but do you know that you are yourself? Are ~ George MacDonald,

381:Real good-breeding is independent of the forms and refinements of what has assumed to itself the name of society. ~ George MacDonald,

382:Where is the good of planning upon an "if?" To trust is to get ready, uncle says. Trust is better than foresight. ~ George MacDonald,

383:A Baby Sermon- The lighting and thunder, they go and they come: But the stars and the stillness are always at home ~ George MacDonald,

384:We must do the thing we must Before the thing we may; We are unfit for any trust Till we can and do obey. ~ George MacDonald,

385:You know nothing about whereness. The only way to come to know where you are is to begin to make yourself at home. ~ George MacDonald,

386:Age is not all decay; it is the ripening, the swelling, of the fresh life within, that withers and bursts the husk. ~ George MacDonald,

387:...he believed in God and he believed that when the human is still, the Divine speaks to it, because it is its own. ~ George MacDonald,

388:In her, ignorance and stupidity formed a perfect shield against the world: this, I suppose, is innocence. It ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

389:I think little of people who will deny their history because it doesn't present the picture they would like. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

390:To say a man might disobey and be none the worse would be to say that no might be yes and light sometimes darkness. ~ George MacDonald,

391:wordy descriptions of the journey, which you can get from Parkman or Gregg if you want them – or from volume ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

392:I saw now that a man alone is but a being that may become a man--that he is but a need, and therefore a possibility. ~ George MacDonald,

393:I understand God’s patience with the wicked, but I do wonder how He can be so patient with the pious. —GEORGE MACDONALD ~ Leonard Sweet,

394:One who not merely beholds the outward shows of things, but catches a glimpse of the soul that looks out of them ... ~ George MacDonald,

395:The fear of man, the trust in man, the deference to the opinion of man, is the merest worship of a rag-stuffed idol. ~ George MacDonald,

396:A Baby Sermon- The lighting and thunder, they go and they come: But the stars and the stillness are always at home ~ George MacDonald,

397:As soon as a man begins to make excuses, the time has come when he might be doing that from which he excuses himself. ~ George MacDonald,

398:God never gave man a thing to do concerning which it were irreverent to ponder how the Son of God would have done it. ~ George MacDonald,

399:In times of horror and torment prayer is a great thing Nobody answers But at least it stops you from thinking. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

400:That which is within a man, not that which lies beyond his vision, is the main factor in what is about to befall him: ~ George MacDonald,

401:The more people trust in God, the less will they trust their own judgments, or interfere with the ordering of events. ~ George MacDonald,

402:When you have once learned to honour anything, love is not very far off; at least that has always been my experience. ~ George MacDonald,

403:Beauty and sadness always go together. Nature thought beauty too rich to go forth Upon the earth without a meet alloy. ~ George MacDonald,

404:Every soul has a landscape that changes with the wind that sweeps the sky, with the clouds that return after its rain. ~ George MacDonald,

405:If we will but let our God and Father work His will with us, there can be no limit to His enlargement of our existence ~ George MacDonald,

406:It is always the way. Until a man knows God, he seeks to obey him by doing things he neither commands nor cares about; ~ George MacDonald,

407:England was a menace to Scotland because Scotland was, by its separate existence, a constant anxiety to England. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

408:If we speak of direct means for the culture of the imagination, the whole is comprised in two words--food and exercise. ~ George MacDonald,

409:No good ever comes of pride, for it is the meanest of mean things, and no one but he who is full of it thinks it grand. ~ George MacDonald,

410:That's what comes o' lovin the praise o' men, Mirran! Easy it passes intil the fear o' men, and disregaird o' the Holy! ~ George MacDonald,

411:What if I should look ugly without being bad - look ugly myself because I am making ugly things beautiful? - What then? ~ George MacDonald,

412:Forgiveness unleashes joy. It brings peace. It washes the slate clean. It sets all the highest values of love in motion. ~ George MacDonald,

413:Therefore all that is not beautiful in the beloved, all that comes between and is not of love's kind, must be destroyed. ~ George MacDonald,

414:There is one kind of religion in which the more devoted a man is, the fewer proselytes he makes: the worship of himself. ~ George MacDonald,

415:For God alone is our salvation; to know him is salvation. He is in us all the time, else we could never move to seek him. ~ George MacDonald,

416:One thing is clear to me, that no indulgence of passion destroys the spiritual nature so much as respectable selfishness. ~ George MacDonald,

417:the road is difficult. - But come; loss now will be gain then! To wait is harder than to run, and its meed is the fuller. ~ George MacDonald,

418:Come, come to Him who made thy heart; Come weary and oppressed; To come to Jesus is thy part; His part, to give thee rest. ~ George MacDonald,

419:He who seeks the Father more than anything He can give, is likely to have what he asks, for he is not likely to ask amiss. ~ George MacDonald,

420:I dare not say with Paul that I am the slave of Christ, but my highest aspiration and desire is to be the slave of Christ. ~ George MacDonald,

421:she was one of the lights of the world—one of the wells of truth, whose springs are fed by the rains on the eternal hills. ~ George MacDonald,

422:The main secret of his progress, the secret of all wisdom, was, that with him action was the beginning and end of thought. ~ George MacDonald,

423:The two pillars of 'political correctness' are, a) willful ignorance, and b) a steadfast refusal to face the truth. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

424:Come, then, affliction, if my Father wills, and be my frowning friend. A friend that frowns is better than a smiling enemy. ~ George MacDonald,

425:I find the doing of the will of God leaves me no time for disputing about his plans — I do not say for thinking about them. ~ George MacDonald,

426: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. ~ George MacDonald,

427:But a man may then imagine in your work what he pleases, what you never meant!" Not what he pleases, but what he can. ~ George MacDonald,

428:Here lies David Elginbrod Have mercy on my soul, dear God, As I would ye if I were God And ye were David Elginbrod. ~ George MacDonald,

429:In truth, they were not given to quarrelling. Many couples who love each other more, quarrel more, and with less politeness. ~ George MacDonald,

430:It is not in the nature of politics that the best men should be elected. The best men do not want to govern their fellowmen. ~ George MacDonald,

431:Our moon," he answered, "is not like yours-the old cinder of a burnt-out world; her beams embalm the dead, not corrupt them. ~ George MacDonald,

432:The possession of wealth is, as it were, prepayment, and involves an obligation of honor to the doing of correspondent work. ~ George MacDonald,

433:This is another to be added to the many proofs that verisimilitude is not in the least an essential element of verity. ~ George MacDonald,

434:Grave doubts as to whether I was in my place in the church, would keep rising and floating about, like rain-clouds within me. ~ George MacDonald,

435:I don't believe that he thinks about His glory except for the sake of truth and men's hearts dying for the lack of it. ~ George MacDonald,

436:Light unshared is darkness. To be light indeed, it must shine out. It is of the very essence of light, that it is for others. ~ George MacDonald,

437:Beauty and sadness always go together. Nature thought Beauty too golden to go forth Upon the earth without a meet alloy. ~ George MacDonald,

438:What distressed me most - more even than my own folly - was the perplexing question, How can beauty and ugliness dwell so near? ~ George MacDonald,

439:The good man never wrote or read a sermon, but talked to his people as one who would meet what was in them with what was in him. ~ George MacDonald,

440:To judge religion we must have it—not stare at it from the bottom of a seeming interminable ladder ~ George Macdonald, Warlock o' Glenwarlock ch 18,

441:How much time is wasted in what is called thought, but is merely care--an anxious idling over the fancied probabilities of result ~ George MacDonald,

442:I might here find the magic word of power to banish the demon and set me free, so that I should no longer be a man beside myself. ~ George MacDonald,

443:It is the one terrible heresy of the church, that it has always been presenting something else than obedience as faith in Christ. ~ George MacDonald,

444:Joy cannot unfold the deepest truths. Cometh white-robed Sorrow, stooping and wan, and flingeth wide the door she must not enter. ~ George MacDonald,

445:Our Lord speaks of many coming up to His door confident of admission, whom He yet sends away. Faith is obedience, not confidence. ~ George MacDonald,

446:I don't know how to thank you.' Then I will tell you. There is only one way I care for. Do better, and grow better, and be better. ~ George MacDonald,

447:In moments of doubt I cry, ‘Could God Himself create such lovely things as I dreamed?’ ‘Whence then came thy dream?’ answers Hope. ~ George MacDonald,

448:Never be discouraged because good things get on so slowly here; and never fail daily to do that good which lies next to your hand. ~ George MacDonald,

449:As George MacDonald wisely wrote, "The one principle of hell is, I am my own!" 4 Fierce pride usually protects this wrong perception. ~ Neal A Maxwell,

450:As you grow ready for it, somewhere or other you will find what is needful for you in a book. ~ George MacDonald, The Marquis of Lossie, Chapter XLII.,

451:But indeed the business of the universe is to make such a fool of you that you will know yourself for one, and so begin to be wise! ~ George MacDonald,

452:The direst foe of courage is the fear itself, not the object of it; and the man who can overcome his own terror is a hero and more. ~ George MacDonald,

453:There is no law that sermons shall be the preacher's own, but there is an eternal law against all manner of humbug. Pardon the word. ~ George MacDonald,

454:Until a man has love, it is well he should have fear. So long as there are wild beasts about, it is better to be afraid than secure. ~ George MacDonald,

455:Am I mystical again, reader? Then I hope you are too, or will be before you have done with this same beautiful mystical life of ours. ~ George MacDonald,

456:God left the world unfinished for man to work his skill upon. He left the electricity still in the cloud, the oil still in the earth. ~ George MacDonald,

457:I don't know how to thank you.' Then I will tell you. There is only one way I care for. Do better, and grow better, and be better. ~ George MacDonald,

458:No man can make haste to be rich without going against the will of God, in which case it is the one frightful thing to be successful. ~ George MacDonald,

459: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? ~ George MacDonald,

460:It is greed and laziness and selfishness, not hunger or weariness or cold, that take the dignity out of a man, and make him look mean. ~ George MacDonald,

461:Suffering While the cup of blessing may and often does run over, I doubt if the cup of suffering is ever more than filled to the brim. ~ George MacDonald,

462:What I would say is this, that the light is not blinding because God would hide, but because the truth is too glorious for our vision. ~ George MacDonald,

463: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. ~ George MacDonald,

464:As to the pure all things are pure, so the common mind sees far more vulgarity in others than the mind developed in genuine refinement. ~ George MacDonald,

465:every honest cry, even if sent into the deaf ear of an idol, passes on to the ears of the unknown God, the heart of the unknown Father. ~ George MacDonald,

466:He had come to think that so long as a man wants to do right he may go where he can: when he can go no further, then it is not the way. ~ George MacDonald,

467:If there be a God and one has never sought him, it will be small consolation to remember that one could not get proof of his existence. ~ George MacDonald,

468:I learned that he that will be a hero will barely be a man; that he that will be nothing but a doer of his work is sure of his manhood. ~ George MacDonald,

469:Love is the law of our condition, without which we can no more render justice than a man can keep a straight line, walking in the dark. ~ George MacDonald,

470:The honour is to be a servant of men, whom God thought worth making, worth allowing to sin, and worth helping out of it at such a cost. ~ George MacDonald,

471:God will not take shelter behind a jugglery of logic or metaphysics. He is neither a schoolman nor theologian, but our Father in Heaven. ~ George MacDonald,

472:A slave will amuse himself in his dungeon; a free man must file through his chains and dig through his prison-walls before he can frolic. ~ George MacDonald,

473:I learned that he that will be a hero, will barely be a man; that he that will be nothing but a doer of his work, is sure of his manhood. ~ George MacDonald,

474:It is to the man who is trying to live, to the man who is obedient to the word of the Master, that the word of the Master unfolds itself. ~ George MacDonald,

475:In moments of doubt I cry, ‘Could God Himself create such lovely things as I dreamed?’ ‘Whence then came thy dream?’ answers Hope. ~ George MacDonald,

476:It is as necessary for a poor man to give away, as for a rich man. Many poor men are more devoted worshipers of Mammon than some rich men. ~ George MacDonald,

477:The door into life generally opens behind us and the only wisdom for one haunted with the scent of unseen roses is work."-George MacDonald ~ George MacDonald,

478:I never heard of her loving anybody but herself, and I do not think she could have managed that if she had not somehow got used to herself. ~ George MacDonald,

479:it is not the rich man only who is under the dominion of things; they too are slaves who, having no money, are unhappy from the lack of it. ~ George MacDonald,

480:Let a man do right, not trouble himself about worthless opinion; the less he heeds tongues, the less difficult will he find it to love men. ~ George MacDonald,

481: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. ~ George MacDonald,

482:That's right, grannie! And the rich have to look down on the poor." "No, my dear. I did not say that. The rich have to be KIND to the poor. ~ George MacDonald,

483:A shudder ran through her from head to foot when she found that the thread was actually taking her into the hole out of which the stream ran. ~ George MacDonald,

484:I saw thee ne'er before; I see thee never more; But love, and help, and pain, beautiful one, Have made thee mine, till all my years are done. ~ George MacDonald,

485:Sorrow herself will reveal one day that she was only the beneficent shadow of Joy. Will Evil ever show herself the beneficent shadow of Good? ~ George MacDonald,

486:Think not to make me afraid, for I fear nothing in the universe but that which I love the best.--I spake of the eyes of the Lord Jesus.--Then ~ George MacDonald,

487:When one has to seek the honour that comes from God only, he will take the withholding of the honour that comes from men very quietly indeed. ~ George MacDonald,

488:That's all nonsense," said Curdie. "I don't know what you mean." "Then if you don't know what I mean, what right have you to call it nonsense? ~ George MacDonald,

489:This is in the very nature of things: obedience alone places a man in the position in which he can see so as to judge that which is above him. ~ George MacDonald,

490:Alas, how easily things go wrong! A sigh too much, a kiss too long And there follows a mist and a weeping rain And life is never the same again ~ George MacDonald,

491:All love will, one day, meet with its return. All true love will, one day, behold its own image in the eyes of the beloved, and be humbly glad. ~ George MacDonald,

492:But it is not the rich man only who is under the dominion of things; they too are slaves who, having no money, are unhappy from the lack of it. ~ George MacDonald,

493:For this, deep waters whelm the fruitful lea, Wars ravage, famine wastes, plague withers, nor Shall cease till men have chosen the better part. ~ George MacDonald,

494:Her heart - like every heart, if only its fallen sides were cleared away - was an inexhaustible fountain of love: she loved everything she saw. ~ George MacDonald,

495: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! ~ George MacDonald,

496:I have never concealed the fact that I regarded him as my master; indeed I fancy I have never written a book in which I did not quote from him. ~ George MacDonald,

497:The darkness knows neither the light nor itself; only the light knows itself and the darkness also. None but God hates evil and understands it. ~ George MacDonald,

498:But words are vain; reject them all— They utter but a feeble part: Hear thou the depths from which they call, The voiceless longing of my heart. ~ George MacDonald,

499:Certainly 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. ~ George MacDonald,

500:There must be hope while there is existence; for where there is existence there must be God; and God is forever good nor can be other than good. ~ George MacDonald,

501:You must be strong with my strength and blessed with my blessedness, for I have no other to give you."-George MacDonald (what God says of us) ~ George MacDonald,

502:For the greatest fool and rascal in creation there is yet a worse condition; and that is, not to know it, but to think himself a respectable man. ~ George MacDonald,

503:He has not yet learned that the day begins with sleep!" said the woman, turning to her husband. "Tell him he must rest before he can do anything! ~ George MacDonald,

504:I am so tried by the things said about God. I understand God's patience with the wicked, but I do wonder how he can be so patient with the pious! ~ George MacDonald,

505:She would wonder what had hurt her when she found her face wet with tears, and then would wonder how she could have been hurt without knowing it. ~ George MacDonald,

506:That's all nonsense," said Curdie. "I don't know what you mean." "Then if you don't know what I mean, what right have you to call it nonsense? ~ George MacDonald,

507:there is no harm in being afraid. The only harm is in doing what Fear tells you. Fear is not your master! Laugh in his face and he will run away. ~ George MacDonald,

508:We have to do with God, to whom no one can look without the need of being good waking up in his heart; to think about God is to begin to be good. ~ George MacDonald,

509: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. ~ George MacDonald,

510:That's all nonsense," said Curdie. "I don't know what you mean." "Then if you don't know what I mean, what right have you to call it nonsense? ~ George MacDonald,

511:They will pressure you into doing things that may be unsafe, use your good judgment, and remember, 'I would rather be laughed at, than cried for.' ~ George MacDonald,

512:We stood there for a full half hour, like so many scarecrows, while they jeered at us from a distance, and one or two of us were shot down. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

513:For that great Love speaks in the most wretched and dirty hearts; only the tone of its voice depends on the echoes of the place in which it sounds. ~ George MacDonald,

514:A candle is not lighted for itself; neither is a man. The light that serves self only, is no true light; its one virtue is that it will soon go out. ~ George MacDonald,

515:If man could do what in his wildest self-worship he can imagine, the grand result would be that he would be his own God, which is the Hell of Hells. ~ George MacDonald,

516:She began to learn that nothing is dead, that there cannot be a physical abstraction, that nothing exists for the sake of the laws of its phenomena. ~ George MacDonald,

517:The purposes of God point to one simple end-that we should be as he is, think the same thoughts, mean the same things, possess the same blessedness. ~ George MacDonald,

518:what is the love of child, or mother, or dog, but the love of God, shining through another being—which is a being just because he shines through it. ~ George MacDonald,

519: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. ~ George MacDonald,

520:Now and then, when I look round on my books, they seem to waver as if a wind rippled their solid mass, and another world were about to break through. ~ George MacDonald,

521:Only by the reflex of other lives can he ripen his specialty, develop the idea of himself, the individuality that distinguishes him from every other. ~ George MacDonald,

522:The ideal flower of hospitality is almost unknown to the rich; it can hardly be grown save in the gardens of the poor; it is one of their beatitudes. ~ George MacDonald,

523:To be conceited of doing one's duty is, then, a sign of how little one does it, and how little one sees what a contemptible thing it is not to do it. ~ George MacDonald,

524:But there are not a few who would be indignant at having their belief in God questioned, who yet seem greatly to fear imagining Him better than He is. ~ George MacDonald,

525:I saw thee ne'er before; I see thee never more; But love, and help, and pain, beautiful one, Have made thee mine, till all my years are done. ~ George MacDonald,

526:The question is not at present, however, of removing mountains, a thing that will one day be simple to us, but of waking and rising from the dead now. ~ George MacDonald,

527:All those evil doctrines about God that work misery and madness have their origin in the brains of the wise and prudent, not in the hearts of children. ~ George MacDonald,

528:If instead of a gem, or even a flower, we should cast the gift of a loving thought into the heart of a friend, that would be giving as the angels give. ~ George MacDonald,

529:No man ever sank under the burden of the day. It is when tomorrow's burden is added to the burden of today that the weight is more than a man can bear. ~ George MacDonald,

530:Alas, how easily things go wrong! A sigh too much, a kiss too long And there follows a mist and a weeping rain And life is never the same again ~ George MacDonald,

531:If a dream reveal a principle, that principle is a revelation, and the dream is neither more NOR LESS valuable than a waking thought that does the same. ~ George MacDonald,

532:Instead of automatically blaming the person who does not believe in God, we should ask first if his notion of God is a God that ought to be believed in. ~ George MacDonald,

533:Never wait for fitter time or place to talk to Him. To wait till thou go to church or to thy closet is to make Him wait. He will listen as thou walkest. ~ George MacDonald,

534:To try too hard to make people good is one way to make them worse. The only way to make them good is to be good, remembering well the beam and the mote. ~ George MacDonald,

535:But in the meantime you must be content, I say, to be misunderstood for a while. We are all very anxious to be understood, and it is very hard not to be. ~ George MacDonald,

536:heaven is high and deep, and its lower air is music; in the upper regions the music may pass, who knows, merging unlost, into something endlessly better! ~ George MacDonald,

537:It is because the young cannot recognize the youth of the aged, and the old will not acknowledge the experience of the young, that they repel each other. ~ George MacDonald,

538:It is not the hysterical alone for whom the great dash of cold water is good. All who dream life, instead of living it, require some similar shock. ~ George MacDonald,

539:The ideal is the only absolute real; and it must become the real in the individual life as well, however impossible they may count it who never tried it. ~ George MacDonald,

540:The Root of All Rebellion: It is because we are not near enough to Thee to partake of thy liberty that we want a liberty of our own different from thine. ~ George MacDonald,

541:We are often unable to tell people what they need to know, because they want to know something else, and would therefore only misunderstand what we said. ~ George MacDonald,

542:The Bible is to me the most precious thing in the world, because it tells me his story; and what good men thought about him who knew him and accepted him. ~ George MacDonald,

543:We are often unable to tell people what they need to know, because they want to know something else, and would therefore only misunderstand what we said. ~ George MacDonald,

544:before serious Anglo-Scottish political differences began, there was a north-south dispute over the manner in which priestly heads should be shaved. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

545:But words are vain; reject them all— They utter but a feeble part: Hear thou the depths from which they call, The voiceless longing of my heart. ~ George MacDonald,

546:"Then what do you see?" asked Irene, who perceived at once that for her not to believe him was at least as bad as for him not to believe her. ~ George MacDonald,

547:Is it not time I lost a few things when I care for them so unreasonably? This losing of things is of the mercy of God: It comes to teach us to let them go. ~ George MacDonald,

548:On Idle Tongues Let a man do right, not trouble himself about worthless opinion; the less he heeds tongues, the less difficult will he find it to love men. ~ George MacDonald,

549:It is a happy thing for us that this is really all we have to concern ourselves about--what to do next. No man can do the second thing. He can do the first. ~ George MacDonald,

550:Primarily, God is not bound to punish sin; he is bound to destroy sin. The only vengeance worth having on sin is to make the sinner himself its executioner. ~ George MacDonald,

551:She was a mother. One who is mother only to her own children is not a mother; she is only a woman who has borne children. But here was one of God's mothers. ~ George MacDonald,

552:The things that come out of a man are they that defile him, and to get rid of them a man must go into himself, be a convict, and scrub the floor of his cell. ~ George MacDonald,

553:They are not the best students who are most dependent on books. What can be got out of them is at best only material; a man must build his house for himself. ~ George MacDonald,

554:To love righteousness is to make it grow, not to avenge it. Throughout his life on earth, Jesus resisted every impulse to work more rapidly for a lower good. ~ George MacDonald,

555:I begin to suspect," said the curate, after a pause, "that the common transactions of life are the most sacred channels for the spread of the heavenly leaven. ~ George MacDonald,

556:There is but one thing that can free a man from superstition, and that is belief. All history proves it. The most sceptical have ever been the most credulous. ~ George MacDonald,

557:Man finds it hard to get what he wants, because he does not want the best; God finds it hard to give, because He would give the best, and man will not take it. ~ George MacDonald,

558:Verily the God that knows how not to reveal himself, must also know how best to reveal himself! If there be a calling child, there must be an answering Father! ~ George MacDonald,

559:And why should the good of anyone depend on the prayer of another? I can only answer with the return question, 'Why should my love be powerless to help another? ~ George MacDonald,

560:And why should the good of anyone depend on the prayer of another? I can only answer with the return question, “Why should my love be powerless to help another? ~ George MacDonald,

561:Any gang of politicos is like the eighth circle of Hell, but the American breed is specially awful because they take it seriously and believe it matters; ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

562:But may not one sometimes make a mistake without being able to help it?' 'Yes. But so long as he is not after his own ends, he will never make a serious mistake. ~ George MacDonald,

563:God is the God of the animals in a far lovelier way, I suspect, than many of us dare to think, but he will not be the God of a man by making a good beast of him. ~ George MacDonald,

564: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. ~ George MacDonald,

565:Truly, if ignorance is the foundation of any man's goodness, it is not worth the wind that upsets it, but in its mere self, ignorance of evil is a negative good. ~ George MacDonald,

566:A man may sink by such slow degrees that, long after he is a devil, he may go on being a good churchman or a good dissenter and thinking himself a good Christian. ~ George MacDonald,

567:Immeasurably imperfect it was, but false the impression could not be, for she saw with the eyes made for seeing, and saw indeed what many men are too wise to see. ~ George MacDonald,

568:Primarily, God is not bound to punish sin; he is bound to destroy sin. The only vengeance worth having on sin is to make the sinner himself its executioner. ~ George MacDonald,

569:...when the children had made sparrows of clay, Thou mad'st them birds, with wings to flutter and fold: Take, Lord, my prayer in thy hand, and make it pray. ~ George MacDonald,

570:But we believe – nay, Lord we only hope, That one day we shall thank thee perfectly For pain and hope and all that led or drove Us back into the bosom of thy love. ~ George MacDonald,

571:My teacher taught me that the way for me to help others was not to tell them their duty, but myself to learn of Him who bore our griefs and carried our sorrows. As ~ George MacDonald,

572:There is this difference between the growth of some human beings and that of others: in the one case it a continuous dying, in the other a continuous resurrection. ~ George MacDonald,

573:Alas! this time is never the time for self-denial, it is always the next time. Abstinence is so much more pleasant to contemplate upon the other side of indulgence. ~ George MacDonald,

574:I begin indeed to fear that I have undertaken an impossibility, undertaken to tell what I cannot tell because no speech at my command will fit the forms in my mind. ~ George MacDonald,

575:It is a great privilege to be poor, Peter. You must not mistake, however, and imagine it a virtue; it is but a privilege, and one also that may be terribly misused. ~ George MacDonald,

576:It may be an infinitely less evil to murder a man than to refuse to forgive him. The former may be the act of a moment of passion: the latter is the heart’s choice. ~ George MacDonald,

577:There is no leveller like Christianity—but it levels by lifting to a lofty table-land, accessible only to humility. He only who is humble can rise, and rising lift. ~ George MacDonald,

578: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. ~ George MacDonald,

579:Oh the folly of any mind that would explain God before obeying Him! That would map out the character of God instead of crying, Lord, what wouldst thou have me to do? ~ George MacDonald,

580: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. ~ George MacDonald,

581:There is no cheating in nature and the simple unsought feelings of the soul. There must be a truth involved in it, though we may but in part lay hold of the meaning. ~ George MacDonald,

582:When a feeling was there, they felt as if it would never go; when it was gone they felt as if it had never been; when it returned, they felt as if it had never gone. ~ George MacDonald,

583:Worlds cannot be without an intermundane relationship. The community of the centre of all creation suggests an interradiating connection and dependence of the parts. ~ George MacDonald,

584:There is no strength in unbelief. Even the unbelief of what is false is no source of might. It is the truth shining from behind that gives the strength to disbelieve. ~ George MacDonald,

585:There is this difference between the growth of some human beings and that of others: in the one case it is a continuous dying, in the other a continuous resurrection. ~ George MacDonald,

586:When a feeling was there, they felt as if it would never go; when it was gone, they felt as if it had never been; when it returned, they felt as if it had never gone. ~ George MacDonald,

587:Many a wrong, and it's curing song, many a road, and many an inn, Room to roam, but only one home, for all the world to win. George MacDonald, (Lilith) ~ George MacDonald,

588:Now Gibbie had been honoured with the acquaintance of many dogs, and the friendship of most of them, for a lover of humanity can hardly fail to be a lover of caninity. ~ George MacDonald,

589:The church grew very lonely about him, and he began to feel like a child whose mother has forsaken it. Only he knew that to be left alone is not always to be forsaken. ~ George MacDonald,

590:We should teach our children to think no more of their bodies when dead than they do of their hair when cut off, or of their old clothes when they have done with them. ~ George MacDonald,

591:I hurried away to the white hall of Phantasy heedless of the innumerable forms of beauty that crowded my way: these might cross my eyes, but the unseen filled my brain. ~ George MacDonald,

592:You have tasted of death now,” said the old man. “Is it good?” “It is good,” said Mossy. “It is better than life.” “No,” said the old man: “it is only more life. ~ George MacDonald,

593:He (God) can be revealed only to the child; perfectly, to the pure child only. All the discipline of the world is to make men children, that God may be revealed to them. ~ George MacDonald,

594:Pious people in general seem to regard religion as a necessary accompaniment of life; to Wingfold it was life itself; with him religion must be all, or could be nothing. ~ George MacDonald,

595:There is nothing eternal but that which loves and can be loved, and love is ever climbing towards the consummation when such shall be the universe, imperishable, divine. ~ George MacDonald,

596:He has wronged me grievously. It is a dreadful thing to me, and more dreadful still to him, that he should have done it. He has hurt me, but he has nearly killed himself. ~ George MacDonald,

597:Let death do what it can, there is just one thing it cannot destroy, and that is life. Never in itself, only in the unfaith of man, does life recognize any sway of death. ~ George MacDonald,

598:No man is condemned for anything he has done: he is condemned for continuing to do wrong. He is condemned for not coming out of the darkness, for not coming to the light. ~ George MacDonald,

599:We should never wish our children or friends to do what we would not do ourselves if we were in their positions. We must accept righteous sacrifices as well as make them. ~ George MacDonald,

600:Forgiveness is the giving and so the receiving of life. the latter may be an impulse of a moment of heat; whereas the former is a cold and deliberate choice of the heart. ~ George MacDonald,

601:the highest condition of the Human Will, as distinct, not as separated from God, is when, not seeing God, not seeming to itself to grasp Him at all, it yet holds Him fast. ~ George MacDonald,

602: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! ~ George MacDonald,

603:But we believe – nay, Lord we only hope, That one day we shall thank thee perfectly For pain and hope and all that led or drove Us back into the bosom of thy love. ~ George MacDonald,

604:It was now to Aggie as if they were all dead and in the blessed world together, only she had brought with her an ache which it would need time to tune. All pain is discord. ~ George MacDonald,

605:Now, in my experience there is only one way to fight a ship, and that is to get below on the side opposite to the enemy and find a snug spot behind a stout bulkhead. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

606:The birds, the poets of the animal creation - what though they never get beyond the lyrical! - awoke to utter their own joy, and awake like joy in others of God's children. ~ George MacDonald,

607:The birds, the poets of the animal creation — what though they never get beyond the lyrical! — awoke to utter their own joy, and awake like joy in others of God's children. ~ George MacDonald,

608:When God can do what He will with a man, the man may do what he will with the world; he may walk on the sea like his Lord; the deadliest thing will not be able to hurt him. ~ George MacDonald,

609:she might be treacherous too, but if I turned from every show of love lest it should be feigned, how was I ever to find the real love which must be somewhere in every world? ~ George MacDonald,

610:But he remembered that even if she did box his ears, he musn't box hers again, for she was a girl, and all that boys must do, if girls are rude, is to go away and leave them. ~ George MacDonald,

611:If those who had set themselves to explain the various theories of Christianity had set themselves instead to do the will of the Master, how different the world would be now! ~ George MacDonald,

612: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. ~ George MacDonald,

613:No; but you came, and found the riddles waiting for you! Indeed you are yourself the only riddle. What you call riddles are truths, and seem riddles because you are not true. ~ George MacDonald,

614:And no scripture is of private interpretation, so is there no feeling in (a) human heart which exists in that heart alone—which is not, in some form or degree, in every heart. ~ George MacDonald,

615:Let us keep our shame and be made clean! Shame is not defilement, though a mean pride persuades men so. On the contrary, the man who is honestly ashamed has begun to be clean. ~ George MacDonald,

616:Oblige me by telling me where I am." "That is impossible. You know nothing about whereness. The only way to come to know where you are is to begin to make yourself at home. ~ George MacDonald,

617:Perhaps the best thing for the princess would have been to fall in love. But how a princess who had no gravity could fall into anything is a difficulty–perhaps the difficulty. ~ George MacDonald,

618:We are all very anxious to be understood, and it is very hard not to be. But there is one thing much more necessary.' 'What is that, grandmother?' 'To understand other people. ~ George MacDonald,

619:no man really denies a thing which he knows only by the words that stand for it. When John Tuke denied the God in his notion, he denied only a God that could have no existence. ~ George MacDonald,

620:When someone is grieving He had too much respect for sorrow to approach it with curiosity. He had learned to put off his shoes when he drew nigh the burning bush of human pain. ~ George MacDonald,

621:Yes, grannie, you are right. You remember how old dame Hope wouldn't take the money you offered her, and dropped such a disdainful courtesy. It was SO greedy of her, wasn't it? ~ George MacDonald,

622:God is God to us not that we may say he is, but that we may know him; and when we know him, then we are with him, at home, at the heart of the universe, the heirs of all things. ~ George MacDonald,

623:Might have been enough for a warning - it looked so like a human being dried up and distorted with age and suffering, with cares instead of loves, and things instead of thoughts. ~ George MacDonald,

624:It is the soul that makes the body. When we are sons of God in heart and soul, then shall we be the sons of God in body too: "we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is". ~ George MacDonald,

625:There are not many people who can think about beautiful things and do common work at the same time. But then there are not many people who have been to the back of the north wind. ~ George MacDonald,

626:We can walk without fear, full of hope and courage and strength to do His will, waiting for the endless good which He is always giving as fast as He can get us able to take it in. ~ George MacDonald,

627:As no scripture is of private interpretation, so is there no feeling in a human heart which exists in that heart alone - which is not, in some form or degree, in every human heart. ~ George MacDonald,

628:Communion with God is the one need of the soul beyond all other need,” wrote George MacDonald. “Prayer is the beginning of that communion and some need is the motive of that prayer.”2 ~ John Eldredge,

629:I am perplexed at the stupidity of the ordinary religious being. In the most practical of all matters he will talk and speculate and try to feel, but he will not set himself to do. ~ George MacDonald,

630:Some dreams, some poems, some musical phrases, some pictures, wake feelings such as one never had before, new in colour and form—spiritual sensations, as it were, hitherto unproved ~ George MacDonald,

631:There is no way of making three men right but by making right each one of the three; but a cure in one man who repents and turns, is a beginning of the cure of the whole human race. ~ George MacDonald,

632:Whose work is it but your own to open your eyes? But indeed the business of the universe is to make such a fool out of you that you will know yourself for one, and begin to be wise. ~ George MacDonald,

633: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. ~ George MacDonald,

634:From all that is thus low and wretched, incapable and fearful, he who made the water into wine delivers men, revealing heaven around them, God in all things, truth in every instinct, ~ George MacDonald,

635:One chief cause of the amount of unbelief in the world is tha tthose who have seen something of the glory of Christ set themselves to theorize concerning him rather than to obey him. ~ George MacDonald,

636:Really he was not an interesting man: short, broad, stout, red-faced, with an immense amount of mental inertia, discharging itself in constant lingual activity about little nothings. ~ George MacDonald,

637:The little boy was just as much one of God's messengers as if he had been an angel with a flaming sword, going out to fight the devil. The devil he had to fight just then was Misery. ~ George MacDonald,

638:This myth called bravery, which is half-panic, half-lunacy (in my case, all panic), pays for all; in England you can’t be a hero and bad. There’s practically a law against it. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

639:You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it himself. (Quoted by C.S.Lewis in Mere Christianity) ~ George MacDonald,

640:I repent me of the ignorance wherein I ever said that God made man out of nothing: there is no nothing out of which to make anything; God is all in all, and he made us out of himself. ~ George MacDonald,

641:But there are victories far worse than defeats; and to overcome an angel too gentle to put out all his strength, and ride away in triumph on the back of a devil, is one of the poorest. ~ George MacDonald,

642:God is just!' said a carping theologian to me the other day. 'Yes,' I answered, 'and he cannot be pleased that you should call that justice which is injustice, and attribute it to him! ~ George MacDonald,

643:I watched her departure, as one watches a sunset. She went like a radiance through the dark wood, which was henceforth bright to me, from simply knowing that such a creature was in it. ~ George MacDonald,

644:Thats what you young chaps have to remember. When u run, RUN! Full speed. Don't dither or dally even for an instant. let terror have his way, for he's the best friend you;ve got ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

645:I am sometimes almost terrified at the scope of the demands made upon me, at the perfection of the self-abandonment required of me; yet outside of such absoluteness can be no salvation. ~ George MacDonald,

646:The Heart And no scripture is of private interpretation, so is there no feeling in (a) human heart which exists in that heart alone—which is not, in some form or degree, in every heart. ~ George MacDonald,

647:they did not fight for a Britain where to hold by truths and values which have been thought good and worthy for a thousand years would be to run the risk of being called “fascist ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

648:[350] The Root of All Rebellion It is because we are not near enough to Thee to partake of thy liberty that we want a liberty of our own different from thine. [351] Two Silly Young Women ~ George MacDonald,

649:[35]              Caelum non animum mutant The man who is not content where he is, would never have been content somewhere else, though he might have complained less. Donal Grant, ch. 31 ~ George MacDonald,

650: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. ~ George MacDonald,

651:He who is faithful over a few things is a lord of cities. It does not matter whether you preach in Westminster Abbey or teach a ragged class, so you be faithful. The faithfulness is all. ~ George MacDonald,

652:To say on the authority of the Bible that God does a thing no honourable man would do, is to lie against God; to say that it is therefore right, is to lie against the very spirit of God. ~ George MacDonald,

653:Aye, weel, here’s tae us.’ ‘Wha’s like us?’ said McGilvray. ‘Dam’ few,’ said Forbes. ‘And they’re a’ deid,’ I said, completing the ritual. ‘Aw-haw-hey,’ said Daft Bob and we drank. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

654:does my Anerew's hert guid to hae a crack wi' ane 'at kens something o' what the Maister wad be at. Mony ane 'll ca' him Lord, but feow 'ill tak the trible to ken what he wad hae o' them. ~ George MacDonald,

655:Some thinkers would feel sorely hampered if at liberty to use no forms but such as existed in nature, or to invent nothing save in accordance with the laws of the world of the senses; but ~ George MacDonald,

656:That guttural, hissing mumble, with all its “Tz” and “zl” and “rr” noises, like a drunk Scotch-Jew having trouble with his false teeth, is something you don’t forget in a hurry. So ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

657:The nearer persons come to each other, the greater is the room and the more are the occasions for courtesy; but just in proportion to their approach the gentleness of most men diminishes. ~ George MacDonald,

658:No, there is no escape. There is no heaven with a little of hell in it--no plan to retain this or that of the devil in our hearts or our pockets. Out Satan must go, every hair and feather! ~ George MacDonald,

659:All that man sees has to do with man. Worlds cannot be without an intermundane relationship. The community of the centre of all creation suggests an interradiating connection and dependence ~ George MacDonald,

660:But God lets men have their playthings, like the children they are, that they may learn to distinguish them from true possessions. If they are not learning that he takes them from them, and ~ George MacDonald,

661:Diamond, however, had not been out so late before in all his life, and things looked so strange about him! - just as if he had got into Fairyland, of which he knew quite as much as anybody; ~ George MacDonald,

662:I'm your father's mother's father's mother.' 'Oh, dear! I can't understand that,' said the princess. 'I dare say not. I didn't expect you would. But that's no reason why I shouldn't say it. ~ George MacDonald,

663:People must believe what they can, and those who believe more must not be hard upon those who believe less. I doubt if you would have believed it all yourself if you hadn't seen some of it. ~ George MacDonald,

664:Whether the lightning bewildered me and made me take a false turn, I cannot tell; for the hardest thing to understand, in intellectual as well as moral mistakes, is—how we came to go wrong. ~ George MacDonald,

665:It was a troubled night, the last they spent in the castle. Not many slept. But the lord of it had long understood that what could cease to be his never had been his, and slept like a child. ~ George MacDonald,

666:No, there is no escape. There is no heaven with a little of hell in it - no place to retain this or that of the devil in our hearts or our pockets. Out Satan must go, every hair and feather. ~ George MacDonald,

667:his mother, who had never been able to manage him, sent him to school to get rid of him, lamented his absence till he returned, then writhed and fretted under his presence until again he went. ~ George MacDonald,

668:Never, my little one, hide anything from those that love you. Never let anything that makes itself a nest in your heart, grow into a secret, for then at once it will begin to eat a hole in it. ~ George MacDonald,

669:The part of philanthropist is indeed a dangerous one; and the man who would do his neighbor good must first study how not do do him evil, and must begin by pulling the beam out of his own eye. ~ George MacDonald,

670:The part of philanthropist is indeed a dangerous one; and the man who would do his neighbor good must first study how not to do him evil, and must begin by pulling the beam out of his own eye. ~ George MacDonald,

671:Eternal Death Not fulfilling these relations, the man is undoing the right of his own existence, destroying his raison d’être, making of himself a monster, a live reason why he should not live. ~ George MacDonald,

672:If God were not only to hear our prayers, as he does ever and always, but to answer them as we want them answered, he would not be God our Saviour but the ministering genius of our destruction. ~ George MacDonald,

673:The part of philanthropist is indeed a dangerous one; and the man who would do his neighbour good must first study how not to do him evil, and must begin by pulling the beam out of his own eye. ~ George MacDonald,

674:Those are not the tears of repentance!... Self-loathing is not sorrow. Yet it is good, for it marks a step in the way home, and in the father's arms the prodigal forgets the self he abominates. ~ George MacDonald,

675:Two people may be at the same spot in manners and behaviour, and yet one may be getting better, and the other worse, which is the greatest of differences that could possibly exist between them. ~ George MacDonald,

676:What a man is lies as certainly upon his countenance as in his heart, though none of his acquaintances may be able to read it. The very intercourse with him may have rendered it more difficult. ~ George MacDonald,

677:What does it all mean?' I said. 'A good question,' he rejoined: 'nobody knows what anything is; a man can learn only what a thing means. Whether he do, depends on the use he is making of it. ~ George MacDonald,

678:When one says to the great Thinker:-- "Here is one of thy thoughts: I am thinking it now!" that is a prayer--a word to the big heart from one of its own little hearts.-- Look, there is another! ~ George MacDonald,

679:By obedience, I intend no kind of obedience to man, or submission to authority claimed by man or community of men. I mean obedience to the will of the Father, however revealed in our conscience. ~ George MacDonald,

680: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. ~ George MacDonald,

681:Most powerful of all powers in its holy insinuation is being . To be is more powerful than even to do . Action may be hypocrisy, but being is the thing itself, and is the parent of action. ~ George MacDonald,

682:All that is made seems planless to the darkened mind, because there are more plans than it looked for...There seems no plan because it is all plan: there seems no centre because it is all centre. ~ George MacDonald,

683:But, for as cold and wretched as it looks, the sun has not forsaken it. He has only drawn away from it a little, for good reasons, one of which is that we may learn that we cannot do without him. ~ George MacDonald,

684:By this edition of HAMLET I hope to help the student of Shakspere to understand the play—and first of all Hamlet himself, whose spiritual and moral nature are the real material of the tragedy, to ~ George MacDonald,

685:He was in fact a poet without words, the more absorbed and endangered, that the springing waters were dammed back in his soul, where, finding no utterance, they grew, and swelled, and undermined. ~ George MacDonald,

686:Looking back over sixty-odd years, life is like a piece of string with knots in it, the knots being those moments that live in the mind forever, and the intervals being hazy, half-recalled ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

687:the fact that the church draws so few of those that are despised, of those whom Jesus drew and to whom most expressly he came, gives ground for question as to how far the church is like her Lord. ~ George MacDonald,

688:Common people, whether lords or shop-keepers, are slow to understand that possession, whether in the shape of birth or lands or money or intellect, is a small affair in the difference between men. ~ George MacDonald,

689:I wondered over again for the hundredth time what could be the principle which, in the wildest, most lawless, fantastically chaotic, apparently capricious work of Nature, always kept it beautiful. ~ George MacDonald,

690:The well-meaning woman was in fact possessed by two devils--the one the stiff-necked devil of pride, the other the condescending devil of benevolence. She was kind, but she must have credit for it ~ George MacDonald,

691:A kind of love to the cheerful little stream arose in my heart. It was born in a desert; but it seemed to say to itself, "I will flow, and sing, and lave my banks, till I make my desert a paradise. ~ George MacDonald,

692:And Summer, dear Summer, hath years of June, With large white clouds, and cool showers at noon; And a beauty that grows to a weight like grief, Till a burst of tears is the heart’s relief. ~ George MacDonald,

693:For each, God has a different response. With every man He has a secret—the secret of a new name. In every man there is a loneliness, an inner chamber of peculiar life into which God only can enter. ~ George MacDonald,

694:I would not favour a fiction to keep a whole world out of hell. The hell that a lie would keep any man out of is doubtless the very best place for him to go to. It is truth... that saves the world. ~ George MacDonald,

695:My soul was like a summer evening, after a heavy fall of rain, when the drops are yet glistening on the trees in the last rays of the down-going sun, and the wind of the twilight has begun to blow. ~ George MacDonald,

696:No one, however strong he may feel his obligations, will ever be man enough to fulfill them except that he be a Christian-that is,one who, like Christ, cares first for the will of the Father. ~ George MacDonald,

697:She did not even trouble herself much to show Godfrey her gratitude. We may spoil gratitude as we offer it, by insisting on its recognition. To receive honestly is the best thanks for a good thing. ~ George MacDonald,

698:The part of the philanthropist is indeed a dangerous one; and the man who would do his neighbour good must first study how not to do him evil, and must begin by pulling the beam out of his own eye. ~ George MacDonald,

699:A voice 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. ~ George MacDonald, Within and Without, Part I, scene 1,

700:Free will is not the liberty to do whatever one likes, but the power of doing whatever one sees ought to be done, even in the very face of otherwise overwhelming impulse. There lies freedom, indeed. ~ George MacDonald,

701:...though I cannot promise to take you home," said North Wind, as she sank nearer and nearer to the tops of the houses, "I can promise you it will be all right in the end. You will get home somehow. ~ George MacDonald,

702:To cease to wonder is to fall plumb-down from the childlike to the commonplace—the most undivine of all moods intellectual. Our nature can never be at home among things that are not wonderful to us. ~ George MacDonald,

703:A man must learn to love his children, not because they are his, but because they are children, else his love will be scarcely a better thing at last than the party-spirit of the faithful politician. ~ George MacDonald,

704:It may seem strange that one with whom I had held so little communion should have so engrossed my thoughts, but benefits conferred awaken love in some minds, as surely as benefits received in others. ~ George MacDonald,

705:Most of us do not think of ourselves as criminals, but possibly there are things in our daily lives which we regard as our “inheritance” which will move future generations to critical disgust. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

706:My spirits rose as I went deeper; into the forest; but I could not regain my former elasticity of mind. I found cheerfulness to be like life itself--not to be created by any argument. Pg. 108 ~ George MacDonald,

707:Unfortunately, to the ordinary people, war and peace were not very different. The trouble with all Anglo-Scottish wars was that no one ever won them; they were always liable to break out again. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

708:I firmly believe people have hitherto been a great deal too much taken up about doctrine and far too little about practice. The word "doctrine," as used in the Bible, means teaching of duty, not theory. ~ George MacDonald,

709:...the loves of the noble wife, the great-souled mother, and the true sister flow from a single root.... they are all but glints on the ruffled waters of humanity of the one, changeless, enduring Light. ~ George MacDonald,

710:His marriage was of infinitely more salvation to the laird than if it had set him free from all his worldly embarrassments, for it set him growing again—and that is the only final path out of oppression. ~ George MacDonald,

711: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 ~ George MacDonald,

712:The best thing you can do for your fellow, next to rousing his conscience, is — not to give him things to think about, but to wake things up that are in him; or say, to make him think things for himself. ~ George MacDonald,

713:you see, and the folly of sitting smug in judgment years after, stuffed with piety and ignorance and book-learned bias. Humanity is beastly and stupid, aye, and helpless, and there’s an end to it. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

714:But more impressive than the facts and figures as to height, width, age, etc., are the entrancing beauty and tranquility that pervade the forest, the feelings of peace, awe and reverence that it inspires. ~ George MacDonald,

715:Oh, I believe that there is no away; that no love, no life, goes ever from us; it goes as He went, that it may come again, deeper and closer and surer, and be with us always, even to the end of the world. ~ George MacDonald,

716:Our God, we will trust thee. Shall we not find thee equal to our faith? One day, we shall laugh ourselves to scorn that we looked for so little from thee; for thy giving will not be limited by our hoping. ~ George MacDonald,

717:That which is the power and worth of life they must be, or die; and the vague consciousness of this makes them afraid. They love their poor existence as it is; God loves it as it must be—and they fear him. ~ George MacDonald,

718:A man must not choose his neighbor: he must take the neighbor that God sends him…. The neighbor is just the man who is next to you at the moment, the man with whom any business has brought you into contact. ~ George MacDonald,

719:Even in the matter of stealing we must think of our own beam before our neighbour's mote. It is not easy to be honest. There is many a thief who is less of a thief than many a respectable member of society. ~ George MacDonald,

720:God Himself - His thoughts, His will, His love, His judgments are men's home. To think His thoughts, to choose His will, to judge His judgments, and thus to know that He is in us, with us, is to be at home. ~ George MacDonald,

721:Then the great old, young, beautiful princess turned to Curdie. "Now, Curdie, are you ready?" she said. "Yes, ma'am," answered Curdie. "You do not know what for." "You do, ma'am. That is enough. ~ George MacDonald,

722:You see this Fairy Land is full of oddities and all sorts of incredibly ridiculous things, which a man is compelled to meet and treat as real existences, although all the time he feels foolish for doing so. ~ George MacDonald,

723:Truth is one, and he who does the truth in the small thing is of the truth; he who will do it only in a great thing, who postpones the small thing near him to the great farther from him, is not of the truth. ~ George MacDonald,

724:At length she gently pushed me away, and with the words, "Go, my son, and do something worth doing," turned back, and, entering the cottage, closed the door behind her. I felt very desolate as I went. CHAPTER ~ George MacDonald,

725:I forced my way to the brink, stepped into the boat, pushed it, with the help of the tree-branches, out into the stream, lay down in the bottom, and let my boat and me float whither the stream would carry us. ~ George MacDonald,

726:Then the great old, young, beautiful princess turned to Curdie. 'Now, Curdie, are you ready?' she said. 'Yes ma'am,' answered Curdie. 'You do not know what for.' 'You do, ma'am. That is enough. ~ George MacDonald,

727:An almost perfect relationship with his father was the earthly root of all his wisdom. From his own father, he said, he first learned that Fatherhood must be at the core of the universe. [speaking of George MacDonald] ~ C S Lewis,

728:His likeness to Christ is the truth of a man, even as the perfect meaning of a flower is the truth of a flower…. As Christ is the blossom of humanity, so the blossom of every man is the Christ perfected in him. ~ George MacDonald,

729:Life eternal, this lady of thine hath a sore heart, and we cannot help her. Thou art help, O Mighty Love. Speak to her, and let her know thy will, and give her strength to do it, O Father of Jesus Christ, Amen. ~ George MacDonald,

730:Self-loathing is not sorrow. Yet it is good, for it marks a step in the way home, and in the father's arms the prodigal forgets the self he abominates. Once with his father, he is to himself of no more account. ~ George MacDonald,

731:She hardly knew for which to be more grateful—her son, given helpless into her hands, unable to repel the love she lavished upon him; or the girl whom God had taken from the very throat of the swallowing grave. ~ George MacDonald,

732:A flush of anger crimsoned the old lady's pale face. It looked dead no longer. "Hold your tongue," she said. "You are rude." And Miss Gladwyn did hold her tongue, but nothing else, for she was laughing all over. ~ George MacDonald,

733:Let us comfort ourselves in the thought of the Father and the Son. So long as there dwells harmony, so long as the Son loves the Father with all the love the Father can welcome, all is well with the little ones. ~ George MacDonald,

734:To know that she could not be near God in peace and love without fulfilling certain mental conditions — that he would not have her just as she was now, filled her with an undefined but terribly real misery . . . ~ George MacDonald,

735:In God we live every commonplace as well as most exalted moment of our being. To trust in Him when no need is pressing, when things seem going right of themselves, may be harder than when things seem going wrong. ~ George MacDonald,

736:This is a wise, sane Christian faith: that a man commit himself, his life, and his hopes to God; that God undertakes the special protection of that man; that therefore that man ought not to be afraid of anything. ~ George MacDonald,

737:No; I'm not bad. But sometimes beautiful things grow bad by doing bad, and it takes some time for their badness to spoil their beauty. So little boys may be mistaken if they go after things because they beautiful. ~ George MacDonald,

738:The man who takes no count of what is fair, friendly, pure, unselfish, lovely, gracious,—where is his claim to call Jesus his master? where his claim to Christianity? What saves his claim from being merest mockery? ~ George MacDonald,

739:There can hardly be a plainer proof of the lowness of our nature, until we have laid hold of the higher nature that belongs to us by birthright, than this, that even a just anger tends to make us unjust and unkind. ~ George MacDonald,

740:Oh, father!" he said, "how the fear and oppression of ages are gone like a cloud swallowed up of space. Oh, father! are not all human ills doomed thus to vanish at last in the eternal fire of the love-burning God?—An ~ George MacDonald,

741:When I look like this into the blue sky, it seems so deep, so peaceful, so full of a mysterious tenderness, that I could lie for centuries and wait for the dawning of the face of God out of the awful loving-kindness. ~ George MacDonald,

742:No; I'm not bad. But sometimes beautiful things grow bad by doing bad, and it takes some time for their badness to spoil their beauty. So little boys may be mistaken if they go after things because they are beautiful. ~ George MacDonald,

743:The Border, in a sense, was a bloody buffer state which absorbed the principal horrors of war. With the benefit of hindsight, one could almost say that the social chaos of the frontier was a political necessity. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

744:Christ died to save us, not from suffering, but from ourselves; not from injustice, far less from justice, but from being unjust. He died that we might live—but live as He lives, by dying as He died who died to Himself. ~ George MacDonald,

745:Divine Fire The fire of God, which is His essential being, His love, His creative power, is a fire unlike its earthly symbol in this, that it is only at a distance it burns—that the further from Him, it burns the worse. ~ George MacDonald,

746:is it not better to complain if one but complain to God himself? Does he not then draw nigh to God with what truth is in him? And will he not then fare as Job, to whom God drew nigh in return, and set his heart at rest? ~ George MacDonald,

747:People must believe what they can, and those who believe more must not be hard upon those who believe less. I doubt if you would have believed it all yourself if you hadn't seen some of it. ~ George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin,

748:People must not choose their neighbors; they must take the neighbors that God sends them. The neighbor is just the person who is next to you at the moment, the person with whom any business has brought you into contact. ~ George MacDonald,

749:No, no hay salida. No hay cielo que contenga un poco de infierno. No hay plan que mantenga esto o aquello del demonio en nuestros corazones o en nuestros bolsillos. Nuestro Satán debe marcharse, completamente.” GEORGE MACDONALD ~ C S Lewis,

750:I know my Easts and Tom Brown, you see, and they're never happy unless their morality is being tried in the furnace and they can feel they are doing the right Christian thing and never mind the consequences to anyone else. ~ George MacDonald,

751:I was doing the wrong of never wanting or trying to better. And now I see that I have been letting things go as the would for a long time. Whatever came into my head I did and whatever didn’t come into my head I didn’t do. ~ George MacDonald,

752:My prayers, my God, flow from what I am not; I think thy answers make me what I am. Like weary waves thought follows upon thought, But the still depth beneath is all thine own, And there thou mov’st in paths to us unknown. ~ George MacDonald,

753:Therefore I have been training him for a work that must soon be done. I was near losing him, and had to send my pigeon. Had he not shot it, that would have been better; but he repented, and that shall be as good in the end. ~ George MacDonald,

754:And if we believe that God is everywhere, why should we not think Him present even in the coincidences that sometimes seem so strange? For, if He be in the things that coincide, He must be in the coincidence of those things. ~ George MacDonald,

755:She had not yet such a love of wisdom as to be able to bear with folly. The foolish and weak are the most easily disgusted with folly and weakness which is not of their own sort, and are the last to make allowances for them. ~ George MacDonald,

756: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. ~ George MacDonald,

757:When I look like this into the blue sky, it seems so deep, so peaceful, so full of a mysterious tenderness, that I could lie for centuries and wait for the dawning of the face of God out of the awe-inspiring loving-kindness. ~ George MacDonald,

758:he was more grateful for Truffey's generous forgiveness than he would have been for the richest living in Scotland. Such forgiveness is just giving us back ourselves—clean and happy. And for what gift can we be more grateful? ~ George MacDonald,

759:Let us then arise and live—arise even in the darkest moments of spiritual stupidity, when hope itself sees nothing to hope for. Let us go at once to the Life. Let us comfort ourselves in the thought of the Father and the Son. ~ George MacDonald,

760:If a man keeps the law, I know he is a lover of his neighbour. But he is not a lover because he keeps the law: he keeps the law because he is a lover. No heart will be content with the law for love. The law cannot fulfil love. ~ George MacDonald,

761:Many a life has been injured by the constant expectation of death. It is life we have to do with, not death. The best preparation for the night is to work diligently while the day lasts. The best preparation for death is life. ~ George MacDonald,

762:Our minds are small because they are faithless,' I said to myself. 'If we had faith in God our hearts would share in His greatness and peace for we should not then be shut up in ourselves, but would walk abroad in him ~ George MacDonald,

763: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. ~ George MacDonald,

764:What is the matter with your master?" George asked Dawtie as they bounced along toward Potlurg. "God knows, sir." "What is the use of telling me that? I want you to tell me what YOU know." "I don't know anything, sir. ~ George MacDonald,

765:But for money and the need of it, there would not be half the friendship in the world. It is powerful for good if divinely used. Give it plenty of air and it is sweet as the hawthorn; shut it up and it cankers and breeds worms. ~ George MacDonald,

766:How often do we look upon God as our last and feeblest resource! We go to Him because we have nowhere else to go. And when we learn that the storms of life have not driven us upon the rocks but into the desired heaven. ~ George MacDonald,

767:We profess to think Jesus the grandest and most glorious of men, yet hardly care to be like him. When we are offered his Spirit, that is, his very nature within us, for the asking, we will hardly take the trouble to ask for it. ~ George MacDonald,

768:But her mother was one of those weakest of women who can never forget the beauty they once possessed, or quite believe they have lost it, remaining, even after the very traces of it have vanished, as greedy as ever of admiration. ~ George MacDonald,

769:I know my Easts and Tom Brown, you see, and they're never happy unless their morality is being tried in the furnace and they can feel they are doing the right Christian thing and never mind the consequences to anyone else. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

770:Of all things let us avoid the false refuge of a weary collapse, a hopeless yielding to things as they are. It is the life in us that is discontented: we need more of what is discontented, not more of the cause of its discontent. ~ George MacDonald,

771:You've got to save your own soul first, and then the souls of your neighbors if they will let you; and for that reason you must cultivate, not a spirit of criticism, but the talents that attract people to the hearing of the Word. ~ George MacDonald,

772:But Mrs. Wingfold had developed a great aptitude for liking people. Surely more people would allow themselves to be thus changed if they realized how greatly the coming of the kingdom of God is slowed by a simple lack of courtesy. ~ George MacDonald,

773:R0 explains and, to some limited degree, it predicts. It defines the boundary between a small cluster of weird infections in a tropical village somewhere, flaring up, burning out, and a global pandemic. It came from George MacDonald. ~ David Quammen,

774:Similarly, there are multitudes who lose their lives pondering what they ought to believe, while something lies at their door waiting to be done, and rendering it impossible for him who makes it wait, ever to know what to believe. ~ George MacDonald,

775:For I suspect the next world will more plainly be a going on with this than most people think—only it will be much better for some, and much worse for others, as the Lord has taught us in the parable of the rich man and the beggar. ~ George MacDonald,

776:The greatest obscuration of the words of the Lord, as of all true teachers, comes from those who give themselves to interpret rather than do them. Theologians have done more to hide the gospel of Christ than any of its adversaries. ~ George MacDonald,

777:There was the lamp--dead indeed, and so changed that she would never have taken it for a lamp but for the shape! No, it was not the lamp anymore now it was dead, for all that made it a lamp was gone, namely, the bright shining of it. ~ George MacDonald,

778:As in all sweetest music, a tinge of sadness was in every note. Nor do we know how much of the pleasures even of life we owe to the intermingled sorrows. Joy cannot unfold the deepest truths, although deepest truth must be deepest joy. ~ George MacDonald,

779:For each, God has a different response. With every man He has a secret—the secret of a new name. In every man there is a loneliness, an inner chamber of peculiar life into which God only can enter. I say not it is the innermost chamber. ~ George MacDonald,

780:If the Lord were to appear this day in England as once in Palestine, He would not come in the halo of the painters or with that wintry shine of effeminate beauty, of sweet weakness, in which it is their helpless custom to represent Him. ~ George MacDonald,

781:I should have known better, of course. Whenever I’m feeling up to the mark and congratulating myself, some fearful fate trips me headlong, and I find myself haring for cover with my guts churning and Nemesis in full cry after me. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

782:People who have suffered every hardship and atrocity, and who have every reason to fear that they will suffer them again, may submit tamely, or they may fight for survival. The English and Scots of the frontier were not tame folk. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

783:St. Paul is not yet the man he would be, which he must be. But he, and all they who with him believe that the perfection of Christ is the sole worthy effort of a man's life, are in the region, though not yet at the centre, of perfection. ~ George MacDonald,

784:When we understand the outside of things, we think we have them. Yet the Lord puts his things in subdefined, suggestive shapes, yielding no satisfactory meaning to the mere intellect, but unfolding themselves to the conscience and heart. ~ George MacDonald,

785:There is hardly a limit to the knowledge and sympathy a man may have in respect of the finest things, and yet be a fool. Sympathy is not harmony. A man may be a poet even, and speak with the tongue of an angel, and yet be a very bad fool. ~ George MacDonald,

786:There is little hope of the repentance and redemption of certain some until they have committed one or another of the many wrong things of which they are daily, through a course of unrestrained selfishness, becoming more and more capable. ~ George MacDonald,

787:The winter drew on — a season as different from the summer in those northern latitudes, as if it belonged to another solar system. Cold and stormy, it is yet full of delight for all beings that can either romp, sleep, or think it through. ~ George MacDonald,

788:Afterwards I learned, that the best way to manage some kinds of painful thoughts, is to dare them to do their worst; to let them lie and gnaw at your heart till they are tired; and you find you still have a residue of life they cannot kill. ~ George MacDonald,

789:But in after days Cosmo repented of having so completely dropped the old gentleman's acquaintance; he was under obligation to him; and if a man will have to do only with the perfect, he must needs cut himself first, and go out of the world. ~ George MacDonald,

790:Let a man think and care ever so little about God, He does not therefore exist without God. God is here with him, upholding, warming, delighting, teaching him - making life a good thing to him. God gives him Himself, though he knows it not. ~ George MacDonald,

791:I would rather be what God chose to make me than the most glorious creature that I could think of; for to have been thought about, born in God's thought, and then made by God, is the dearest, grandest and most precious thing in all thinking. ~ George MacDonald,

792:They scorched the earth, destroyed their own homes and fields, took to the hills and the wilderness with their beasts and all they could move, and carried on the struggle by onfall, ambush, cutting supply lines, and constant harrying. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

793:Afterwards I learned, that the best way to manage some kinds of pain fill thoughts, is to dare them to do their worst; to let them lie and gnaw at your heart till they are tired; and you find you still have a residue of life they cannot kill. ~ George MacDonald,

794:And we had met at last in this same cave of greenery, while the summer night hung round us heavy with love, and the odours that crept through the silence from the sleeping woods were the only signs of an outer world that invaded our solitude. ~ George MacDonald,

795:God hides nothing. His very work from the beginning is revelation--a casting aside of veil after veil, a showing unto men of truth after truth. On and on from fact Divine He advances, until at length in His Son Jesus He unveils His very face. ~ George MacDonald,

796:But the man of independent feeling, except he be thus your friend, will not unlikely resent your compassion, while the beggar will accept it chiefly as a pledge for something more to be got from you; and so it will tend to keep him in beggary. ~ George MacDonald,

797:But then to every lover of the truth, a true thing is dearer because it is old-fashioned, and dearer because it is new-fashioned: and true music, like true love, like all truth, laughs at the god Fashion, because it knows him to be but an ape. ~ George MacDonald,

798:LET A MAN THINK AND CARE ever so little about God, he does not therefore exist without God. God is here with him, upholding, warming, delighting, teaching him-making life a good thing to him. God gives him himself, though the man knows it not. ~ George MacDonald,

799:The advantage to being a wicked bastard is that everyone pesters the Lord on your behalf; if volume of prayers from my saintly enemies means anything, I'll be saved when the Archbishop of Canterbury is damned. It's a comforting thought. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

800:The bliss of the animals lies in this, that, on their lower level, they shadow the bliss of those—few at any moment on the earth—who do not “look before and after, and pine for what is not” but live in the holy carelessness of the eternal now. ~ George MacDonald,

801:It is one of the poorest of human weaknesses that a man would be ashamed of saying he has done wrong instead of so ashamed of having done wrong that he cannot rest till he has said so. For the shame cleaves fast until the confession removes it. ~ George MacDonald,

802:Yes, it is - a very great deal, for it is a beginning. And a beginning is the greatest thing of all. To try to be brave is to be brave. The coward who tries to be brave is before the man who is brave because he is made so, and never had to try. ~ George MacDonald,

803:In 1929, George Macdonald recalled that there “has always been a considerable fringe of ascetics in the Freethought ranks—foes of rum, tobacco, corsets, sex, meat, and white bread. . . . Their slogan is: ‘The whiter the bread the sooner you’re dead. ~ Susan Jacoby,

804:Now he learned what law and order and truth are, what consent and harmony mean; how the individual may find his own end in a higher end, where law and freedom mean the same thing, and the purest certainty exists without the slightest constraint. ~ George MacDonald,

805:Now, look you here, Sekundar," says I, but he came up straight like a little bantam and cut me off. "Sir Alexander. if you please," says he icily, as though I’d never seen him with his breeches down, chasing after some big Afghan bint. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

806:A man must learn to love his children, not because they are his, but because they are children, else his love will be scarcely a better thing at last than the party-spirit of the faithful politician. I doubt if it will prove even so good a thing. ~ George MacDonald,

807:George MacDonald gives me renewed strength during times of trouble--times when I have seen people tempted to deny God--when he says, "The Son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like his. ~ Madeleine L Engle,

808:One of the good things that come of a true marriage is, that there is one face on which changes come without your seeing them; or rather there is one face which you can still see the same, through all the shadows which years have gathered upon it. ~ George MacDonald,

809:Remember, then, that whoever does not mean good is always in danger of harm. But I try to give everybody fair play, and those that are in the wrong are in far more need of it always than those who are in the right: they can afford to do without it. ~ George MacDonald,

810:The golden age, of Scotland, of Anglo-Scottish harmony, and of the Border country, ended when King Alexander III of Scotland fell over a cliff in 1286. Few stumbles—if indeed His Majesty was not pushed—have been more important than that one. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

811:Things come to the poor that can't get in at the door of the rich. Their money somehow blocks it up. It is a great privilege to be poor--one that no man covets, and brat a very few have sought to retain, but one that yet many have learned to prize. ~ George MacDonald,

812:Why don't you go on, Mother dear?' he asked. 'It's such nonsense!' said his mother. 'I believe it would go on for ever.' 'That's just what it did,' said Diamond.' 'What did?' she asked.' 'Why, the river. That's almost the very tune it used to sing. ~ George MacDonald,

813:If He pleases to forget anything, then He can forget it. And I think that is what He does with our sins—that is, after He has got them away from us, once we are clean from them altogether. It would be a dreadful thing if He forgot them before that…. ~ George MacDonald,

814:Love loves unto purity. Love has ever in view the absolute loveliness of that which it beholds. Therefore all that is not beautiful in the beloved, all that comes between and is not of love's kind, must be destroyed. And our God is a consuming fire. ~ George MacDonald,

815:That man is perfect in faith who can come to God in the utter dearth of his feelings and desires, without a glow or an aspiration, with the weight of low thoughts, failures, neglects, and wandering forgetfulness, and say to Him, “Thou art my refuge. ~ George MacDonald,

816:To be right with God is to be right with the universe: one with the power, the love, the will of the mighty Father, the cherisher of joy, the Lord of laughter, whose are all glories, all hopes, who loves everything and hates nothing but selfishness. ~ George MacDonald,

817:What a hell of horror, I thought, to wander alone, a bare existence never going out of itself, never widening its life in another life, but, bound with the cords of its poor peculiarities, lying an eternal prisoner in the dungeon of its own being! I ~ George MacDonald,

818:For the bliss of the animals lies in this, that, on their lower level, they shadow the bliss of those--few at any moment on the earth--who do not 'look before and after, and pine for what is not,' but live in the holy carelessness of the eternal now. ~ George MacDonald,

819:In a word, why were they not men at worst, when at best they ought to be more of men than other men?--And here lay the difficulty: by no effort could I get the face before me to fit into the clerical mould which I had all ready in my own mind for it. ~ George MacDonald,

820:Take my advice, my dear Mr Walton, and don't make too much of your poor, or they'll soon be too much for you to manage.—Come, Pet: it's time to go home to lunch.—And for the surplice, take your own way and wear it. I shan't say anything more about it. ~ George MacDonald,

821:The minister was an honest man so far as he knew himself and honesty, and did not relish this form of submission. But he did not ask himself where was the difference between accepting the word of man and accepting man's explanation of the word of God! ~ George MacDonald,

822:For the country was so rejoiced at the death of the giants, and so many of their lost friends had been restored to the nobility and men of wealth, that the gladness surpassed the grief. "Ye have indeed left your lives to your people, my great brothers! ~ George MacDonald,

823:George MacDonald: “I would rather be what God chose to make me than the most glorious creature that I could think of. For to have been thought about—born in God’s thoughts—and then made by God is the dearest, grandest, most precious thing in all thinking. ~ Jerry Bridges,

824:God, and not woman, is the heart of all. But she, as priestess of the visible earth, Holding the key, herself most beautiful, Had come to him, and flung the portals wide. He entered in: each beauty was a glass That gleamed the woman back upon his view. ~ George MacDonald,

825:But it is no use trying to account for things in Fairy Land; and one who travels there soon learns to forget the very idea of doing so, and takes everything as it comes; like a child, who, being in a chronic condition of wonder, is surprised at nothing. ~ George MacDonald,

826:Why know the name of a thing when the thing itself you do not know? Whose work is it but your own to open your eyes? But indeed the business of the universe is to make such a fool of you that you will know yourself for one, and so begin to be wise!” But ~ George MacDonald,

827:She did not hesitate. Right into the hole she went, which was high enough to let her walk without stooping. For a little way there was a brown glimmer, but at the first turn it all but ceased, and before she had gone many paces she was in total darkness. ~ George MacDonald,

828:la única manera de sentirnos mejor es intentar que otros se sientan mejor, y eso sucede, en parte, porque cuando ayudamos a los demás no pensamos tanto en nosotros mismos. Pues a uno mismo siempre le va bastante bien si no le prestamos demasiada atención. ~ George MacDonald,

829:If anything in their history demonstrates that the Scots are remarkable, it is that in spite of being physically attached to England, they have survived as a people, with their own culture, laws, institutions, and, like the English, their own ideas. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

830:It is like his Father, too, not to withhold good wine because men abuse it. Enforced virtue is unworthy of the name. That men may rise above temptation, it is needful that they should have temptation. It is the will of him who makes the grapes and the wine. ~ George MacDonald,

831:Then his heart and imagination were more in the ascendency. Now he had begun to admire the intellectual qualities of that literature more, and its imaginative less; for he had begun to think truth attainable through the forces of the brain, sole and supreme. ~ George MacDonald,

832:Then she would laugh like the very spirit of fun; only in her laugh there was something missing. What it was, I find myself unable to describe. I think it was a certain tone, depending upon the possibility of sorrow--MORBIDEZZA, perhaps. She never smiled. ~ George MacDonald,

833:there is a light that goes deeper than the will, a light that lights up the darkness behind it: that light can change your will, can make it truly yours and not another's--not the Shadow's. Into the created can pour itself the creating will, and so redeem it! ~ George MacDonald,

834:but where is the use of saying what might have been, when all things are ever moving towards the highest and best for the individual as well as for the universe! —not the less that hell may be the only path to it for some—the hell of an absolute self-loathing. ~ George MacDonald,

835:You will not be cold. I shall take care of that. Nobody is cold with the North Wind.' 'I thought everybody was,' said Diamond. 'That is a great mistake. Most people make it, however. They are cold because they are not with the North Wind, but without it. ~ George MacDonald,

836:Christ is our righteousness, not that we should escape punishment, still less escape being righteous, but as the live potent creator of righteousness in us, so that we, with our wills receiving His spirit, shall like Him resist unto blood, striving against sin. ~ George MacDonald,

837:Faith is that which, knowing the Lord's will, goes and does it; or, not knowing it, stands and waits, content in ignorance as in knowledge, because God wills - neither pressing into the hidden future, nor careless of the knowledge which opens the path of action ~ George MacDonald,

838:It was foolish indeed - thus to run farther and farther from all who could help her, as if she had been seeking a fit spot for the goblin creature to eat her in at his leisure; but that is the way fear serves us: it always sides with the thing we are afraid of. ~ George MacDonald,

839:I've been a Danish prince, a Texas slave-dealer, an Arab sheik, a Cheyenne Dog Soldier, and a Yankee navy lieutenant in my time, among other things, and none of 'em was as hard to sustain as my lifetime's impersonation of a British officer and gentleman. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

840:Letty's first false step was here: she said to herself I can not , and did not. She lacked courage--a want in her case not much to be wondered at, but much to be deplored, for courage of the true sort is just as needful to the character of a woman as of a man. ~ George MacDonald,

841:The boy should enclose and keep, as his life, the old child at the heart of him, and never let it go. He must still, to be a right man, be his mother's darling, and more, his father's pride, and more. The child is not meant to die, but to be forever fresh born. ~ George MacDonald,

842:The more I work with the body, keeping my assumptions in a temporary state of reservation, the more I appreciate and sympathize with a given disease. The body no longer appears as a sick or irrational demon, but as a process with its own inner logic and wisdom. ~ George MacDonald,

843:There is no water in oxygen, no water in hydrogen: it comes bubbling fresh from the imagination of the living God, rushing from under the great white throne of the glacier. The very thought of it makes one gasp with an elemental joy no metaphysician can analyse. ~ George MacDonald,

844:These love self, not life, and self is but the shadow of life. When it is taken for life itself, and set as the man’s center, it becomes a live death in the man, a devil he worships as his God: the worm of the death eternal he clasps to his bosom as his one joy. ~ George MacDonald,

845:For others, as for ourselves, we must trust him. If we could thoroughly understand anything, that would be enough to prove it undivine; and that which is but one step beyond our understanding must be in some of its relations as mysterious as if it were a hundred. ~ George MacDonald,

846: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. ~ George MacDonald,

847:the guard house of the bloodiest valley in Britain. One is not surprised to learn that an early owner was boiled alive by impatient neighbours; there is a menace about the massive walls, about the rain-soaked hillside, about the dreary gurgle of the river. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

848:But in the meantime, you must be content, I say, to be misunderstood for a while. We are all very anxious to be understood, and it is very hard not to be. But there is one thing much more necessary." "What is that, grandmother?" "To understand other people. ~ George MacDonald,

849:But there is a light that goes deeper than the will, a light that lights up the darkness behind it: that light can change your will, can make it truly yours and not another's - not the Shadow's. Into the created can pour itself the creating will, and so redeem it! ~ George MacDonald,

850:I must accept my fate! But how was life to be lived in a world of which I had all the laws to learn? There would, however, be adventure! that held consolation; and whether I found my way home or not, I should at least have the rare advantage of knowing two worlds! ~ George MacDonald,

851:It is not the high summer alone that is God's. The winter also is His. And into His winter He came to visit us. And all man's winters are His - the winter of our poverty, the winter of our sorrow, the winter of our unhappiness - even 'the winter of our discontent. ~ George MacDonald,

852:One thing the war ensured; whatever treaties might be made and truces agreed at the top, however often a state of official peace existed, there was never again to be quiet along the frontier while England and Scotland remained politically separate countries. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

853:The whole history of the Christian life is a series of resurrections. . . . Every time we find our hearts are troubled, that we are not rejoicing in God, a resurrection must follow; a resurrection out of the night of troubled thought into the gladness of the truth. ~ George MacDonald,

854:To deny oneself is to act no more from the standing ground of self.... No longing after the praise of men influence a single throb of the heart. Right deeds, and not the judgment thereupon; true words, and not what reception they may have, shall be our concern. ~ George MacDonald,

855:Understanding is the reward of obedience. Obedience is the key to every door. I am perplexed at the stupidity of the ordinary religious being. In the most practical of all matters he will talk and speculate and try to feel, but he will not set himself to do. ~ George MacDonald,

856:Why, you don't seem even to know the good of the things you are constantly doing. Now don't mistake me. I don't mean you are good for doing them. It is a good thing to eat your breakfast, but you don't fancy it's very good of you to do it. The thing is good, not you. ~ George MacDonald,

857:she had now no inclination to trouble Gibbie's heart with what men call the plan of salvation. It was enough to her to find that he followed her Master. Being in the light she understood the light, and had no need of system, either true or false, to explain it to her. ~ George MacDonald,

858:You must give him time,' said her grandmother;'and you must be content not to be believed for a while. It is very hard to bear; but I have had to bear it, and shall have to bear it yet. I will take care of what Curdie thinks of you in the end. You must let him go now. ~ George MacDonald,

859:Not to be believed does not at all agree with princesses: for a real princess cannot tell a lie. So all the afternoon she did not speak a word. Only when the nurse spoke to her, she answered her, for a real princess is never rude—even when she does well to be offended. ~ George MacDonald,

860:It was not, she said, confessing to her husband her sleeplessness, that she was afraid. She was only "keepin' them company, an' haudin' the yett open," she said. The latter phrase was her picture-periphrase for praying. She never said she prayed; she held the gate open. ~ George MacDonald,

861:Then the Old Man of the Earth stooped over the floor of the cave, raised a huge stone from it, and left it leaning. It disclosed a great hole that went plumb-down. "That is the way," he said. "But there are no stairs." "You must throw yourself in. There is no other way. ~ George MacDonald,

862:The poetry of life, the inner side of nature, rises near the surface to meet the eyes of the man who makes. The advantage gained by the carpenter of Nazareth at his bench is the inheritance of every workman as he imitates his maker in the divine - that is, honest - work. ~ George MacDonald,

863:The revival of ancient benefits, a new spring-time of old flowers, and the fresh quickening of one's own soul, are the spiritual wages of every spiritual service. In giving, a man receives more than he gives, and the MORE is in proportion to the worth of the thing given. ~ George MacDonald,

864:O, lack and doubt and fear can only come Because of plenty, confidence, and love! They are the shadow-forms about their feet, Because they are not perfect crystal-clear To the all-searching sun in which they live. Dread of its loss is Beauty’s certain seal! ~ George MacDonald,

865:When a heart hears - and believes, or half believes - that it is not the child of God by origin, from the first of its being, but may possibly be adopted into His family, its love sinks at once in a cold faint: where is its own father, and who is this that would adopt it? ~ George MacDonald,

866:The very fact that anything can die, implies the existence of something that cannot die; which must either take to itself another form, as when the seed that is sown dies, and arises again; or, in conscious existence, may, perhaps, continue to lead a purely spiritual life. ~ George MacDonald,

867:. . . he would perhaps have known that to try too hard to make people good, is one way to make them worse; that the only way to make them good is to be good -- remembering well the beam and the mote; that the time for speaking comes rarely, the time for being never departs. ~ George MacDonald,

868:However strange it may well seem, to do one's duty will make anyone conceited who only does it sometimes. Those who do it always would as soon think of being conceited of eating their dinner as of doing their duty. What honest boy would pride himself on not picking pockets? ~ George MacDonald,

869:I cannot be perfect; it is hopeless; and He does not expect it.”—It would be more honest if he said, “I do not want to be perfect: I am content to be saved.” Such as he do not care for being perfect as their Father in heaven is perfect, but for being what they called saved. ~ George MacDonald,

870:Suppose you didn't know him, would that make any difference?' 'No,' said Willie, after thinking a little. 'Other people would know him if I didn't.' 'Yes, and if nobody knew him, God would know him, and anybody God has thought worth making, it's an honor to do anything for. ~ George MacDonald,

871:Yet I know that good is coming to me—that good is always coming; though few have at all times the simplicity and the courage to believe it. What we call evil, is the only and best shape, which, for the person and his condition at the time, could be assumed by the best good. ~ George MacDonald,

872:How many who love never come nearer than to behold each other as in a mirror; seem to know and yet never know the inward life; never enter the other soul; and part at last, with but the vaguest notion of the universe on the borders of which they have been hovering for years? ~ George MacDonald,

873:she might have seen that she was not bound to measure God by the way her father talked to him—that the form of the prayer had to do with her father, not immediately with God—that God might be altogether adorable, notwithstanding the prayers of all heathens and of all saints. ~ George MacDonald,

874:Of all teachings that which presents a far distant God is the nearest to absurdity. Either there is none, or he is nearer to every one of us than our nearest consciousness of self. An unapproachable divinity is the veriest of monsters, the most horrible of human imaginations. ~ George MacDonald,

875:The necessary unlikeness between the creator and the created holds within it the equally necessary likeness of the thing made to him who makes it, and so of the work of the made to the work of the maker... The imagination of man is made in the image of the imagination of God. ~ George MacDonald,

876:Annie said her prayers, read her Bible, and tried not to forget God. Ah! could she only have known that God never forgot her, whether she forgot him or not, giving her sleep in her dreary garret, gladness even in Murdoch Malison's school-room, and the light of life everywhere! ~ George MacDonald,

877:The world...is full of resurrections... Every night that folds us up in darkness is a death; and those of you that have been out early, and have seen the first of the dawn, will know it - the day rises out of the night like a being that has burst its tomb and escaped into life. ~ George MacDonald,

878:We weep for gladness, weep for grief; The tears they are the same; We sigh for longing, and relief; The sighs have but one name, And mingled in the dying strife, Are moans that are not sad The pangs of death are throbs of life, Its sighs are sometimes glad. ~ George MacDonald,

879:Difficulties It often seems to those in earnest about the right as if all things conspired to prevent their progress. This, of course, is but an appearance, arising in part from this, that the pilgrim must be headed back from the side-paths into which he is constantly wandering. ~ George MacDonald,

880:How can beauty and ugliness dwell so near? Even with her altered complexion and her face of dislike; disenchanted of the belief that clung around her; known for a living, walking sepulchre, faithless, deluding, traitorous; I felt notwithstanding all this, that she was beautiful. ~ George MacDonald,

881:That man is perfect in faith who can come to God in the utter dearth of his feelings and his desires, without a glow or an aspiration, with the weight of low thoughts, failures, neglects, and wandering forgetfulness, and say to him, "Thou art my refuge, because thou art my home. ~ George MacDonald,

882:That man is perfect in faith who can come to God in the utter dearth of his feelings and his desires, without a glow or an aspiration, with the weight of low thoughts, failures, neglects, and wandering forgetfulness, and say to him, 'Thou art my refuge, because thou art my home. ~ George MacDonald,

883:I looked, and saw: before her, cast from an unseen heavenly mirror, stood the reflection of herself, and beside it a form of splendent beauty. She trembled, and sank again on the floor helpless. She knew the one that God had intended her to be, the other that she had made herself. ~ George MacDonald,

884:Then the Old Man of the Earth stooped over the floor of the cave, raised a huge stone from it, and left it leaning. It disclosed a great hole that went plumb-down. "That is the way," he said. "But there are no stairs." "You must throw yourself in. There is no other way. ~ George MacDonald,

885:I thank thee, Lord, for forgiving me, but I prefer staying in the darkness: forgive me that too.”—“No; that cannot be. The one thing that cannot be forgiven is the sin of choosing to be evil, of refusing deliverance. It is impossible to forgive that. It would be to take part in it. ~ George MacDonald,

886:There is a great deal more to be got out of things than is generally got out of them, whether the thing be a chapter of the Bible or a yellow turnip, and the marvel is that those who use the most material should so often be those that show the least result in strength or character. ~ George MacDonald,

887:It is the vile falsehood and miserable unreality of Christians, their faithlessness to their Master, their love of their own wretched sects, their worldliness and unchristianity, their talking and not doing, that has to answer, I suspect, for the greater part of our present atheism. ~ George MacDonald,

888:but he takes our sins on himself, and while he drives them out of us with a whip of scorpions he will yet make them work his ends. He defeats our sins, makes them prisoners, forces them into the service of good, chains them like galley-slaves to the rowing-benches of the gospel-ship, ~ George MacDonald,

889: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. I learned that he that will be a hero, will barely be a man; that he that will be nothing but a doer of his work, is sure of his manhood. ~ George MacDonald,

890:It would hardly be kindness if he didn't punish sin, not to use every means to put the evil thing far from us. Whatever may be meant by the place of misery Mr. Sutherland, it's only another form of his love. Love shining through the fogs of evil, and thus made to look very different. ~ George MacDonald,

891:No One Loves Because He Sees Why Where a man does not love, the not-loving must seem rational. For no one loves because he sees why, but because he loves. No human reason can be given for the highest necessity of divinely created existence. For reasons are always from above downward. ~ George MacDonald,

892: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. ~ George MacDonald,

893:Poverty will not make a man worthless—he may be worth a great deal more when he is poor than he was when he was rich; but dishonesty goes very far indeed to make a man of no value—a thing to be thrown out in the dust-hole of the creation, like a bit of a broken basin, or a dirty rag. ~ George MacDonald,

894:The righteousness that makes a man visit the sins of a father upon his children, is the righteousness of a devil, not the righteousness of God. When God visits the sins of a father on his children, it is to deliver the child from his own sins through yielding to inherited temptation. ~ George MacDonald,

895:The love of our neighbor is the only door out of the dungeon of self, where we mope and mow, striking sparks, and rubbing phosphorescences out of the walls, and blowing our own breath in our own nostrils, instead of issuing to the fair sunlight of God, the sweet winds of the universe. ~ George MacDonald,

896:How old are you?" "Ten," answered Tangle. "You don't look like it," said the lady. "How old are you, please?" returned Tangle. "Thousands of years old," answered the lady. "You don't look like it," said Tangle. "Don't I? I think I do. Don't you see how beautiful I am! ~ George MacDonald,

897:Suppose you didn't know him, would that make any difference?' 'No,' said Willie, after thinking a little. 'Other people would know him if I didn't.' 'Yes, and if nobody knew him, God would know him, and anybody God has thought worth making, it's an honor to do anything for. ~ George MacDonald,

898:When you have got quite alone, sit down and be lonely…fold your hands in your lap, and be still. Do not try to think anything… by and by, it may be, you will begin to know something of nature. Nature will soon speak to you, or not until, as Henri Vaughn says, some veil be broken in you ~ George MacDonald,

899:Better to sit at the waters birth, Than a sea of waves to win; To live in the love that floweth forth, Than the love that cometh in. Be thy a well of love, my child, Flowing, and free, and sure; For a cistern of love, though undefiled, Keeps not the spirit pure. ~ George MacDonald,

900:And then peace broke out. It seems surprising, in view of what had been and what would one day follow, but there now began an era of tranquillity between England and Scotland, and consequently along the Border, which was to endure almost uninterrupted for nearly two hundred years. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

901:I'm as religious as the next man - which is to say I'll keep in with the local parson for form's sake and read the lessons on feast-days because my tenants expect it, but I've never been fool enough to confuse religion with belief in God. That's where so many clergymen... go wrong ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

902:… leaning with her back bowed into the back of the chair, her head hanging down and her hands in her lap, very miserable as she would say herself, not even knowing what she would like, except to go out and get very wet, catch a particularly nice cold and have to go to bed and take gruel. ~ George MacDonald,

903:The world is like a picture with a golden background and we the figures in that picture. Until you step off the plane of the picture into the large dimensions of death you cannot see the gold. But we have reminders of it."-George MacDonald *Gold being Heaven *Picture being life ~ George MacDonald,

904:he was always too much of a man to want to look like a man by imitating men. That is unmanly. A boy who wants to look like a man is not a manly boy, and men do not care for his company. A true boy is always welcome to a true man, but a would-be man is better on the other side of the wall. ~ George MacDonald,

905: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. ~ George MacDonald,

906:Whatever belonging to the region of thought and feeling is uttered in words, is of necessity uttered imperfectly. For thought and feeling are infinite, and human speech, although far-reaching in scope, and marvelous in delicacy, can embody them after all but approximately and suggestively. ~ George MacDonald,

907:England had another line of defence, in the establishment of numbers of “slewdogges”48 for the tracking down of raiders; money was raised for their maintenance, and from the number of them stolen in raids it is obvious that they were highly prized. They could be worth as much as £10. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

908:The cessation of labor affords but the necessary occasion; makes it possible, as it were, for the occupant of an outlying station in the wilderness to return to his Father’s house for fresh supplies…. The child-soul goes home at night, and returns in the morning to the labors of the school. ~ George MacDonald,

909:Truth is a very different thing from fact; it is the loving contact of the soul with spiritual fact, vital and potent. It does not work in the soul independently of all faculty or qualification there for setting it forth or defending it. Truth in the inward parts is a power, not an opinion. ~ George MacDonald,

910:Whatever belonging to the region of thought and feeling is uttered in words, is of necessity uttered imperfectly. For thought and feeling are infinite, and human speech, although far-reaching in scope, and marvellous in delicacy, can embody them after all but approximately and suggestively. ~ George MacDonald,

911:When the Lord is known as the heart of every joy, as well as the refuge from every sorrow, then the altar will be known for what it is—an ecclesiastical antique. The Father permitted but never ordained sacrifice; in tenderness to his children he ordered the ways of their unbelieving belief. ~ George MacDonald,

912:George Macdonald said, 'If you knew what God knows about death you would clap your listless hands', but instead I find old people in North America just buying this whole youth obsession. I think growing older is a wonderful privilege. I want to learn to glorify God in every stage of my life. ~ Elisabeth Elliot,

913:If anything she was a shade too plump, but she knew the ninety-seven ways of making love that the Hindus are supposed to set much store by―though mind you, it is all nonsense, for the seventy-fourth position turns out to be the same as the seventy-third, but with your fingers crossed. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

914:Or, if needing years to wake thee From thy slumbrous solitudes, Come, sleep-walking, and betake thee To 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. ~ George MacDonald,

915:We are all very anxious to be understood, and it is very hard not to be. But there is one thing much more necessary.' What is that, grandmother?' To understand other people.' Yes, grandmother. I must be fair - for if I'm not fair to other people, I'm not worth being understood myself. I see. ~ George MacDonald,

916:Yet I know that good is coming to me—that good is always coming; though few have at all times the simplicity and the courage to believe it. What we call evil, is the only and best shape, which, for the person and his condition at the time, could be assumed by the best good. And so, FAREWELL. ~ George MacDonald,

917:For repose is not the end of education; its end is a noble unrest, an ever renewed awaking from the dead, a ceaseless questioning of the past for the interpretation of the future, an urging on of the motions of life, which had better far be accelerated into fever, than retarded into lethargy. ~ George MacDonald,

918:On Good Friday Jesus died But rose again at Eastertide.....Lord, teach us to understand that your Son died to save us not from suffering but from ourselves, not from injustice...but from being unjust. He died that we might live - but live as he lives, by dying as he died who died to himself. ~ George MacDonald,

919:Except the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ Jesus make a man sick of his opinions, he may hold them to doomsday for me; for no opinion, I repeat is Christianity, and no preaching of any plan of salvation is the preaching of the glorious gospel of the living God. ~ George MacDonald,

920:Instead of asking yourself whether you believe or not, ask yourself whether you have this day done one thing because He said, Do it, or once abstained because He said, Do not do it. It is simply absurd to say you believe, or even want to believe, in Him, if you do not do anything He tells you. ~ George MacDonald,

921:The heavens and the earth are around us that it may be possible for us to speak of the unseen by the seen, for the outermost husk of creation has correspondence with the deepest things of the Creator. He is not a God that hides himself, but a God who made all that he might reveal himself. ~ George MacDonald,

922:It is not the high summer alone that is God’s. The winter also is His. And into His winter He came to visit us. And all man’s winters are His – the winter of our poverty, the winter of our sorrow, the winter of our unhappiness – even “the winter of our discontent.” Adela Cathcart, vol. 1, ch. 2 ~ George MacDonald,

923:One who not merely beholds the outward shows of things, but catches a glimpse of the soul that looks out of them, whose garment and revelation they are-if he be such, I say, he will stand, for more than a moment, speechless with something akin to that which made the morning stars sing together. ~ George MacDonald,

924:the idyll was marred by the appearance round the southern headland of a small, waspish-looking vessel, standing slowly out on a course parallel to our own. It happened that I saw her first, and drew my commander’s attention to her with a sailor-like hail of: “Jesus! Look at that!” Spring ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

925:To inquire into what God has made is the main function of the imagination. It is aroused by facts, is nourished by facts; seeks for higher and yet higher laws in those facts; but refuses to regard science as the sole interpreter of nature, or the laws of science as the only region of discovery. ~ George MacDonald,

926:Instead of asking yourself whether you believe or not, ask yourself whether you have, this day, done one thing because He said, Do it! or once abstained because He said, Do not do it! It is simply absurd to say you believe, or even want to believe, in Him, if you do not do anything He tells you. ~ George MacDonald,

927:Little White Lily. This poem (George Macdonald, 1828-) finds a place in this volume because, as a child, I loved it. It completely filled my heart, and has made every member of the lily family dear to me. George Macdonald's charming book, "At the Back of the North Wind," also was my wonder and delight. ~ Anonymous,

928:Set any one to talk about himself, instead of about other people, and you will have a seam of the precious mental metal opened up to you at once; only ore, most likely, that needs much smelting and refining; or it may be, not gold at all, but a metal which your mental alchemy may turn into gold. ~ George MacDonald,

929:So there was but one way of setting matters right, as Mr Malison had generosity enough left in him to perceive; and that was, to make a friend of his adversary. Indeed there is that in the depths of every human breast which makes a reconciliation the only victory that can give true satisfaction. ~ George MacDonald,

930:The man who recognizes the truth of any human relation and neglects the duty involved is not a true man.... A man may be aware of the highest truths of many things, and yet not be a true man, inasmuch as the essentials of manhood are not his aim: he has not come into the flower of his own being. ~ George MacDonald,

931: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. ~ George MacDonald,

932:To the dim and bewildered vision of humanity, God's care is more evident in some instances than in others; and upon such instances men seize, and call them providences. It is well that they can; but it would be gloriously better if they could believe that the whole matter is one grand providence. ~ George MacDonald,

933:When I can no more stir my soul to move, and life is but the ashes of a fire; when I can but remember that my heart once used to live and love, long and aspire- O, be thou then the first, the one thou art; be thou the calling, before all answering love, and in me wake hope, fear, boundless desire. ~ George MacDonald,

934:If it were not for the outside world, we would have no inside world to understand things by. Least of all could we understand God without these millions of sights and sounds and scents and motions, weaving their endless harmonies. They come out of His heart to let us know a little of what is in it. ~ George MacDonald,

935:Impossibilities “I thank thee, Lord, for forgiving me, but I prefer staying in the darkness: forgive me that too.”—“No; that cannot be. The one thing that cannot be forgiven is the sin of choosing to be evil, of refusing deliverance. It is impossible to forgive that. It would be to take part in it. ~ George MacDonald,

936:People are so ready to think themselves changed when it is only their mood that is changed. Those who are good-tempered because it is a fine day will be ill-tempered when it rains: their selves are just the same both days; only in one case the fine weather has got into them, in the other the rainy. ~ George MacDonald,

937:Right gladly would He free them from their misery, but He knows only one way: He will teach them to be like himself, meek and lowly, bearing with gladness the yoke of His Father's will. This in the one, the only right, the only possible way of freeing them from their sin, the cause of their unrest. ~ George MacDonald,

938:She alone is free who would make free; she loves not freedom who would enslave: she is herself a slave. Every life, every will, every heart that came within your ken, you have sought to subdue: you are the slave of every slave you have made--such a slave that you do not know it!--See your own self! ~ George MacDonald,

939:Foolish is the man, and there are many such men, who would rid himself or his fellows of discomfort by setting the world right, by waging war on the evils around him, while he neglects that integral part of the world where lies his business, his first business, namely, his own character and conduct. ~ George MacDonald,

940:How many things are there in the world in which the wisest of us can ill descry the hand of God! Who not knowing could read the lily in its bulb, the great oak in the pebble-like acorn? God’s beginnings do not look like his endings, but they are like; the oak is in the acorn, though we cannot see it. ~ George MacDonald,

941:The 1563 agreement between England and Scotland speaks of “lawfull Trodd with Horn and Hound, with Hue and Cry and all other accustomed manner of fresh pursuit”; according to Scott, this obliged the pursuer to carry a lighted turf on his lance-point, as earnest of open and peaceful intentions. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

942:We are all very anxious to be understood, and it is very hard not to be. But there is one thing much more necessary.' What is that, grandmother?' To understand other people.' Yes, grandmother. I must be fair - for if I'm not fair to other people, I'm not worth being understood myself. I see. ~ George MacDonald,

943:For when is the child the ideal child in our eyes and to our hearts? Is it not when with gentle hand he takes his father by the beard, and turns that father's face up to his brothers and sisters to kiss? when even the lovely selfishness of love-seeking has vanished, and the heart is absorbed in loving? ~ George MacDonald,

944:Had Job been Calvinist or Lutheran, the book of Job would have been very different. His perplexity would then have been—how God being just, could require of a man more than he could do, and punish him as if his sin were that of a perfect being who chose to do the evil of which he knew all the enormity. ~ George MacDonald,

945:It is not the cares of today, but the cares of tomorrow, that weigh a man down. For the needs of today we have corresponding strength given. For the morrow we are told to trust. It is not ours yet. It is when tomorrow's burden is added to the burden of today that the weight is more than a man can bear. ~ George MacDonald,

946: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. ~ George MacDonald,

947:There are women," returned my uncle, "some of them of the most admired, who are slaves to a demoniacal love of power. The very pleasure of their consciousness consists in the knowledge that they have power--not power to do things, but power to make other people do things." [Uncle; Flight of the Shadow] ~ George MacDonald,

948:What a horror will it not be to a vile man…when his eyes are opened to see himself as the pure see him, as God sees him! Imagine such a man waking all at once, not only to see the eyes of the universe fixed upon him with loathing astonishment, but to see himself at the same moment as those eyes see him. ~ George MacDonald,

949:Have you forgiven me?' I asked. 'How can I say I have, when I never had anything to forgive?' 'Well then, I must go unforgiven for I cannot forgive myself.' I said. 'O Mrs. Percivale! If you think how the world is flooded with forgiveness, you will just dip in your cup, and take what you want. ~ George MacDonald,

950:Good luck “You will be the better for it,” he returned. “I believe I’ve allus been the better for any trouble as ever I had to go through with. I couldn’t quite say the same for every bit of good luck I had; leastways, I consider trouble the best luck a man can have.” Annals of a Quiet Neighborhood, ch. 33 ~ George MacDonald,

951:Nor will God force any door to enter in. He may send a tempest about the house; the wind of His admonishment may burst doors and windows, yea, shake the house to its foundations; but not then, not so, will He enter. The door must be opened by the willing hand, ere the foot of Love will cross the threshold. ~ George MacDonald,

952:But in truth there was more expression in the flower than was yet in the face. The flower expressed what God was thinking of when He made it; the face, what the girl was thinking of her self. When she ceased thinking of herself, then, like the flower, she would show what God was thinking of when he made her. ~ George MacDonald,

953:Doubts are the messengers of the Living One to the honest. They are the first knock at our door of things that are not yet, but have to be, understood. . . . Doubts must precede every deeper assurance; for uncertainties are what we first see when we look into a region hitherto unknown, unexplored, unannexed. ~ George MacDonald,

954:For the absence of human companionship in bestial forms; the loss of green fields, free to her as to the winds of heaven, and of country sounds and odours; and an almost constant sense of oppression from the propinquity of one or another whom she had cause to fear, were speedily working sad effects upon her. ~ George MacDonald,

955:The good in a true book, he would say, is the best protection against what may not be so good in it; its wrong as well as its right may wake the conscience: the thoughts of a book accuse and excuse one another. In saying so, he took the true reader for granted; to an untrue reader the truth itself is untrue. ~ George MacDonald,

956:In after years when he remembered the enchanting dreams of his boyhood, instead of sighing after them as something gone for ever, he would say to himself, "what matter they are gone? In the heavenly kingdom my own mother is waiting me, fairer and stronger and real. I imagined the elves; God imagined my mother. ~ George MacDonald,

957:Where people know their work and do it, life has few blank spaces for boredom and they are seldom to be pitied. Where people have not yet found their work, they may be more pitied than those that beg their bread. When a man knows his work and will not do it, pity him more than one who is to be hanged tomorrow. ~ George MacDonald,

958:I am pretty sure that if she had been one of us, that is, one of his own, he would have taken sharper measures with her; but he said we must never attempt to treat other people's children as our own, for they are not our own. We did not love them enough, he said, to make severity safe either for them or for us. ~ George MacDonald,

959:I can no more than lift my weary eyes; Therefore I lift my weary eyes—no more. But my eyes pull my heart, and that, before 'Tis well awake, knocks where the conscience lies; Conscience runs quick to the spirit's hidden door: Straightway, from every sky-ward window, cries Up to the Father's listening ears arise. ~ George MacDonald,

960:To him who obeys, and thus opens the door of his heart to receive the eternal gift, God gives the Spirit of His Son, the Spirit of Himself, to be in him, and lead him to the understanding of all truth…. The true disciple shall thus always know what he ought to do, though not necessarily what another ought to do. ~ George MacDonald,

961:I wish I had [made that song]. No, I don't That would be to take it from somebody else. But it's mine for all that.' 'What makes it yours?' 'I love it so.' 'Does loving a thing make it yours?' 'I think so, Mother -- at least more than anything else can. . . . Love makes the only myness,' said Diamond. ~ George MacDonald,

962:So long as we have nothing to say to God, nothing to do with Him, save in the sunshine of the mind when we feel Him near us, we are poor creatures, willed upon, not willing…. And how in such a condition do we generally act? Do we sit mourning over the loss of feeling? Or worse, make frantic efforts to rouse them? ~ George MacDonald,

963: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. ~ George MacDonald,

964:I maun hae buiks. I wad get the newspapers whiles, but no aften, for they’re a sair loss o’ precious time. Ye see they tell ye things afore they’re sure, an’ ye hae to spen’ yer time the day readin’ what ye’ll hae to spen’ yer time the morn readin’ oot again; an’ ye may as weel bide till the thing’s sattled a wee. ~ George MacDonald,

965:On the credit side, there is a Border virtue which in the human scale should outweigh all the rest, and it is simply the ability to endure, unchanging. Perhaps the highest compliment that one can pay to the people of the Anglo-Scottish frontier is to remark that, in spite of everything, they are still there. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

966:the churchyard, in ruins, some of the people who used to pray there, go there still. they need help from each other to get their thinking done, and their feelings hatched, so they talk and sing together, and then, they say, the big thought floats out of their hearts like a great ship out of the river at high water. ~ George MacDonald,

967:Ye’re a scholar — that’s easy to see, for a’ ye’re sae plain spoken. It dis a body’s hert guid to hear a man ‘at un’erstan’s things say them plain oot i’ the tongue his mither taucht him. Sic a ane ‘ill gang straucht till’s makker, an’ fin’ a’thing there hame-like. Lord, I wuss minnisters wad speyk like ither fowk! ~ George MacDonald,

968:By all means tell people, when you are busy about something that must be done, that you cannot spare the time for them except they want of you something of yet more pressing necessity; but tell them, and do not get rid of them by the use of the instrument commonly called the cold shoulder. It is a wicked instrument. ~ George MacDonald,

969:Never tell a child ‘you have a soul. Teach him, you are a soul; you have a body.’ As we learn to think of things always in this order, that the body is but the temporary clothing of the soul, our views of death and the unbefittingness of customary mourning will approximate to those of Friends of earlier generations. ~ George MacDonald,

970:It may be an infinitely less evil to murder a man than to refuse to forgive him. The former may be the act of a moment of passion: the latter is the heart’s choice. It is spiritual murder, the worst, to hate, to brood over the feeling that excludes, that, in our microcosm, kills the image, the idea of the hated. [13] ~ George MacDonald,

971:He began to wonder whether even an all-mighty and all-good God would be able to contrive such a world as no somebody in it would ever complain of. What if he had plans too large for the vision of men to take in, and they were uncomfortable to their own blame, because, not seeing them, they would trust him for nothing? ~ George MacDonald,

972:Self will come to life even in the slaying of self; but there is ever something deeper and stronger than it, which will emerge at last from the unknown abysses of the soul: will it be as a solemn gloom, burning with eyes? or a clear morning after the rain? or a smiling child, that finds itself nowhere, and everywhere? ~ George MacDonald,

973:Show me the person ready to step from any, let it be the narrowest, sect of Christian Pharisees into a freer and holier air, and I shall look to find in that person the one of that sect who, in the midst of its darkness and selfish worldliness, mistaken for holiness, has been living a life more obedient than the rest. ~ George MacDonald,

974:There is a certain amount of the queenly element in every woman, so that she cannot feel perfectly at ease without something to govern, however small and however troublesome her queendom may be. At my fathers, I had every ministration and all comforts, but no responsibilities and no rule. I could not help feeling idle. ~ George MacDonald,

975:Do you ask, “What is faith in Him?” I answer, The leaving of your way, your objects, your self, and the taking of His and Him; the leaving of your trust in men, in money, in opinion, in character, in atonement itself, and doing as He tells you. I can find no words strong enough to serve for the weight of this obedience. ~ George MacDonald,

976:He had fallen in love with her almost, already; for her anger made her more charming than any one else had ever beheld her; and, as far as he could see, which certainly was not far, she had not a single fault about her, except, of course, that she had not any gravity. No prince, however, would judge of a princess by weight. ~ George MacDonald,

977:Seek not that your sons and your daughters should not see visions, should not dream dreams; seek that they should see true visions, that they should dream noble dreams. Such out-going of the imagination is one with aspiration, and will do more to elevate above what is low and vile than all possible inculcations of morality. ~ George MacDonald,

978:There is a childhood into which we have to grow, just as there is a childhood which we must leave behind; a childlikeness which is the highest gain of humanity, and a childishness from which but few of those who are counted the wisest among men, have freed themselves in their imagined progress towards the reality of things. ~ George MacDonald,

979:You are a sorry creature, Flashman. I have failed in you. But even to you I must say, this is not the end. You cannot continue here, but you are young, Flashman, and there is time yet. Though your sins be as red as crimson, yet shall they be as white as snow. You have fallen very low, but you can be raised up again … ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

980:Those Christians who are very strict in their observances, think a good deal more of the Sabbath than of man, a great deal more of the Bible than of the truth, and ten times more of their creed than of the will of God. Of course, if they heard anyone utter such words as I have just written, they would say he was and atheist. ~ George MacDonald,

981: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. ~ George MacDonald,

982:We must remember that God is not occupied with a grand toy of worlds and suns and planets, of attractions and repulsions, of agglomerations and crystallizations, of forces and waves; that these but constitute a portion of his workshops and tools for the bringing out of righteous men and women to fill his house of love withal. ~ George MacDonald,

983:If you turn your face to the Sun, my boy, your soul will, when you come to die, feel like an autumn, with the golden fruits of the earth hanging in rich clusters ready to be gathered – not like a winter. You may feel ever so worn, but you will not feel withered. You will die in peace, hoping for the spring – and such a spring! ~ George MacDonald,

984:O Lord, I have been talking to the people; Thought's wheels have round me whirled a fiery zone And the recoil of my word's airy ripple My heart unheedful has puffed up and blown. Therefore I cast myself before thee prone: Lay cool hands on my burning brain and press From my weak heart the swelling emptiness. ~ George MacDonald,

985:it is so silly of people to fancy that old age means crookedness and witheredness and feebleness and sticks and spectacles and rheumatism and forgetfulness! It is so silly! Old age has nothing whatever to do with all that. The right old age means strength and beauty and mirth and courage and clear eyes and strong painless limbs. ~ George MacDonald,

986:Spiritual Murder It may be an infinitely less evil to murder a man than to refuse to forgive him. The former may be the act of a moment of passion: the latter is the heart’s choice. It is spiritual murder, the worst, to hate, to brood over the feeling that excludes, that, in our microcosm, kills the image, the idea of the hated. ~ George MacDonald,

987:There are many, doubtless, who have not yet got farther in love than their own family; but there are others who have learned that for the true heart there is neither Frenchman nor Englishman, neither Jew nor Greek, neither white nor black—only the sons and daughters of God, only the brothers and sisters of the one elder brother. ~ George MacDonald,

988:(Malcolm) A library cannot be made all at once, any more than a house or a nation or a tree: they must all take time to grow, and so must a library.... (Lady Florimel) You could get somebody who knew more about them (the books) to buy them for you. (Malcolm) I would as soon think of getting somebody to eat my dinner for me. ~ George MacDonald,

989:the Borderers regarded reiving as legitimate (which is true), but that they held murder to be a crime, and consequently were reluctant to commit it—except in the heat of action or when covered by the virtual absolution of deadly feud. It is rather like saying that a heavy drinker, in his sober moments, is an abstemious man. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

990:Thou wouldst not have thy man crushed back to clay; It must be, God, thou hast strength to give To him that fain would do what thou dost say; Else how shall any soul repentant live, Old griefs and new fears hurrying on dismay? Let pain be what thou wilt, kind and degree, Only in pain calm thou my heart with thee. ~ George MacDonald,

991:Why are all reflections lovelier than what we call reality? -- not so grand or so strong, it may be, but always lovelier? Fair as is the gliding sloop on the shining sea, the wavering, trembling, unresting sail below is fairer still...All mirrors are magic mirrors. The commonest room is a room in a poem when I turn to the glass... ~ George MacDonald,

992:...it is so silly of people to fancy that old age means crookedness and witheredness and feebleness and sticks and spectacles and rheumatism and forgetfulness! It is so silly! Old age has nothing whatever to do with all that. The right old age means strength and beauty and mirth and courage and clear eyes and strong painless limbs. ~ George MacDonald,

993:On occasion they were cut down in cold blood or hanged on the spot; in the saying of the Border, which has passed into the language, they had been taken “red-hand”, which was “in the deede doinge”, and the law was not likely to call a trod-follower to account if his rage got the better of him and he despatched a reiver out of ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

994:That's a poet.' 'I thought you said it was a bo-at.' 'Stupid pet! Don't you know what a poet it?' 'Why, a thing to sail on the water in.' 'Well, perhaps you're not so far wrong. Some poets do carry people over the sea....' ... 'A poet is a man who is glad of something, and tries to make other people glad of it too. ~ George MacDonald,

995:I knew now, that it is by loving, and not by being loved, that one can come nearest the soul of another; yea, that, where two love, it is the loving of each other, and not the being loved by each other, that originates and perfects and assures their blessedness. I knew that love gives to him that loveth, power over any soul beloved... ~ George MacDonald,

996:The Lord never came to deliver men from the consequences of their sins while yet those sins remained...Yet men, loving their sins and feeling nothing of their dread hatefulness, have, consistent with their low condition, constantly taken this word concerning the Lord to mean that he came to save them from the punishment of their sins. ~ George MacDonald,

997:...I am still librarian in your house, for I never was dismissed, and never gave up the office. Now I am librarian here as well.' 'But you have just told me you were sexton here!' 'So I am. It is much the same profession. Except you are a true sexton, books are but dead bodies to you, and a library nothing but a catacomb! ~ George MacDonald,

998:It is one thing to believe in a God; it is quite another to believe in God! Every time we grumble at our fate, every time we are displeased, hurt, resentful at this or that which comes to us, every time we do not receive the suffering sent us, "with both hands," as William Law says, we are of the same spirit with this half-crazy woman. ~ George MacDonald,

999:Hundreds of hopeless waves rushed constantly shorewards, falling exhausted upon a beach of great loose stones, that seemed to stretch miles and miles in both directions. There was nothing for the eye but mingling shades of gray; nothing for the ear but the rush of the coming, the roar of the breaking, and the moan of the retreating wave. ~ George MacDonald,

1000:If a writer's aim be logical conviction, he must spare no logical pains, not merely to be understood but to escape being misunderstood; but where his object is to move by suggestion, to cause to imagine, then let him assail the soul of his reader as the wind assails an aeolian harp. If there be music in my reader, I would gladly wake it. ~ George MacDonald,

1001:[94] Small Prayers In every request, heart and soul and mind ought to supply the low accompaniment, “Thy will be done”; but the making of any request brings us near to Him…. Anything large enough for a wish to light upon, is large enough to hang a prayer upon: the thought of Him to whom that prayer goes will purify and correct the desire. ~ George MacDonald,

1002:Because you don't see what can be done, you say God can do nothing—which is as much as to say there cannot be more within his scope than there is within yours! One thing is clear, that, if he saw no more than what lies within your ken, he could not be God. The very impossibility you see in the thing points to the region wherein God works. ~ George MacDonald,

1003:Home is ever so far away in the palm of your hand, and how to get there it is of no use to tell you. But you will get there; you must get there; you have to get there. Everybody who is not at home, has to go home. You thought you were at home where I found you: if that had been your home, you could not have left it. Nobody can leave home. ~ George MacDonald,

1004:With every morn my life afresh must break The crust of self, gathered about me fresh; That thy wind-spirit may rush in and shake The darkness out of me, and rend the mesh The spider-devils spin out of the flesh- Eager to net the soul before it wake, That it may slumberous lie, and listen to the snake. George MacDonald ~ George MacDonald,

1005: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 wind Over the stubble left behind. ~ George MacDonald,

1006:es tan tonta de las personas a imaginar que la vejez significa tortuosidad y witheredness y debilidad y palos y espectáculos y el reumatismo y el olvido! Es tan tonto! La vejez no tiene nada que ver con todo eso. La vejez derecho significa la fuerza y ​​la belleza y la alegría y el coraje y los ojos claros y fuertes extremidades sin dolor. ~ George MacDonald,

1007:What God may hereafter require of you, you must not give yourself the least trouble about. Everything He gives you to do, you must do as well as ever you can, and that is the best possible preparation for what He may want you to do next. If people would but do what they have to do, they would always find themselves ready for what came next. ~ George MacDonald,

1008:Perhaps his only vice was self-satisfaction--which few will admit to be a vice; remonstrance never reached him; to himself he was ever in the right, judging himself only by his sentiments and vague intents, never by his actions; that these had little correspondence never struck him; it had never even struck him that they ought to correspond. ~ George MacDonald,

1009:She did not know that she was wishing for nothing more, and something a little less, than the kingdom of heaven—the very thing she thought the laird and Cosmo so strange for troubling their heads about. If men's wishes are not always for what the kingdom of heaven would bring them, their miseries at least are all for the lack of that kingdom. ~ George MacDonald,

1010:For our Selves will always do pretty well if we don't pay them too much attention. 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. ~ George MacDonald,

1011:he was a man of his hands, and most were, he might decide to wait and plan for the day when he could raid the robbers in his turn, and get his revenge illegally with interest. Or he could decide on pursuit, across the frontier if necessary. This was a strictly legal, almost a hallowed process, known by the descriptive name of “hot trod”. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

1012:Trust the Oak,” said she; “trust the Oak, and the Elm, and the great Beech. Take care of the Birch, for though she is honest, she is too young not to be changeable. But shun the Ash and the Alder; for the Ash is an ogre,—you will know him by his thick fingers; and the Alder will smother you with her web of hair, if you let her near you at night. ~ George MacDonald,

1013:Now I want you to think that in life troubles will come, which seem as if they never would pass away. The night and storm look as if they would last forever; but the calm and the morning cannot be stayed; the storm in its very nature is transient. The effort of nature, as that of the human heart, ever is to return to its repose, for God is Peace. ~ George MacDonald,

1014:Thy will be done. I yield up everything. 'The life is more than meat' -- then more than health; 'The body more than raiment' -- then more than wealth; The hairs I made not, thou art numbering. Thou art my life--I the brook, thou the spring. Because thine eyes are open, I can see; Because thou art thyself, 'tis therefore I am me. ~ George MacDonald,

1015:God left the world unfinished for man to work his skill upon. He left the electricity still in the cloud, the oil still in the earth. How often we look upon God as our last and feeblest resource! We go to Him because we have nowhere else to go. And then we learn that the storms of life have driven us, not upon the rocks, but into the desired haven. ~ George MacDonald,

1016:My dear queen,” said he, “duplicity of any sort is exceedingly objectionable between married people of any rank, not to say kings and queens; and the most objectionable form duplicity can assume is that of punning.” MacDonald, George. The Light Princess: and Other Fairy Stories (Kindle Locations 193-195). Dancing Unicorn Books. Kindle Edition. ~ George MacDonald,

1017:Notwithstanding his ignorance of the lore of Christianity, Thomas Wingfold was, in regard to some things, gifted with what I am tempted to call a divine stupidity. Many of the distinctions and privileges after which men follow, and of the annoyances and slights over which they fume, were to the curate inappreciable: he did not and could not see them. ~ George MacDonald,

1018:Surely this youth will not serve our ends,' said I, 'for he weeps.' "The old woman smiled. 'Past tears are present strength,' said she. "'Oh!' said my brother, 'I saw you weep once over an eagle you shot.' "'That was because it was so like you, brother,' I replied; 'but indeed, this youth may have better cause for tears than that—I was wrong.' "'Wait ~ George MacDonald,

1019:He did not torture himself with vain attempts to hold his brain as a mirror to his heart, that he might read his heart there. The heart is deaf and dumb and blind, but it has more in it — more life and blessedness, more torture and death — than any poor knowledge-machine of a brain can understand, or even delude itself into the fancy of understanding. ~ George MacDonald,

1020:He may delay because it would not be safe to give us at once what we ask: we are not ready for it. To give ere we could truly receive, would be to destroy the very heart and hope of prayer, to cease to be our Father. The delay itself may work to bring us nearer to our help, to increase the desire, perfect the prayer, and ripen the receptive condition. ~ George MacDonald,

1021:Looking back over sixty-odd years, life is like a piece of string with knots in it, the knots being those moments that live in the mind forever, and the intervals being hazy, half-recalled times when I have a fair idea of what was happenng, in a general way, but cannot be sure of dates or places or even the exact order in which events took place. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

1022: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. ~ George MacDonald,

1023:He heard me through in silence, for it was a rule with him never to interrupt a narrator. He used to say, "You will generally get at more, and in a better fashion, if you let any narrative take its own devious course, without the interruption of requested explanations. By the time it is over, you will find the questions you wanted to ask mostly vanished. ~ George MacDonald,

1024:It is not at all a fit place for you," said Clementina. "Gently, my lady. It is a greater than thou that sets the bounds of my habitation. Perhaps He may give me a palace one day. But the Father has decreed for His children that they shall know the thing that is neither their ideal nor His. All in His time, my lady. He has much to teach us. ~ George MacDonald,

1025:counsel:--Go to the Lady of Sorrow, and `take with both hands'* what she will give you. Yonder lies her cottage. She is not in it now, but her door stands open, and there is bread and water on her table. Go in; sit down; eat of the bread; drink of the water; and wait there until she appear. Then ask counsel of her, for she is true, and her wisdom is great. ~ George MacDonald,

1026:Descubrí que la alegría era como la vida misma: no puede ser creada por ningún razonamiento. Luego aprendí que la mejor manera de manejar cierta clase de pensamientos dolorosos es atreverse a dejarlos obrar en su forma peor. Que se aposenten y roan el corazón hasta que se cansen y allí encontraremos que todavía queda un residuo de vida que no pueden matar. ~ George MacDonald,

1027:Most of them would have nothing to do with a caterpillar, except watch it through its changes; but when at length it came from its retirement with wings, all would immediately address it as Sister Butterfly, congratulating it on its metamorphosis--for which they used a word that meant something like REPENTANCE--and evidently regarding it as something sacred. ~ George MacDonald,

1028:Let me, if I may, be ever welcomed to my room in winter by a glowing hearth, in summer by a vase of flowers. If I may not, let me think how nice they would be and bury myself in my work. I do not think that the road to contentment lies in despising what we have not got. Let us acknowledge all good, all delight that the worlds holds, and be content without it. ~ George MacDonald,

1029:It is vain to think that any weariness, however caused, any burden, however slight, may be got rid of otherwise than by bowing the neck to the yoke of the Father's will. There can be no other rest for heart and soul than He has created. From every burden, from every anxiety, from all dread of shame or loss, even loss of love itself, that yoke will set us free. ~ George MacDonald,

1030:The face of the Son of God, who, instead of accepting the sacrifice of one of his creatures to satisfy his justice or support his dignity, gave himself utterly unto them, and therein to the Father by doing his lovely will; who suffered unto the death, not that men might not suffer, but that their suffering might be like his, and lead them up to his perfection. ~ George MacDonald,

1031:"But if God is so good as you represent Him, and if He knows all that we need, and better far than we do ourselves, why should it be necessary to ask Him for anything?" I answer, "What if He knows prayer to be the thing we need first and most? What if the main object in God's idea of prayer be the supplying of our great, our endless need - the need of Himself?" ~ George MacDonald,

1032: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. ~ George MacDonald,

1033:And both were more fortunate than Hecky Noble who, within a few nights of Mrs Hetherington’s widowhood, was a victim of that gay desperado, Dickie Armstrong of Dryhope,49 and his 100 jolly followers. Apart from reiving a herd of 200 head, and destroying nine houses, the raiders also burned alive Hecky’s son John, and his daughter-in-law, who was pregnant. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

1034:Ere long, I learned that it was not myself, but only my shadow, that I had lost. 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. I learned that he that will be a hero, will barely be a man; that he that will be nothing but a doer of his work, is sure of his manhood. ~ George MacDonald,

1035:Every one, as you ought to know, has a beast-self—and a bird-self, and a stupid fish-self, ay, and a creeping serpent-self too—which it takes a deal of crushing to kill! In truth he has also a tree-self and a crystal-self, and I don’t know how many selves more—all to get into harmony. You can tell what sort a man is by his creature that comes oftenest to the front. ~ George MacDonald,

1036:I Have been asked to tell you about the back of the north wind. An old Greek writer mentions a people who lived there, and were so comfortable that they could not bear it any longer, and drowned themselves. My story is not the same as his. I do not think Herodotus had got the right account of the place. I am going to tell you how it fared with a boy who went there. ~ George MacDonald,

1037:What a folly is it now," he instantly resumed, leaving the general and attacking a particular, "to think to make people good by promises and threats--promises of a heaven that would bore the dullest among them to death, and threats of a hell the very idea of which, if only half conceived, would be enough to paralyse every nerve of healthy action in the human system! ~ George MacDonald,

1038:a man may be haunted with doubts, and only grow thereby in faith. Doubts are the messengers of the Living One to the honest. They are the first knock at our door of things that are not yet, but have to be, understood…. Doubt must precede every deeper assurance; for uncertainties are what we first see when we look into a region hitherto unknown, unexplored, unannexed. ~ George MacDonald,

1039:but he had a great respect for money, and much overrated its value as a means of doing even what he called good: religious people generally do -- with a most unchristian dulness. We are not told that the Master made the smallest use of money for his end. When he paid the temple-rate, he did it to avoid giving offence; and he defended the woman who divinely wasted it. ~ George MacDonald,

1040:Each is but a means to an end; in the perfected end we find the intent, and there God — not in the laws themselves, except as his means of revealing himself. For that same reason, human science cannot discover God. For human science is but the backward undoing of the tapestry-web of God's science, it works with its back to him, and is always leaving him — his intent. ~ George MacDonald,

1041:As in all sweetest music, a tinge of sadness was in every note. Nor do we know how much of the pleasures even of life we owe to the intermingled sorrows. Joy cannot unfold the deepest truths, although deepest truth must be deepest joy. Cometh white-robed Sorrow, stooping and wan, and flingeth wide the doors she may not enter. Almost we linger with Sorrow for very love. ~ George MacDonald,

1042:It has been well said that no man ever sank under the burden of the day. It is, when tomorrow's burden is added to the burden of today, that the weight is more than a man can bear. Never load yourselves so, my friends. If you find yourselves so loaded, at least remember this: it is your own doing, not God's. He begs you to leave the future to Him, and mind the present. ~ George MacDonald,

1043:He lay back unfazed, in a confidence unknown to me. “The Holy Spirit,” he whispered with the patience of a sage, “gives us time to make fools of ourselves, so we will long to see with Jesus’s eyes.” He imitated a blind person suddenly seeing. His words reminded me of George MacDonald’s. “This is how we learn. As we do, we see people, even the Romans, with new eyes.” “But ~ C Baxter Kruger,

1044:Nobody can be a real princess--do not imagine you have yet been anything more than a mock one--until she is a princess over herself, that is, until, when she finds herself unwilling to do the thing that is right, she makes herself do it. So long as any mood she is in makes her do the thing she will be sorry for when that mood is over, she is a slave, and not a princess. ~ George MacDonald,

1045:For the bliss of the animals lies in this, that, on their lower level, they shadow the bliss of those -- few at any moment on the earth -- who do not "look before and after, and pine for what is not," but live in the holy carelessness of the eternal now. Gibbie by no means belonged to the higher order, was as yet, indeed, not much better than a very blessed little animal. ~ George MacDonald,

1046:Humble mistake will not hurt us: the truth is there, and the Lord will see that we come to know it. We may think we know it when we have scarce a glimpse of it; but the error of a true heart will not be allowed to ruin it. Certainly that heart would not have mistaken the truth except for the untruth yet remaining in it; but he who casts out devils will cast out that devil. ~ George MacDonald,

1047: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. ~ George MacDonald,

1048:Here I should like to remark, for the sake of princes and princesses in general, that it is a low and contemptible thing to refuse to confess a fault, or even an error. If a true princess has done wrong, she is always uneasy until she has had an opportunity of throwing the wrongness away from her by saying: 'I did it; and I wish I had not; and I am sorry for having done it. ~ George MacDonald,

1049:Until you repent and believe afresh, believe in a nobler Christ, namely the Christ revealed by himself, and not the muffled form of something vaguely human and certainly not all divine, which the false interpretations of men have substituted for him, you will be, as, I repeat, you are, the main reason why faith is so scanty in the earth, and the enemy comes in like a flood. ~ George MacDonald,

1050:Now I knew that life and truth were one; that life mere and pure is in itself bliss; that where being is not bliss, it is not life, but life-in-death. Every inspiration of the dark wind that blew where it listed went out a sigh of thanksgiving. At last I was! I lived, and nothing could touch my life! My darling walked beside me, and we were on our way home to see the Father! ~ George MacDonald,

1051:On a summer morning she woke to a sense of returning health. She had been lying like a waste shore, at low spring-tide, covered with dry seaweeds, withered jelly-fishes, and a multitudinous life that gasped for the ocean: at last the cook washing throb of the great sea of bliss, whose fountain is the heart of God, had stolen upon her consciousness, and she knew that she lived. ~ George MacDonald,

1052:No man can order his life, for it comes flowing over him from behind. But if it lay before us, and we could watch its current approaching from a long distance, what could we do with it before it had reached the now? In like wise a man thinks foolishly who imagines he could have done this and that with his own character and development, if he had but known this and that in time. ~ George MacDonald,

1053:But I never just quite liked that ryhme.' 'Why not, child?' 'Because it seems to say one's as good as another, or two new ones are better than one that's lost. . . . Somehow, when once you've looked into anybody's eyes, right deep down into them, I mean, nobody will do for that one any more. Nobody, ever so beautiful or so good, will make up for that one going out of sight. ~ George MacDonald,

1054:[God desires] not that He may say to them, "Look how mighty I am, and go down upon your knees and worship," for power alone was never yet worthy of prayer; but that He may say thus: "Look, my children, you will never be strong but with my strength. I have no other to give you. And that you can get only by trusting in me. I can not give it you any other way. There is no other way." ~ George MacDonald,

1055:The light of our life, our sole, eternal, and infinite joy, is simply God - God - God - nothing but God, and all His creatures in Him. He is all in all, and the children of the kingdom know it. He includes all things; not to be true to anything He has made is to be untrue to Him. God is truth, is life; to be in God is to know Him and need no law. Existence will be eternal Godness. ~ George MacDonald,

1056:I do not say we are called upon to dispute and defend the truth with logic and argument, but we are called upon to show by our lives that we stand on the side of truth. But when i say truth, I do not mean opinion. To treat opinion as if that were truth is grievously to wrong the truth. The soul that loves the truth and tries to be true will know when to speak and when to be silent. ~ George MacDonald,

1057:I would I were in the kingdom of heaven if it be as you and Mr. Graham take it for!" said Clementina. "You must be in it, my lady, or you couldn't wish it to be such as it is." "Can one be in it and yet seem to himself to be out of it. Malcolm?" "So many are out of it that seem to be in it, my lady, that one might well imagine it the other way around with some. ~ George MacDonald,

1058:That is why hardships, troubles, disappointments, and all kinds of pain and suffering, are sent to so many of us. We are so full of ourselves, and feel so grand, that we should never come to know what poor creatures we are, never begin to do better, but for the knock-down blows that the loving God gives us. We do not like them, but he does not spare us for that. A Rough Shaking, ch. ~ George MacDonald,

1059:The sin he dwells in, the sin he will not come out of, is the sole ruin of a man. His present, his live sins, those pervading his thoughts and ruling his conduct; the sins he keeps doing, and will not give up; the sins he is called to abandon, and clings to; the same sins which are the cause of his misery, though he may not know it, these are they for which he is even now condemned. ~ George MacDonald,

1060:The destructible must be burned out of it, or begin to be burned out of it, before it can partake of eternal life. When that is all burnt away and gone, then it has eternal life. Or rather, when the fire of eternal life has possessed a man, then the destructible is gone utterly, and he is pure. Many a man's work must be burned, that by that very burning he may be saved—"so as by fire. ~ George MacDonald,

1061:Then let us be of one heart too, Dawtie!" She was so accustomed to hear Andrew speak in figures, that sometimes she looked through and beyond his words. She did so now, and seeing nothing, stood perplexed. "Willna ye, Dawtie?" said Andrew, holding out his hands. "I dinna freely understand ye, An'rew!" "Ye heavenly idiot!" cried Andrew. "Will ye be my wife, or will you no? ~ George MacDonald,

1062:When she went to church, nothing received her, nothing came near her, nothing brought her any message. Something was done, she supposed, that ought to be done—something she had no inclination to dispute, no interest in questioning; a certain good power called God, required from people, in return for the gift of existence, the attention of going to church; therefore she went sometimes. ~ George MacDonald,

1063:It is not alone the first beginnings of religion that are full of fear. So long as love is imperfect, there is room for torment. That lore only which fills the heart—and nothing but love can fill any heart—is able to cast out fear, leaving no room for its presence. What we find in the beginnings of religion, will hold in varying degree, until the religion, that is the love, be perfected. ~ George MacDonald,

1064:What honest boy would pride himself on not picking pockets ? A thief who was trying to reform would. To be conceited of doing one's duty is then a sign of how little one does it, and how little one sees what a contemptible thing it is not to do it. Could any but a low creature be conceited of not being contemptible? Until our duty becomes to us common as breathing, we are poor creatures. ~ George MacDonald,

1065:A library cannot be made all at once, any more than a house or a nation or a tree; they must all take time to grow, and so must a library. I wouldn't even know what books to go and ask for. I dare say, if I were to try, I couldn't at a moment's notice tell you the names of more than two score of books at the outside. Folk must make acquaintance among books as they would among living folk. ~ George MacDonald,

1066:But the more familiar one becomes with any religious system, while yet the conscience and will are unawakened and obedience has not begun, the harder is it to enter into the kingdom of heaven. Such familiarity is a soul-killing experience, and great will be the excuse for some of those sons of religious parents who have gone further toward hell than many born and bred thieves and sinners. ~ George MacDonald,

1067:The First Meeting And all the time it was God near her that was making her unhappy. For as the Son of Man came not to send peace on the earth but a sword, so the first visit of God to the human soul is generally in a cloud of fear and doubt, rising from the soul itself at His approach. The sun is the cloud dispeller, yet often he must look through a fog if he would visit the earth at all. ~ George MacDonald,

1068:The days glided by. The fervid Summer slid away round the shoulder of the world, and made room for her dignified matron sister; my lady Autumn swept her frayed and discoloured train out of the great hall-door of the world, and old brother Winter, who so assiduously waits upon the house, and cleans its innermost recesses, was creeping around it, biding his time, but eager to get to his work. ~ George MacDonald,

1069:One day [the prince] lost sight of his retinue in a great forest. These forests are very useful in delivering princes from their courtiers, like a sieve that keeps back the bran. Then the princes get away to follow their fortunes. In this they have the advantage of the princesses, who are forced to marry before they have had a bit of fun. I wish our princesses got lost in a forest sometimes. ~ George MacDonald,

1070:entrance of the Rev. Clement Sclater -- the minister of her parish, recently appointed. He was a man between young and middle-aged, an honest fellow, zealous to perform the duties of his office, but with notions of religion very beggarly. How could it be otherwise when he knew far more of what he called the Divine decrees than he did of his own heart, or the needs and miseries of human nature? ~ George MacDonald,

1071:it is not because of God's poverty that the world is so slowly redeemed. Not the most righteous expenditure of money will save it, but that of life and soul and spirit—it may be, to that, of nerve and muscle, blood and brain. All these our Lord spent—but no money. Therefore I say, that of all means for saving the world, or doing good, as it is called, money comes last in order, and far behind. ~ George MacDonald,

1072: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. ~ George MacDonald,

1073:Never pupil was more humble, never pupil more obedient; thinking nothing of himself or of anything he had done or could do, his path was open to the swiftest and highest growth. It matters little where a man may be at this moment; the point is whether he is growing. The next point will be, whether he is growing at the ratio given him. The key to the whole thing is obedience , and nothing else. ~ George MacDonald,

1074:It Was a lovely spring morning, and the sun was shining gloriously. I knew that the rain of the last night must be glittering on the grass and the young leaves; and I heard the birds singing as if they knew far more than mere human beings, and believed a great deal more than they knew. Nobody will persuade me that the birds don't mean it; that they sing from any thing else than gladness of heart. ~ George MacDonald,

1075:The truly wise talk little about religion and are not given to taking sides on doctrinal issues. When they hear people advocating or opposing the claims of this or that party in the church, they turn away with a smile such as men yield to the talk of children. They have no time, they would say, for that kind of thing. They have enough to do in trying to faithfully practice what is beyond dispute. ~ George MacDonald,

1076: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. ~ George MacDonald,

1077: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. ~ George MacDonald,

1078:We are and remain such creeping Christians, because we look at ourselves and not at Christ; because we gaze at the marks of our own soiled feet, and the trail of our own defiled garments.... Each, putting his foot in the footprint of the Master, and so defacing it, turns to examine how far his neighbor’s footprint corresponds with that which he still calls the Master’s, although it is but his own. ~ George MacDonald,

1079:Do you really suppose God cares whether a man comes to good or ill?" "If He did not, He could not be good himself..." "...Then He can't be so hard on us as the parsons say, even in the after-life?" "He will give absolute justice, which is the only good thing. He will spare nothing to bring His children back to himself, their sole well-being, whether He achieve it here--or there. ~ George MacDonald,

1080:How many people would like to be good, if only they might be good without taking trouble about it! They do not like goodness well enough to hunger and thirst after it, or to sell all that they have that they may buy it; they will not batter at the gate of the kingdom of heaven; but they look with pleasure on this or that aerial castle of righteousness, and think it would be rather nice to live in it. ~ George MacDonald,

1081:You never know what to expect on encountering royalty. I've seen 'em stark naked except for wings of peacock feathers (Empress of China), giggling drunk in the embrace of a wrestler (Maharani of the Punjab), voluptuously wrapped in wet silk (Queen of Madagascar), wafting to and fro on a swing (Rani of Jhansi), and tramping along looking like an out-of-work charwoman (our own gracious monarch). ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

1082:Could you not give me some sign, or tell me something about you that never changes, or some other way to know you, or thing to know you by?" — "No, Curdie: that would be to keep you from knowing me. You must know me in quite another way from that. It would not be the least use to you or me either if I were to make you know me in that way. It would be but to know the sign of me — not to know me myself. ~ George MacDonald,

1083:I've been thinking about it a great deal, and it seems to me that although any one sixpence is as good as any other 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 any more . Nobody, ever so beautiful or so good, will make up for that one going out of sight. ~ George MacDonald,

1084:I’d have found it amusing enough, I dare say, if I hadn’t been irritated by the thought that these irresponsible Christian zealots were only making things harder for the Army and Company, who had important work to do. It was all so foolish and unnecessary—the heathen creeds, for all their nonsensical mumbo-jumbo, were as good as any for keeping the rabble in order, and what else is religion for? In ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

1085:Is it possible that even then he thought of the lost sheep who could not believe that God was their Father; and for them, too, in all their loss and blindness and unlove, cried, saying the word they might say, knowing for them that God means Father and more, and knowing now, as he had never known till now, what a fearful thing it is to be without God and without hope? I dare not answer the question I put. ~ George MacDonald,

1086:Suddenly pressing both hands on her heart, she fell to the ground, and the mist rose from her and melted in the air. I ran to her. But she began to writhe in such torture that I stood aghast. A moment more and her legs, hurrying from her body, sped away serpents. From her shoulders fled her arms as in terror, serpents also. Then something flew up from her like a bat, and when I looked again, she was gone. ~ George MacDonald,

1087:Sad, indeed, would the whole matter be if the Bible had told us everything God meant us to believe. But herein is the Bible greatly wronged. It nowhere lays claim to be regarded as the Word, the Way, the Truth. The Bible leads us to Jesus, the inexhaustible, the ever-unfolding Revelation of God. It is Christ "in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge," not the Bible, save as leading to Him. ~ George MacDonald,

1088:I doobt the fau't's nae sae muckle i' my temper as i' my hert. It's mair love that I want, Tibbie. Gin I lo'ed my neebor as mysel', I cudna be sae ill-natert till him; though 'deed, whiles, I'm angry eneuch at mysel' — a hantle waur nor at him." "Verra true, Thamas," answered Tibbie. "Perfect love casteth oot fear, 'cause there's nae room for the twa o' them; and I daursay it wad be the same wi' the temper. ~ George MacDonald,

1089:There are times, and those times many, when the cares of this world-with no right to any part in our thought, seeing that they are either unreasonable or God imperfect- so blind the eyes of the soul to the radiance of the eternally true, that they see it only as if it ought to be true, not as if it must be true; as if it it might be true in the region of thought, but could not be true in the region of fact. ~ George MacDonald,

1090:Love me, beloved; Hades and Death Shall vanish away like a frosty breath; These hands, that now are at home in thine, Shall clasp thee again, if thou art still mine; And thou shalt be mine, my spirit's bride, In the ceaseless flow of eternity's tide, If the truest love thy heart can know Meet the truest love that from mine can flow. Pray God, beloved, for thee and me, That our sourls may be wedded eternally. ~ George MacDonald,

1091: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. ~ George MacDonald,

1092:It is with the holiest fear that we should approach the terrible fact of the sufferings of Our Lord. Let no one think that these were less because He was more. The more delicate the nature, the more alive to all that is lovely and true, lawful and right, the more does it feel the antagonism of pain, the inroad of death upon life; the more dreadful is that breach of the harmony of things whose sound is torture. ~ George MacDonald,

1093:What distressed me most - more even than my own folly - was the perplexing question - How can beauty and ugliness dwell so near? Even with her altered complexion and face of dislike; disenchanted of the belief that clung around her; known for a living, walking sepulcher, faithless, deluding, traitorous; I felt, notwithstanding all this, that she was beautiful. Upon this I pondered with undiminished perplexity. ~ George MacDonald,

1094:There are who are so pitiful over the poor man, that, finding they cannot lift him beyond the reach of the providence which intends there shall always be the poor on the earth, will do for him nothing at all. "Where is the use?" they say. They treat their money like their children, and would not send it into a sad house. If they had themselves no joys but their permanent ones, where would the hearts of them be? ~ George MacDonald,

1095:What distressed me most - more even than my own folly - was the perplexing question - How can beauty and ugliness dwell so near? Even with her altered complexion and face of dislike; disenchanted of the belief that clung around her; known for a living, walking sepulcher, faithless, deluding, traitorous; I felt, notwithstanding all this, that she was beautiful. Upon this I pondered with undiminished perplexity... ~ George MacDonald,

1096:Well, papa, I sometimes wish you wouldn't explain things so much. I seem to understand you all the time you are preaching, but when I try the text afterwards by myself, I can't make anything of it, and I've forgotten every word you said about it." "Perhaps that is because you have no right to understand it." "I thought all Protestants had a right to understand every word of the Bible," she returned. "If they can, ~ George MacDonald,

1097:I learned that it is better, a thousandfold , for a proud man to fall and be humbled, than to hold up his head in his pride and fancied innocence. I learned that he that will be a hero, will barely be a man; that he that will be nothing but a doer of his work, is sure of his manhood. In nothing was my ideal lowered, or dimmed, or grown less precious; I only saw it too plainly, to set myself for a moment beside it. ~ George MacDonald,

1098:And my good lord, for your honors better satisfaction, that it was not so barbarouslie nor butcherlie don as you thinck it to be, it should seeme your honor hath bene wrongfullie enformed, in sayinge he was cutt in manye peeces, after his deathe—for if he had bene cutt in many peces, he could not a lived till the next morninge, which themselves reported he did—which shewes he was not cutt in verie many peeces! ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

1099:Do you know my name, child?' 'No, I don't know it,' answered the princess. 'my name is Irene.' 'That's my name!' cried the princess. 'I know that. I let you have mine. I haven't got your name. You've got mine.' 'How can that be?' asked the princess, bewildered. 'I've always had my name.' 'Your papa, the king, asked me if I had any objection to your having it; and, of course, I hadn't. I let you have it with pleasure. ~ George MacDonald,

1100:One of four gates stands open to us: to deny the existence of God, and say we can do without him; to acknowledge his existence, but say he is not good, and act as true men resisting a tyrant; to say, "I would there were a God," and be miserable because there is none; or to say there must be a God, and he must be perfect in goodness or he could not be, and give ourselves up to him heart and soul and hands and history. ~ George MacDonald,

1101:Why are all reflections lovelier than what we call reality? -- not so grand or so strong, it may be, but always lovelier? Fair as is the gliding sloop on the shining sea, the wavering, trembling, unresting sail below is fairer still...All mirrors are magic mirrors. The commonest room is a room in a poem when I turn to the glass...There must be a truth involved in it, though we may but in part lay hold of the meaning. ~ George MacDonald,

1102:His heart, he said, had been the guide of his intellect." "That is just what I would fain believe. But, O Wynnie! the pity of it if that story should not be true, after all!" "Ah, my love!" I cried, "that very word makes me surer than ever that it cannot but be true. Let us go on putting it to the hardest test; let us try it until it crumbles in our hands,—try it by the touchstone of action founded on its requirements. ~ George MacDonald,

1103:Strange dim memories, which will not abide identification, often, through misty windows of the past, look out upon me in the broad daylight, but I never dream now. It may be, notwithstanding, that, when most awake, I am only dreaming the more! But when I wake at last into that life which as a mother her child, carries life in its bosom, I shall know that I wake, and shall doubt no more. I wait; asleep or awake, I wait. ~ George MacDonald,

1104: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. ~ George MacDonald,

1105:The fact was, that the moment he began to love Alice, his eyes began to send forth light. What he thought came from Alice's face, really came from his eyes. All about her and her path he could see, and every minute saw better; but to his own path he was blind. He could not see his hand when he held it straight before his face, so dark was it. But he could see Alice, and that was better than seeing the way-- ever so much. ~ George MacDonald,

1106:The one use of the Bible is to make us look at Jesus, that through him we might know his Father and our Father, his God and our God. Till we thus know Him, let us hold the Bible dear as the moon of our darkness, by which we travel towards the east; not dear as the sun whence her light cometh, and towards which we haste, that, walking in the sun himself, we may no more need the mirror that reflected his absent brightness. ~ George MacDonald,

1107:More of what he said, I cannot tell; somehow this much has reached my ears. He remained there upon the straw while hour after hour passed, pleading with the great Father for his son; his soul now lost in dull fatigue, now uttering itself in groans for lack of words, until at length the dawn looked in on the night-weary earth, and into the two sorrow-laden hearts, bringing with it a comfort they did not seek to understand. ~ George MacDonald,

1108:The claim that hung over him haunted his very life, turning the currents of his thought into channels of speculation unknown before. One day when these questions were fighting in his heart, all at once it seemed as if a soundless voice in the depth of his soul replied, "Thy soul, however it became known to itself, is from the pure heart of God." And with the thought, the horizon of his life began to clear. ~ George MacDonald,

1109:Here I was alone, and could take my own time. In other parts of the world one always seems to be in a great hurry, tearing from one spot to the other at a gallop, but out yonder, perhaps because distances are so great, time don't seem to matter; you can jog along, breathing fresh air and enjoying the scenery and your own thoughts about women and home and hunting and booze and money and what may lie over the next hill. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

1110:I will attempt no historical or theological classification of MacDonald’s thought, partly because I have not the learning to do so, still more because I am no great friend to such pigeonholing. One very effective way of silencing the voice of conscience is to impound in an Ism the teacher through whom it speaks: the trumpet no longer seriously disturbs our rest when we have murmured “Thomist,” “Barthian,” or “Existentialist. ~ George MacDonald,

1111:The perfection of His relation to us swallows up all our imperfections, all our defeats, all our evils; for our childhood is born of His fatherhood. That man is perfect in faith who can come to God in the utter dearth of his feelings and his desires, without a glow or an aspiration, with the weight of low thoughts, failures, neglects, and wandering forgetfulness, and say to Him, “Thou art my refuge, because Thou art my home”. ~ George MacDonald,

1112:What a good thing, for instance, it was that one princess should sleep for a hundred years! Was she not saved from all the plague of young men who were not worthy of her? And did not she come awake exactly at the right moment when the right prince kissed her? For my part, I cannot help wishing a good many girls would sleep till just the same fate overtook them. It would be happier for them, and more agreeable to their friends. ~ George MacDonald,

1113: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. ~ George MacDonald,

1114:Hunger may drive the runaway child home, and he may or may not be fed at once, but he needs his mother more than his dinner. Communion with God is the one need of the soul beyond all other need: prayer is the beginning of that communion, and some need is the motive of that prayer…. So begins a communion, a taking with God, a coming-to-one with Him, which is the sole end of prayer, yea, of existence itself in its infinite phases. ~ George MacDonald,

1115:The one cure for any organism, is to be set right--to have all its parts brought into harmony with each other; the one comfort is to know this cure in process. Rightness alone is cure. The return of the organism to its true self, is its only possible ease. To free a man from suffering, he must be set right, put in health; and the health at the root of man's being, his rightness, is to be free from wrongness, that is, from sin. A ~ George MacDonald,

1116:Blackmail was paid by the tenant or farmer to a “superior” who might be a powerful reiver, or even an outlaw, and in return the reiver not only left him alone, but was also obliged to protect him from other raiders and to recover his goods if they were carried off. It reached the proportions of a major industry, with the blackmailers employing collectors and enforcers (known as brokers), and even something like accountants. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

1117:Many feelings are simply too good to last--using the phrase not in the unbelieving sense in which it is generally used, but to express the fact that intensity and endurance cannot coexist in the human frame. But the virtue of a mood depends by no means on its immediate presence. Like any other experience, it may be believed in, and, in its absence, which leaves the mind free to contemplate it, works even more good than its presence ~ George MacDonald,

1118:the fatal privilege”. It enshrined the right to recover one’s property by force, and in practice to deal with the thieves out of hand. A trod might lawfully be made at any time within six days after the offence; if it was followed immediately it was a hot trod, otherwise it was known as a cold trod. In either case it was governed by strict rules; a careful line was drawn, under Border law, between a trod and a reprisal raid. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

1119:Could we see things always as we have sometimes seen them—and as one day we must always see them, only far better—should we ever know dullness? Greatly as we might enjoy all forms of art, much as we might learn through the eyes and thoughts of other men, should we fly to these for deliverance from ennui, from any haunting discomfort? Should we not just open our own child-eyes, look upon the things themselves, and be consoled? ~ George MacDonald,

1120:I knew that love gives to him that loveth, power over any soul beloved, even if that soul know him not, bringing him inwardly close to that spirit; a power that cannot be but for good; for in proportion as selfishness intrudes, the love ceases, and the power which springs therefrom dies. Yet all love will, one day, meet with its return. All true love will, one day, behold its own image in the eyes of the beloved, and be humbly glad. ~ George MacDonald,

1121:Love me, beloved; Hades and Death Shall vanish away like a frosty breath; These hands, that now are at home in thine, Shall clasp thee again, if thou art still mine; And thou shalt be mine, my spirit's bride, In the ceaseless flow of eternity's tide, If the truest love thy heart can know Meet the truest love that from mine can flow. Pray God, beloved, for thee and me, That our souls may be wedded eternally ~ George MacDonald,

1122:With a fiction it was the same. Mine was the whole story. For I took the place of the character who was most like myself, and his story was mine; until, grown weary with the life of years condensed in an hour, or arrived at my deathbed, or the end of the volume, I would awake, with a sudden bewilderment, to the consciousness of my present life, recognising the walls and roof around me, and finding I joyed or sorrowed only in a book. ~ George MacDonald,

1123:Love me, beloved; Hades and Death Shall vanish away like a frosty breath; These hands, that now are at home in thine, Shall clasp thee again, if thou art still mine; And thou shalt be mine, my spirit's bride, In the ceaseless flow of eternity's tide, If the truest love thy heart can know Meet the truest love that from mine can flow. Pray God, beloved, for thee and me, That our sourls may be wedded eternally. ~ George MacDonald,

1124:she always administered her charity with some view to the value of the probable return,—with some regard, that is, to the amount of good likely to result to others from the aid given to one. She always took into consideration whether the good was likely to be propagated, or to die with the receiver. She confessed to frequent mistakes; but such, she said, was the principle upon which she sought to regulate that part of her stewardship. ~ George MacDonald,

1125:I do believe that when a man confesses to his neighbor and says he's sorry, he thinks more of him than he did before. You see, we all know we have done wrong, but we haven't usually confessed it. And it's a funny thing, but when the time comes when there's something he needs to repent of himself, he hesitates for fear of the shame of having to confess it. To me the shame lies in not confessing after you know you're in the wrong. ~ George MacDonald,

1126:Nothing that could be got from the heart of the earth could have been put to better purposes than the silver the king's miners got for him. There were people in the country who, when it came into their hands, degraded it by locking it up in a chest, and then it grew diseased and was called mammon, and bred all sorts of quarrels; but when first it left the king's hands it never made any but friends, and the air of the world kept it clean. ~ George MacDonald,

1127:The ruin of a man's teaching comes of his followers, such as having never touched the foundation he has laid, build upon it wood, hay, and stubble, fit only to be burnt. Therefore, if only to avoid his worst foes, his admirers, a man should avoid system. The more correct a system the worse will it be misunderstood; its professed admirers will take both its errors and their misconceptions of its truths, and hold them forth as its essence. ~ George MacDonald,

1128:dark, wiry soldier at the first bed was cleaning his rifle, hauling the pull-through along the barrel. ‘Not like that,’ said Bennet-Bruce. ‘Pull it straight out, not at an angle, or you’ll wear away the muzzle and your bullets will fly off squint, missing the enemy, who will seize the opportunity to unseam you, from nave to chaps.’ He tugged at the pull-through. ‘What the hell have you got on the end of this, the battalion colours? ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

1129:His father could not have vanished like a sea-bubble on the sand! To have known a great man—perhaps I do not mean such a man as my reader may be thinking of—is to have some assurance of immortality. One of the best of men said to me once that he did not feel any longing after immortality, but, when he thought of certain persons, he could not for a moment believe they had ceased. He had beheld the lovely, believed therefore in the endless. ~ George MacDonald,

1130:A mountain is a strange and awful thing. In old times, without knowing so much of their strangeness and awfulness as we do, people were yet more afraid of mountains. But then somehow they had not come to see how beautiful they are as well as awful, and they hated them--and what people hate they must fear. Now that we have learned to look at them with admiration, perhaps we do not feel quite awe enough of them. To me they are beautiful terrors. ~ George MacDonald,

1131:But the little people were constantly doing and saying things that pleased, often things that surprised me. Every day I grew more loath to leave them. While I was at work, they would keep coming and going, amusing and delighting me, and taking all the misery, and much of the weariness out of my monotonous toil. Very soon I loved them more than I can tell. They did not know much, but they were very wise, and seemed capable of learning anything. ~ George MacDonald,

1132:I doubt if wickedness does half as much harm as sectarianism, whether it be the sectarianism of the church or of dissent, the sectarianism whose virtue is condescension, or the sectarianism whose vice is pride. Division has done more to hide Christ from the view of men, than all the infidelity that has ever been spoken. It is the half-Christian clergy of every denomination that are the main cause of the so-called failure of the Church of Christ. ~ George MacDonald,

1133:The region belonging to the pure intellect is straitened: the imagination labours to extend its territories, to give it room. She sweeps across the boarders, searching out new lands into which she may guide her plodding brother. The imagination is the light which redeems from the darkness for the eyes of the understanding. Novalis says, 'The imagination is the stuff of the intellect' -affords, that is, the material upon which the intellect works. ~ George MacDonald,

1134: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. ~ George MacDonald,

1135:Often, no doubt, it will appear otherwise, for the childlike child is easier to save than the other, and may come first. But the rejoicing in heaven is greatest over the sheep that has wandered the farthest—perhaps was born on the wild hill-side, and not in the fold at all. For such a prodigal, the elder brother in heaven prays thus—" Lord, think about my poor brother more than about me, for I know thee, and am at rest in thee. I am with thee always. ~ George MacDonald,

1136:All about us, in earth and air, wherever the eye or ear can reach, there is a power ever breathing itself forth in signs, now in daisy, now in a wind-waft, a cloud, a sunset; a power that holds constant and sweetest relation with the dark and silent world within us. The same God who is in us, and upon whose tree we are the buds, if not yet the flowers, also is all about us- inside, the Spirit; outside, the Word. And the two are ever trying to meet in us. ~ George MacDonald,

1137:Who invented music? Some one must have made the delight of it possible! With his own share in its joy he had had nothing to do! Was Chance its grand inventor, its great ingenieur? Why or how should Chance love loveliness that was not, and make it be, that others might love it? Could it be a deaf God, or a being that did not care and would not listen, that invented music? No; music did not come of itself, neither could the source of it be devoid of music! ~ George MacDonald,

1138:But is it not rather that art rescues nature from the weary and sated regards of our senses, and the degrading injustice of our anxious everyday life, and, appealing to the imagination, which dwells apart, reveals Nature in some degree as she really is, and as she represents herself to the eye of the child, whose everyday life, fearless and unambitious, meets the true import of the wonder-teeming world around him, and rejoices therein without questioning? ~ George MacDonald,

1139:For He regards men not as they are merely, but as they shall be; not as they shall be merely, but as they are now growing, or capable of growing, toward that image after which He made them that they might grow to it. Therefore a thousand stages, each in itself all but valueless, are of inestimable worth as the necessary and connected gradations of an infinite progress. A condition which of declension would indicate a devil, may of growth indicate a saint. ~ George MacDonald,

1140:I firmly believe people have hitherto been a great deal too much taken up about doctrine and far too little about practice. The word doctrine, as used in the Bible, means teaching of duty, not theory. I preached a sermon about this. We are far too anxious to be definite and to have finished, well-polished, sharp-edged systems — forgetting that the more perfect a theory about the infinite, the surer it is to be wrong, the more impossible it is to be right. ~ George MacDonald,

1141:In that ugly building, amidst that weary praying and inharmonious singing, with that blatant tone, and, worse than all, that merciless doctrine, there was yet preaching — that rare speech of a man to his fellow-men whereby in their inmost hearts they know that he in his inmost heart believes. There was hardly an indifferent countenance in all that wide space beneath, in all those far-sloping galleries above. Every conscience hung out the red or pale flag. ~ George MacDonald,

1142:If any one object that I have here imagined too much, I would remark, first, that the records in the Gospel are very brief and condensed; second, that the germs of a true intelligence must lie in this small seed, and our hearts are the soil in which it must unfold itself; third, that we are bound to understand the story, and that the foregoing are the suppositions on which I am able to understand it in a manner worthy of what I have learned concerning Him. ~ George MacDonald,

1143:...and suddenly, without the slightest volition on my part, there was the most crashing discharge of wind, like the report of a mortar. My horse started; Cardigan jumped in his saddle, glaring at me.....Be Silent! snaps he, and he must have been in a highly nervous condition himself, otherwise he would never have added, in a hoarse whipser: Can you not contain yourself, you disgusting fellow?--Flashman at the start of the Charge of the Light Brigade. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

1144:Without the correction, the reflection, the support of other presences, being is not merely unsafe, it is a horror—for anyone but God, who is His own being. For him whose idea is God’s, and the image of God, his own being is far too fragmentary and imperfect to be anything like good company. It is the lovely creatures God has made all around us, in them giving us Himself, that, until we know Him, save us from the frenzy of aloneness—for that aloneness is self. ~ George MacDonald,

1145:I sickened at the sight of Myself; how should I ever get rid of the demon? The same instant I saw the one escape: I must offer it back to its source—commit it to Him who had made it. I must live no more from it but from the source of it; seek to know nothing more of it than He gave me to know by His presence therein…. What flashes of self-consciousness might cross me, should be God’s gift, not of my seeking, and offered again to Him in every new self-sacrifice. ~ George MacDonald,

1146:The door closed behind them. They climbed out of the earth; and, still climbing, rose above it. They were in the rainbow. Far abroad, over ocean and land, they could see through its transparent walls the earth beneath their feet. Stairs beside stairs wound up together, and beautiful beings of all ages climbed along with them. They knew that they were going up to the country whence the shadows fall. And by this time I think they must have got there. ~ George MacDonald,

1147:It was not that the youth had turned again from the hope of rest in the Son of Man; but that, as everyone knows who knows anything of the human spirit, there must be in its history days and seasons, mornings and nights, yea deepest midnights. It has its alternating summer and winter, its storm and shine, its soft dews and its tempests of lashing hail, its cold moons and prophetic stars, its pale twilights of saddest memory, and its golden gleams of brightest hope. ~ George MacDonald,

1148:You are right. Curdie is much farther on than Lootie, and you will see what will come of it. But in the meantime you must be content, I say, to be misunderstood for a while. We are all very anxious to be understood, and it is very hard not to be. But there is one thing much more necessary.' 'What is that, grandmother?' 'To understand other people.' 'Yes, grandmother. I must be fair - for if I'm not fair to other people, I'm not worth being understood myself. I see. ~ George MacDonald,

1149:Do you think you love your children better than He who made them? Is not your love what it is because He put it into your heart first? Have you not often been cross with them? Sometimes unjust to them? Whence came the returning love that rose from unknown depths in your being, and swept away the anger and the injustice? You did not create that love. Probably you were not good enough to send for it by prayer. But it came. God sent it. He makes you love your children. ~ George MacDonald,

1150:I am content to be to myself what I would be. What I choose to seem to myself makes me what I am. My own thought makes me me; my own thought of myself is me. Another shall not make me!" "But another has made you, and can compel you to see what you have made yourself. You will not be able much longer to look to yourself anything but what he sees you! You will not much longer have satisfaction in the thought of yourself. At this moment you are aware of the coming change! ~ George MacDonald,

1151: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. ~ George MacDonald,

1152:To oppose, to refute, to deny is not to know the truth. Whatever good may come in the destroying of the false, the best hammer of the critic will not serve to carve the celestial form of the real; and when the iconoclast becomes the bigot of negation and declares the non-existence of any form worthy of worship because he has destroyed so many unworthy forms, he becomes a fool. That he has never conceived a deity worth worshipping is poor ground for saying such cannot exist. ~ George MacDonald,

1153:It was to be no more who should rule, but who should serve; no more who should look down upon his fellows from the conquered heights of authority—even of sacred authority, but who should look up honouring humanity, and ministering unto it, so that humanity itself might at length be persuaded of its own honour as a temple of the living God. It was to impress this lesson upon them that he showed them the child. Therefore, I repeat, the lesson lay in the childhood of the child. ~ George MacDonald,

1154:It is a hard thing for a rich man to grow poor; but it is an awful thing for him to grow dishonest, and some kinds of speculation lead a man deep into dishonesty before he thinks what he is about. Poverty will not make a man worthless—he may be of worth a great deal more when he is poor than he was when he was rich; but dishonesty goes very far indeed to make a man of no value—a thing to be thrown out in the dust-hole of the creation, like a bit of broken basin, or dirty rag. ~ George MacDonald,

1155:It is just the old way--that of obedience. If you have ever seen the Lord, if only from afar--if you have any vaguest suspicion that the Jew Jesus, who professed to have come from God, was a better man, a different man--one of your first duties must be to open your ears to His words and see whether they seem to you to be true. Then, if they do, to obey them with your whole strength and might. This is the way of life, which will lead a man out of its miseries into life indeed. ~ George MacDonald,

1156:but natural to expect that the deeds of the great messenger should be just the works of the Father done in little. If he came to reveal his Father in miniature, as it were (for in these unspeakable things we can but use figures, and the homeliest may be the holiest), to tone down his great voice, which, too loud for men to hear it aright, could but sound to them as an inarticulate thundering, into such a still small voice as might enter their human ears in welcome human speech, ~ George MacDonald,

1157:At length, one lovely morning, when the green corn lay soaking in the yellow sunlight, and the sky rose above the earth deep and pure and tender like the thought of God about it, Alec became suddenly aware that life was good, and the world beautiful . . . One of God's lyric prophets, the larks, was within earshot, pouring down a vocal summer of jubilant melody. The lark thought nobody was listening but his wife; but God heard in heaven, and the young prodigal heard on the earth. ~ George MacDonald,

1158:Don't you sometimes find it hard to remember God all through your work?" asked Clementina. "I don't try to consciously remember Him every moment. For He is in everything, whether I am thinking of it or not. When I go fishing, I go to catch God's fish. When I take Kelpie out, I am teaching one of God's wild creatures. When I read the Bible or Shakespeare, I am listening to the word of God, uttered in each after its own kind. When the wind blows on my face, it is God's wind. ~ George MacDonald,

1159:Often in the summer, as I go to or come from the vestry, I sit down for a moment on the turf that covers my old friend Rodgers, and think that this body of mine is everyday moldering away, til it shall fall a heap of dust into it's appointed place. But what is that to me? It is to me the drawing nigh of the fresh morning of life when I shall be young and strong again, glad in the presence of the wise and beloved dead, and unspeakably glad in the presence of God. ~ George MacDonald,

1160:I will be glad!" he said, "even in the midst of a world of rain!—Yet again, why should the mere look of a rainy night make it needful for me to assert joy and resist sadness?—After all, what is there to be merry about, in this best of possible worlds? I like going to the theatre; but if I don't like the play, am I to be pleased all the same, sit it out with smiles, and applaud at the end?—I don't see what there is to make me miserable, and I don't see what there is to make me glad! ~ George MacDonald,

1161:To free a man from suffering, he must be set right, put in health; and the health at the root of man's being, his rightness, is to be free from wrongness, that is, from sin. A man is right when there is no wrong in him. I do not mean set free from the sins he has done: that will follow; I mean the sins he is doing, or is capable of doing; the sins in his being which spoil his nature — the wrongness in him — the evil he consents to; the sin he is, which makes him do the sin he does. ~ George MacDonald,

1162:What is faith in Christ? It is the leaving of your way, your objects, your self, and the taking of his and him; the leaving of your trust in men, in money, in opinion, in character, in religious doctrines and opinions, and then doing as Christ tells you. I can find no words strong enough to serve for the weight of this necessity-this obedience. It is the one terrible heresy of the church that it has always been presenting something else than obedience as faith in Christ. ~ George MacDonald,

1163:You see when he forgot his Self his mother took care of his Self, and loved and praised his Self. Our own praises poison our Selves, and puff and swell them up, till they lose all shape and beauty, and become like great toadstools. But the praises of father or mother do our Selves good, and comfort them and make them beautiful. They never do them any harm. If they do any harm, it comes of our mixing some of our own praises with them, and that turns them nasty and slimy and poisonous. ~ George MacDonald,

1164:I must show the blacksmith and the shopkeeper once more--two years after marriage--time long enough to have made common people as common to each other as the weed by the roadside; but these are not common to each other yet, and never will be. They will never complain of being desillusionnes , for they have never been illuded. They look up each to the other still, because they were right in looking up each to the other from the first. Each was, and therefore each is and will be, real. ~ George MacDonald,

1165:It was part of war; men died, more would die, that was past, and what mattered now was the business in hand; those who lived would get on with it. Whatever sorrow was felt, there was no point in talking or brooding about it, much less in making, for form's sake, a parade of it. Better and healthier to forget it, and look to tomorrow.The celebrated British stiff upper lip, the resolve to conceal emotion which is not only embarrassing and useless, but harmful, is just plain commons sense ~ George MacDonald,

1166:Sir Galahad and Sir Percivale rencountered in the depths of a great forest. Now, Sir Galahad was dight all in harness of silver, clear and shining; the which is a delight to look upon, but full hasty to tarnish, and withouten the labour of a ready squire, uneath to be kept fair and clean. And yet withouten squire or page, Sir Galahad's armour shone like the moon. And he rode a great white mare, whose bases and other housings were black, but all besprent with fair lilys of silver sheen. ~ George MacDonald,

1167:I was sufficiently recovered from my nervous condition – or else the booze was beginning to work – to be able to discuss with Rudi the merits of checked or striped trousers, which had been the great debate among the London nobs that year. I was a check-er myself, having the height and leg for it, but Rudi thought they looked bumpkinish, which only shows what damned queer taste they had in Austria in those days. Of course, if you’ll put up with Metternich you’ll put up with anything. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

1168:Once more I say, the word used by St Paul does not imply that God adopts children that are not his own, but rather that a second time he fathers his own; that a second time they are born—this time from above; that he will make himself tenfold, yea, infinitely their father: he will have them back into the very bosom whence they issued, issued that they might learn they could live nowhere else; he will have them one with himself. It was for the sake of this that, in his Son, he died for them. ~ George MacDonald,

1169:There are those who in their very first seeking of it are nearer to the Kingdom of Heaven than many who have for years believed themselves of it. In the former there is more of the mind of Jesus, and when He calls them they recognize Him at once and go after Him; while the others examine Him from head to foot, and finding Him not sufficiently like the Jesus of their conception, turn their backs and go to church or chapel or chamber to kneel before a vague form mingled of tradition and fancy. ~ George MacDonald,

1170: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. ~ George MacDonald,

1171:Out of the historic tangle, there certainly emerged among English kings a belief that they had, traditionally, some kind of superiority over the Scottish king, and no doubt a feeling that for the sake of political security and unity—one might say almost of tidiness—it would be better if Scotland were under English control, or at best, added to England. This attitude can be charitably seen as politically realistic, or at the other extreme, as megalomaniac; it is all in the point of view. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

1172:She had left his church and gone to the missionars, and there found more spiritual nourishment than Mr Cowie's sermons could supply, but she could not forget his kisses, or his gentle words, or his shilling, for by their means, although she did not know it, Mr Cowie's self had given her a more confiding notion of God, a better feeling of his tenderness, than she could have had from all Mr Turnbull's sermons together. What equal gift could a man give? Was it not worth bookfuls of sound doctrine? ~ George MacDonald,

1173:It was part of war; men died, more would die, that was past, and what mattered now was the business in hand; those who lived would get on with it. Whatever sorrow was felt, there was no point in talking or brooding about it, much less in making, for form’s sake, a parade of it. Better and healthier to forget it, and look to tomorrow. The celebrated British stiff upper lip, the resolve to conceal emotion which is not only embarrassing and useless, but harmful, is just plain commons sense ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

1174:She thanked God for the country, but soon was praying to him for the town. The neighborly offer of the country to console her for the loss of the town she received with alarm, hastening to bethink herself that God cared more for one miserable, selfish, wife-and-donkey-beating costermonger of unsavory Shoreditch, than for all the hills and dales of Cumberland, yea and all the starry things of his heavens. She would care only as God cared, and from all this beauty gather strength to give to sorrow. ~ George MacDonald,

1175:It opened a little way, and a face came into the opening. It was Lona's. It's eyes were closed, but the face itself was upon me, and seemed to see me. It was as white as Eve's, white as Mara's, but did not shine like their faces. She spoke, and her voice was like a sleepy night-wind in the grass. "Are you coming, king?" it said. "I cannot rest until you are with me, gliding down the river to the great sea, and the beautiful dream-land. The sleepiness is full of lovely things: come and see them. ~ George MacDonald,

1176:There is this difference between the growth of some human beings and that of others:in the one case it is a continuous dying, in the other a continuous resurrection. One of the latter sort comes at length to know at once whether a thing is true the moment it comes before him; one of the former class grows more and more afraid of being taken in, so afraid that he takes himself in altogether, and comes at length to believe in nothing but his dinner: to be sure of a thing is to have it between his teeth. ~ George MacDonald,

1177:My spirits rose as I went deeper; into the forest; but I could not regain my former elasticity of mind. I found cheerfulness to be like life itself - not to be created by any argument. Afterwards I learned, that the best way to manage some kinds of pain fill thoughts, is to dare them to do their worst; to let them lie and gnaw at your heart till they are tired; and you find you still have a residue of life they cannot kill. So, better and worse, I went on, till I came to a little clearing in the forest. ~ George MacDonald,

1178:So, teaching him only that which she loved, not that which she had been taught, Janet read to Gibbie of Jesus, and talked to him of Jesus, until at length his whole soul was full of the Man, of His doings, of His words, of His thoughts, of His life. Almost before he knew, he was trying to fashion his life after that of the Master. Janet had no inclination to trouble her own head, or Gibbie's heart, with what men call the plan of salvation. It was enough to her to find that he followed her Master. ~ George MacDonald,

1179:The trees bathed their great heads in the waves of the morning, while their roots were planted deep in gloom; save where on the borders of the sunshine broke against their stems, or swept in long streams through their avenues, washing with brighter hue all the leaves over which it flowed; revealing the rich brown of the dacayed leaves and fallen pine-cones, and the delicate greens of the long grasses and tiny forests of moss that covered the channel over which it passed in the motionless rivers of light. ~ George MacDonald,

1180:Whether it is a good thing or a bad thing not to be afraid depends on what the fearlessness is founded upon. Some how no fear because they have no knowledge of the danger; there is nothing fine in that. Some are too stupid to be afraid; there is nothing fine in that. Some who are not easily frightened would yet turn their backs and run the moment they were frightened; such never had more courage than fear. But the person who will do his or her work in spite of his or her fear is a person of true courage. ~ George MacDonald,

1181:[91] Why Should It Be Necessary? “But if God is so good as you represent Him, and if He knows all that we need, and better far than we do ourselves, why should it be necessary to ask Him for anything?” I answer, What if He knows Prayer to be the thing we need first and most? What if the main object in God’s idea of prayer be the supplying of our great, our endless need—the need of Himself?…Hunger may drive the runaway child home, and he may or may not be fed at once, but he needs his mother more than his dinner. ~ George MacDonald,

1182:It was not a bed with curtains, but a bed with doors like shutters. This may not seem like a nice way of having a bed, but we would all be glad of the wooden curtains about us at night if we lived in such a cottage, on the side of a hill along which the wind swept like a wild river. Through the cottage it would be streaming all night long. And a poor woman with a cough, or a man who has been out in the cold all day, is very glad of such a place to lie in, and leave the the rest of the house to the wind and the fairies. ~ George MacDonald,

1183:We may trust God with our past as heartily as with our future. It will not hurt us so long as we do not try to hide things, so long as we are ready to bow our heads in hearty shame where it is fit we should be ashamed. For to be ashamed is a holy and blessed thing. Shame is a thing to shame only those who want to appear, not those who want to be. Shame is to shame those who want to pass their examination, not those who would get into the heart of things…. To be humbly ashamed is to be plunged in the cleansing bath of truth. ~ George MacDonald,

1184:I wonder how many Christians there are who so thoroughly believe God made them that they can laugh in God's name; who understand that God invented laughter and gave it to his children. Such belief would add a keenness to the zest in their enjoyment, and slay that sneering laughter of which a man grimaces to the fiends, as well as that feeble laughter in which neither heart nor intellect has a share. It would help them also to understand the depth of this miracle. The Lord of gladness delights in the laughter of a merry heart. ~ George MacDonald,

1185:So long as men must toss in weary fancies all the dark night, crying, "Would God it were morning," to find, it may be, when it arrives, but little comfort in the grey dawn, so long must we regard God as one to be seen or believed in--cried unto at least--across all the dreary flats of distress or dark mountains of pain, and therefore those who would help their fellows must sometimes look for him, as it were, through the eyes of those who suffer, and try to help them to think, not from ours, but from their own point of vision. ~ George MacDonald,

1186:I should like to remark, for the sake of princes and princesses in general, that it is a low and contemptible thing to refuse to confess a fault, or even an error. If a true princess has done wrong, she is always uneasy until she has had an opportunity of throwing the wrongness away from her by saying: 'I did it; and I wish I had not; and I am sorry for having done it.' So you see there is some ground for supposing that Curdie was not a miner only, but a prince as well. Many such instances have been known in the world's history. ~ George MacDonald,

1187:No words can express how much the world owes to sorrow. Most of the Psalms were born in the wilderness. Most of the Epistles were written in a prison. The greatest thoughts of the greatest thinkers have all passed through fire. The greatest poets have "learned in suffering what they taught in song." In bonds Bunyan lived the allegory that he afterwards wrote, and we may thank Bedford Jail for the Pilgrim's Progress. Take comfort, afflicted Christian! When God is about to make pre-eminent use of a person, He put them in the fire. ~ George MacDonald,

1188:Shame We may trust God with our past as heartily as with our future. It will not hurt us so long as we do not try to hide things, so long as we are ready to bow our heads in hearty shame where it is fit we should be ashamed. For to be ashamed is a holy and blessed thing. Shame is a thing to shame only those who want to appear, not those who want to be. Shame is to shame those who want to pass their examination, not those who would get into the heart of things…. To be humbly ashamed is to be plunged in the cleansing bath of truth. ~ George MacDonald,

1189:This world looks to us the natural and simple one, and so it is--absolutely fitted to our need and education. But there is that in us which is not at home in this world, which I believe holds secret relations with every star, or perhaps rather, with that in the heart of God whence issued every star, diverse in kind and character as in colour and place and motion and light. To that in us, this world is so far strange and unnatural and unfitting, and we need a yet homelier home. Yea, no home at last will do, but the home of God's heart. ~ George MacDonald,

1190:But to try to make others comfortable is the only way to get right comfortable ourselves, and that comes partly of not being able to think so much about ourselves when we are helping other people. For our Selves will always do pretty well if we don't pay them too much attention. 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. ~ George MacDonald,

1191:It is by loving, and not by being loved, that one can come nearest the soul of another; yea, that, where two love, it is the loving of each other, that originates and perfects and assures their blessedness. I knew that love gives to him that loveth, power over any soul beloved, even if that soul know him not, bringing him inwardly close to that spirit; a power that cannot be but for good; for in proportion as selfishness intrudes, the love ceases, and the power which springs therefrom dies. Yet all love will, one day, meet with its return. ~ George MacDonald,

1192:Like some of the rest of us, she never reflected how balefully her evil mood might operate; and that all things work for good in the end, will not cover those by whom come the offenses. Another night's rest, it is true, sent the evil mood to sleep again for a time, but did not exorcise it; for there are demons that go not out without prayer, and a bad temper is one of them--a demon as contemptible, mean-spirited, and unjust, as any in the peerage of hell--much petted, nevertheless, and excused, by us poor lunatics who are possessed by him. ~ George MacDonald,

1193:Vain were the fancy, by treatise, or sermon, or poem, or tale, to persuade a man to forget himself. He cannot if he would. Sooner will he forget the presence of a raging tooth. 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…“but as many as received Him, to them gave He power to become the sons of God. ~ George MacDonald,

1194:Could it be that the Lord was still, child and man, suffering for his race, to deliver his brothers and sisters from their sins?—wandering, enduring, beaten, blessing still? accepting the evil, slaying it, and returning none? his patience the one rock where the evil word finds no echo; his heart the one gulf into which the dead-sea wave rushes with no recoil—from which ever flows back only purest water, sweet and cool; the one abyss of destroying love, into which all wrong tumbles, and finding no reaction, is lost, ceases for evermore? there, ~ George MacDonald,

1195:To trust in spite of the look of being forsaken; to keep crying out into the vast, whence comes no returning voice, and where seems no hearing; to see the machinery of the world pauselessly grinding on as if self-moved, caring for no life, nor shifting a hair-breadth for all entreaty, and yet believe that God is awake and utterly loving; to desire nothing but what comes meant for us from His hand; to wait patiently, ready to die of hunger, fearing only lest faith should fail--such is the victory that overcometh the world, such is faith indeed. ~ George MacDonald,

1196:I mention the fact here because it shows how great events are decided by trifles. Scholars, of course, won’t have it so. Policies, they say, and the subtly laid schemes of statesmen, are what influence the destinies of nations; the opinions of intellectuals, the writings of philosophers, settle the fate of mankind. Well, they may do their share, but in my experience the course of history is as often settled by someone’s having a belly-ache, or not sleeping well, or a sailor getting drunk, or some aristocratic harlot waggling her backside. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

1197:It is by loving, and not by being loved, that one can come nearest the soul of another; yea, that, where two love, it is the loving of each other, that originates and perfects and assures their blessedness. I knew that love gives to him that loveth, power over over any soul be loved, even if that soul know him not, bringing him inwardly close to that spirit; a power that cannot be but for good; for in proportion as selfishness intrudes, the love ceases, and the power which springs therefrom dies. Yet all love will, one day, meet with its return. ~ George MacDonald,

1198:Our Lord had no design of constructing a system of truth in intellectual forms. The truth of the moment in its relation to him, The Truth, was what he spoke. He spoke out of a region of realities which he knew could only be suggested—not represented—in the forms of intellect and speech. With vivid flashes of life and truth his words invade our darkness, rousing us with sharp stings of light to will our awaking, to arise from the dead and cry for the light which he can give, not in the lightning of words only, but in indwelling presence and power. ~ George MacDonald,

1199:I must do what I can to make myself intelligible to you. Our natures, however, are so different, that this may not be easy. Men and women live but to die; we, that is such as I-we are but a few-live to live on. Old age is to you a horror; to me it is a dear desire: the older we grow, the nearer we are to our perfection. Your perfection is a poor thing, comes soon, and lasts but a little while; ours is a ceaseless ripening. I am not yet ripe, and have lived thousands of your years-how many, I never cared to note. The everlasting will not be measured. ~ George MacDonald,

1200:In very truth, a wise imagination, which is the presence of the spirit of God, is the best guide that man or woman can have; for it is not the things we see the most clearly that influence us the most powerfully; undefined, yet vivid visions of something beyond, something which eye has not seen nor ear heard, have far more influence than any logical sequences whereby the same things may be demonstrated to the intellect. It is the nature of the thing, not the clearness of its outline, that determines its operation. We live by faith, and not by sight. ~ George MacDonald,

1201:To be lord of space, a man must be free of all bonds of place. To be heir of all things, his heart must have no things in it. He must be like him who makes things, not like one who would put everything in his pocket. He must stand on the upper, not the lower side of them. He must be as the man who makes poems, not the man who gathers books of verse. God, having made a sunset, lets it pass, and makes such a sunset no more. He has no picture-gallery, no library. What if in heaven men shall be so busy growing, that they have not time to write or to read! ~ George MacDonald,

1202:To be lord of space, a man must be free of all bonds to place. To be heir of all things, his heart must have no THINGS in it. He must be like him who makes things, not like one who would put everything in his pocket. He must stand on the upper, not the lower side of them. He must be as the man who makes poems, not the man who gathers books of verse. God, having made a sunset, lets it pass, and makes such a sunset no more. He has no picture-gallery, no library. What if in heaven men shall be so busy growing, that they have not time to write or to read! ~ George MacDonald,

1203:what then is death? If it be a stopping of life, then that is which cannot be. But it may be only a change in the form of life that looks like a stopping, and is not! If Death be stronger than Life, so that he stops life, how then was Life able so to flout him, that he, the thing that was not, arose from the antenatal sepulchre on which Death sat throned in impotent negation of entity, unable to preclude existence, and yet able to annihilate it? Life alone is: nothingness is not; Death cannot destroy; he is not the antagonist, not the opposite of life. ~ George MacDonald,

1204:But I withhold my pen; for vain were the fancy, by treatise or sermon or poem or tale, to persuade a man to forget himself. He cannot if he would. Sooner will he forget the presence of a raging tooth. 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. ~ George MacDonald,

1205:The sense they find in the words must be a sense small enough to pass through their narrow doors. And if mere words, without the interpreting sympathy, may mean, as they may, almost anything the receiver will or can attribute to them, how shall the man, bent at best on the salvation of his own soul, understand, for instance, the meaning of that apostle who was ready to encounter banishment itself from the presence of Christ, that the beloved brethren of his nation might enter in? To men who are not simple, simple words are the most inexplicable of riddles. ~ George MacDonald,

1206:the English general was less concerned for the moment with what he was going to do in Scotland than with the problem of actually getting his army there in working order. His main worry was a shortage of beer for the troops; on September 2 he was indenting for “vi or vii hundred tonne of bere”, five days later he was noting that “I feare lak of no thyng so moche as of drynk”, and this despite the brewing that was taking place at Berwick, and on September 11 he was announcing flatly that he could not hope to get his army to Edinburgh without beer. Like ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

1207:To attempt to apply normal law and government to the Border area was a waste of time, and both countries had long recognised this. Thus there grew up a body of local law and custom, often extremely complex, seldom consistent, and in practice all too rough and ready, by which the two governments attempted to keep their frontier subjects in order. It can probably be said to have worked moderately well, in that it prevented a decline into complete anarchy; it was at least practised by both sides with some co-operation. The wonder is that it worked at all. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

1208:them. But I often ask myself to what it all goes.--I learn to love my boys. I kill in them all the bad I can. I nourish in them all the good I can. I send them across the borders of manhood--and they leave me, and most likely I hear nothing more of them. And I say to myself: 'My life is like a wind. It blows and will cease.' But something says in reply: 'Wouldst thou not be one of God's winds, content to blow, and scatter the rain and dew, and shake the plants into fresh life, and then pass away and know nothing of what thou hast done?' And I answer: 'Yes, Lord. ~ George MacDonald,

1209:At the same time you are constantly experiencing things which you not only do not, but cannot understand. You think you understand them, but your understanding of them is only your being used to them, and therefore not surprised at them. You accept them, not because you understand them, but because you must accept them: they are there, and have unavoidable relations with you! The fact is, no man understands anything; when he knows he does not understand, that is his first tottering step--not toward understanding, but toward the capability of one day understanding. ~ George MacDonald,

1210:He was dimly angry with himself, he did not know why. It was that he had struck his wife. He had forgotten it, but was miserable about it, notwithstanding. And this misery was the voice of the great Love that had made him and his wife and the baby and Diamond, speaking in his heart, and telling him to be good. For that great Love speaks in the most wretched and dirty hearts; only the tone of its voice depends on the echoes of the place in which it sounds. On Mount Sinai, it was thunder; in the cabman's heart it was misery; in the soul of St John it was perfect blessedness. ~ George MacDonald,

1211: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. I learned that he that will be a hero, will barely be a man; that he that will be nothing but a doer of his work, is sure of his manhood. In nothing was my ideal lowered, or dimmed, or grown less precious; I only saw it too plainly, to set myself for a moment beside it. Indeed, my ideal soon became my life; whereas, formerly, my life had consisted in a vain attempt to behold, if not my ideal in myself, at least myself in my ideal. ~ George MacDonald,

1212:When I learn the meaning of a word, I know the word; but when I say to myself, 'I know the word,' there comes a reflection of the word back from the mirror of my mind, making a second impression, and after that I am at least not so likely to forget it...“When, then, I think about the impression that the word makes upon me, how it is affecting me with the knowledge of itself, then I am what I should call self-conscious of the word—conscious not only that I know the word, but that I know the phenomena of knowing the word—conscious of what I am as regards my knowing of the word. ~ George MacDonald,

1213:It would not fall in with that gradual development of life and history by which the Father works, and which must be the way to breed free, God-loving wills. It would be violent, theatrical, therefore poor in nature and in result, — not God-like in any way. Everything in God’s doing comes harmoniously with and from all the rest. Son of Man, his history shall be a man’s history, shall be The Man’s history. Shall that begin with an exception? Yet it might well be a temptation to Him who longed to do all he could for men. He was the Son of God: why should not the sons of God know it? ~ George MacDonald,

1214:You must convince your chiefs that what you're telling 'em is important, which ain't difficult, since they want to believe you, having chiefs of their own to satisfy; make as much mystery of your methods as you can; hint what a thoroughgoing ruffian you can be in a good cause, but never forget that innocence shines brighter than any virtue, "Flashman? Extraordinary fellow - kicks 'em in the crotch with the heart of a child"; remember that silence frequently passes for shrewdness, and that while suppressio veri is a damned good servant, suggestio falsi is a perilous master. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

1215:With his divine alchemy he turns not only water into wine, but common things into radiant mysteries, yea, every meal into a eucharist, and the jaws of the sepulchre into an outgoing gate. I do not mean that he makes any change in the things or ways of God, but a mighty change in the hearts and eyes of men, so that God's facts and God's meanings become their faiths and their hopes. The destroying spirit, who works in the commonplace, is ever covering the deep and clouding the high. For those who listen to that spirit great things cannot be. Such are there, but they cannot see them, ~ George MacDonald,

1216:But, sir, isn't death a dreadful thing?" asked Malcolm. "That depends on whether a man regards it as his fate or as the will of a perfect God. Its obscurity is its dread. But if God be light, then death itself must be full of splendor--a splendor probably too keen for our eyes to receive." "But there's the dying itself; isn't that fearsome? It's that I would be afraid of." "I don't see why it should be. It's the lack of a God that makes it dreadful, and you would be greatly to blame for that, Malcolm, if you hadn't found your God by the time you had to die. ~ George MacDonald,

1217:If any one thinks I am unfaithful to human fact, and overcharge the description of this child, I on my side doubt the extent of the experience of that man or woman. I admit the child a rarity, but a rarity in the right direction, and therefore a being with whom humanity has the greater need to be made acquainted. I admit that the best things are the commonest, but the highest types and the best combinations of them are the rarest. There is more love in the world than anything else, for instance; but the best love and the individual in whom love is supreme are the rarest of all things. ~ George MacDonald,

1218:Mary did not care a straw for the world besides. She was too much occupied with obedience to trouble her head about opinion, either her own or other people's. Not until a question comes puzzling and troubling us so as to paralyze the energy of our obedience is there any necessity for its solution, or any probability of finding a real one. A thousand foolish doctrines may lie unquestioned in the mind, and never interfere with the growth or bliss of him who lives in active subordination of his life to the law of life: obedience will in time exorcise them, like many another worse devil. ~ George MacDonald,

1219:God Himself - His thoughts, His will, His love, His judgments are men's home. To think His thoughts, to choose His will, to judge His judgments, and thus to know that He is in us, with us, is to be at home. And to pass through the valley of the shadow of death is the way home, but only thus, that as all changes have hitherto led us nearer to this home, the knowledge of God, so this greatest of all outward changes - for it is but an outward change - will surely usher us into a region where there will be fresh possibilities of drawing nigh in heart, soul, and mind to the Father of us all. ~ George MacDonald,

1220:And God is all in all. He is ever seeking to get down to us—to be the divine man to us. And we are ever saying, "That be far from thee, Lord!" We are careful, in our unbelief, over the divine dignity, of which he is too grand to think. Better pleasing to God, it needs little daring to say, is the audacity of Job, who, rushing into his presence, and flinging the door of his presence-chamber to the wall, like a troubled, it may be angry, but yet faithful child, calls aloud in the ear of him whose perfect Fatherhood he has yet to learn: "Am I a sea or a whale, that thou settest a watch over me? ~ George MacDonald,

1221:Even if there be no hereafter, I would live my time believing in a grand thing that ought to be true if it is not. And if these be not truths, then is the loftiest part of our nature a waste. Let me hold by the better than the actual, and fall into nothingness off the same precipice with Jesus and Paul and a thousand more, who were lovely in their lives, and with their death make even the nothingness into which they have passed like the garden of the Lord. I will go further, and say I would rather die forevermore believing as Jesus believed, than live forevermore believing as those that deny Him. ~ George MacDonald,

1222:Even Annie did not then know that it was the soul's hunger, the vague sense of a need which nothing but the God of human faces, the God of the morning and of the starful night, the God of love and self-forgetfulness, can satisfy, that sent her money-loving, poverty-stricken, pining, grumbling old aunt out staring towards the east. It is this formless idea of something at hand that keeps men and women striving to tear from the bosom of the world the secret of their own hopes. How little they know what they look for in reality is their God! This is that for which their heart and their flesh cry out. ~ George MacDonald,

1223:It’s always the same before the shooting begins—the hostesses go into a frenzy of gaiety, and all the spongers and civilians crawl out of the wainscoting braying with good fellowship because thank God they ain’t going, and the young plungers and green striplings roister it up, and their fiancées let ’em pleasure them red in the face out of pity, because the poor brave boy is off to the cannon’s mouth, and the dance goes on and the eyes grow brighter and the laughter shriller—and the older men in their dress uniforms look tired, and sip their punch by the fireplace and don’t say much at all. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

1224:There are three conceivable kinds of punishment—first, that of mere retribution, which I take to be entirely and only human—therefore, indeed, more properly inhuman, for that which is not divine is not essential to humanity, and is of evil, and an intrusion upon the human; second, that which works repentance; and third, that which refines and purifies, working for holiness. But the punishment that falls on whom the Lord loveth because they have repented, is a very different thing from the punishment that falls on those whom he loveth in deed but cannot forgive because they hold fast by their sins. ~ George MacDonald,

1225:However strange it may well seem, to do one's duty will make any one conceited who only does it sometimes. Those who do it always would as soon think of being conceited of eating their dinner as of doing their duty. What honest boy would pride himself on not picking pockets? A thief who was trying to reform would. To be conceited of doing one's duty is then a sign of how little one does it, and how little one sees what a contemptible thing it is not to do it. Could any but a low creature be conceited of not being contemptible? Until our duty becomes to us common as breathing, we are poor creatures. ~ George MacDonald,

1226:If he says, “At least I have it in my own way!”, I answer, you do not know what is your way and what is not. You know nothing of whence your impulses, your desires, your tendencies, your likings come. They may spring now from some chance, as of nerves diseased; now from some roar of a wandering bodiless devil; now from some infant hate in your heart; now from the greed of lawlessness of some ancestor you would be ashamed of if you knew him; or, it may be, now from some far-piercing chord of a heavenly orchestra: the moment comes up into your consciousness, you call it your own way, and glory in it. ~ George MacDonald,

1227:One of my greatest difficulties in consenting to think of religion was that I thought I should have to give up my beautiful thoughts and my love for the things God has made. But I find that the happiness springing from all things not in themselves sinful is much increased by religion. God is the God of the Beautiful—Religion is the love of the Beautiful, and Heaven is the Home of the Beautiful—-Nature is tenfold brighter in the Sun of Righteousness, and my love of Nature is more intense since I became a Christian—-if indeed I am one. God has not given me such thoughts and forbidden me to enjoy them. ~ George MacDonald,

1228:In the name of him who delighted to say "My Father is greater than I," I will say that his miracles in bread and in wine were far less grand and less beautiful than the works of the Father they represented, in making the corn to grow in the valleys, and the grapes to drink the sunlight on the hill-sides of the world, with all their infinitudes of tender gradation and delicate mystery of birth. But the Son of the Father be praised, who, as it were, condensed these mysteries before us, and let us see the precious gifts coming at once from gracious hands--hands that love could kiss and nails could wound. ~ George MacDonald,

1229:The Presence, indeed, was with him, and he felt it, but he knew it only as the wind and shadow, the sky and closed daisies: in all these things and the rest it took shape that it might come near him. Yea, the Presence was in his very soul, else he could never have rejoiced in friend, or desired ghost to mother him: still he knew not the Presence. But it was drawing nearer and nearer to his knowledge -- even in sun and air and night and cloud, in beast and flower and herd-boy, until at last it would reveal itself to him, in him, as Life Himself. Then the man would know that in which the child had rejoiced. ~ George MacDonald,

1230:You do not his will, and so you cannot understand him; you do not know him, that is why you cannot trust in him. You think your common sense enough to let you know what he means? Your common sense ought to be enough to know itself unequal to the task. It is the heart of the child that alone can understand the Father. Would you have me think you guilty of the sin against the Holy Ghost—that you understand Jesus Christ and yet will not obey him? That were too dreadful. I believe you do not understand him. No man can do yet what he tells him aright—but are you trying? Obedience is not perfection, but trying. ~ George MacDonald,

1231:There was no night there at this season, any more than all the year through in heaven. Indeed we have seldom real positive night in this world—so many provisions have been made against it. Every time we say, "What a lovely night!" we speak of a breach, a rift in the old night. There is light more or less, positive light, else were there no beauty. Many a night is but a low starry day, a day with a softened background against which the far-off suns of millions of other days show themselves: when the near vision vanishes the farther hope awakes. It is nowhere said of heaven, there shall be no twilight there, ~ George MacDonald,

1232:But I could not remain where I was any longer, though the daylight was hateful to me, and the thought of the great, innocent, bold sunrise unendurable. Here there was no well to cool my face, smarting with the bitterness of my own tears. Nor would I have washed in the well of that grotto, had it flowed clear as the rivers of Paradise. I rose, and feebly left the sepulchral cave. I took my way I knew not whither, but still towards the sunrise. The birds were singing; but not for me. All the creatures spoke a language of their own, with which I had nothing to do, and to which I cared not to find the key any more. ~ George MacDonald,

1233:A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean. If my drawing, on the other hand, is so far from being a work of art that it needs THIS IS A HORSE written under it, what can it matter that neither you nor your child should know what it means? It is there not so much to convey a meaning as to wake a meaning. If it do not even wake an interest, throw it aside. A meaning may be there, but it is not for you. If, again, you do not know a horse when you see it, the name written under it will not serve you much. At all events, the business of the painter is not to teach zoology. ~ George MacDonald,

1234:The clouds were gathering over Mary, too--deep and dark, but of altogether another kind from those that enveloped Letty: no troubles are for one moment to be compared with those that come of the wrongness, even if it be not wickedness, that is our own. Some clouds rise from stagnant bogs and fens; others from the wide, clean, large ocean. But either kind, thank God, will serve the angels to come down by. In the old stories of celestial visitants the clouds do much; and it is oftenest of all down the misty slope of griefs and pains and fears, that the most powerful joy slides into the hearts of men and women and children. ~ George MacDonald,

1235:THE SHADOWS Table of Contents Old Ralph Rinkelmann made his living by comic sketches, and all but lost it again by tragic poems. So he was just the man to be chosen king of the fairies, for in Fairyland the sovereignty is elective. It is no doubt very strange that fairies should desire to have a mortal king; but the fact is, that with all their knowledge and power, they cannot get rid of the feeling that some men are greater than they are, though they can neither fly nor play tricks. So at such times as there happens to be twice the usual number of sensible electors, such a man as Ralph Rinkelmann gets to be chosen. They ~ George MacDonald,

1236:The care that is filling your mind at this moment, or but waiting till you lay the book aside to leap upon you—that need which is no need, is a demon sucking at the spring of your life. “No; mine is a reasonable care—an unavoidable care, indeed.” Is it something you have to do this very moment? “No.” Then you are allowing it to usurp the place of something that is required of you this moment. “There is nothing required of me at this moment.” Nay but there is—the greatest thing that can be required of man. “Pray, what is it?” Trust in the living God…. “I do trust Him in spiritual matters.” Everything is an affair of the spirit. ~ George MacDonald,

1237:She would be one of those who kneel to their own shadows till feet grow on their knees; then go down on their hands till their hands grow into feet; then lay their faces on the ground till they grow into snouts; when at last they are a hideous sort of lizards, each of which believes himself the best, wisest, and loveliest being in the world, yea, the very centre of the universe. And so they run about for ever looking for their own shadows that they may worship them, and miserable because they cannot find them, being themselves too near the ground to have any shadows; and what becomes of them at last, there is but one who knows. ~ George MacDonald,

1238:But the princess had to learn to walk, before they could be married with any propriety. And this was not so easy at her time of life, for she could walk no more than a baby. She was always falling down and hurting herself. “Is this the gravity you used to make so much of?” said she one day to the prince, as he raised her from the floor. “For my part, I was a great deal more comfortable without it.” “No, no, that’s not it. This is it,” replied the prince, as he took her up, and carried her about like a baby, kissing her all the time. “This is gravity.” “That’s better,” said she. “I don’t mind that so much. ~ George MacDonald,

1239:Other March law offences included truce-breaking, attacking castles, impeding a Warden, importing wool, and a delightful local custom known as “bauchling and reproaching”. This meant publicly vilifying and upbraiding someone, usually at a day of truce; such abuse might be directed at a man who had broken his word, or had neglected to honour a bond or pay a ransom. The “bauchler” (also known as brangler, bargler, etc.) sometimes made his reproof by carrying a glove on his lance-point, or displaying a picture of his enemy, and by crying out or sounding a horn-blast, indicating that his opponent was a false man and detestable. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

1240:himself—"What if the dying who seem thus divided from us, are but looking over the tops of insignificant earthly things? What if the heart within them is lying content in a closer contact with ours than our dull fears and too level outlook will allow us to share? One thing their apparent withdrawal means—that we must go over to them; they cannot retrace, for that would be to retrograde. They have already begun to learn the language and ways of the old world, begun to be children there afresh, while we remain still the slaves of new, low—bred habits of unbelief and self-preservation, which already to them look as unwise as unlovely. ~ George MacDonald,

1241:I am now getting old—faster and faster. I cannot help my gray hairs, nor the wrinkles that gather so slowly yet ruthlessly; no, nor the quaver that will come in my voice, not the sense of being feeble in the knees, even when I walk only across the floor of my study. But I have not got used to age yet. I do not FEEL one atom older than I did at three-and-twenty. Nay, to tell all the truth, I feel a good deal younger.—For then I only felt that a man had to take up his cross; whereas now I feel that a man has to follow Him; and that makes an unspeakable difference.” ~ George MacDonaldGeorge MacDonald, “Annals of a Quiet Neighbohood ~ George MacDonald,

1242:notwithstanding the beauty of this country of Faerie, in which we are, there is much that is wrong in it. If there are great splendours, there are corresponding horrors; heights and depths; beautiful women and awful fiends; noble men and weaklings. All a man has to do, is to better what he can. And if he will settle it with himself, that even renown and success are in themselves of no great value, and be content to be defeated, if so be that the fault is not his; and so go to his work with a cool brain and a strong will, he will get it done; and fare none the worse in the end, that he was not burdened with provision and precaution. ~ George MacDonald,

1243:The stars are spinning their threads, And the clouds are the dust that flies, And the suns are weaving them up For the time when the sleepers shall rise. The ocean in music rolls, And gems are turning to eyes, And the trees are gathering souls For the day when the sleepers shall rise. The weepers are learning to smile, And laughter to glean the sighs; Burn and bury the care and guile, For the day when the sleepers shall rise. Oh, the dews and the moths and the daisy red, The larks and the glimmers and flows! The lilies and sparrows and daily bread, And the something that nobody knows! ~ George MacDonald,

1244:What Gibbie made of Mr. Sclater's prayers, either in congregational or family devotion, I am at some loss to imagine. Beside his memories of the direct fervid outpouring and appeal of Janet, in which she seemed to talk face to face with God, they must have seemed to him like the utterances of some curiously constructed wooden automaton, doing its best to pray, without any soul to be saved, any weakness to be made strong, any doubt to be cleared, any hunger to be filled. What can be less like religion than the prayers of a man whose religion is his profession, and who, if he were not "in the church," would probably never pray at all? ~ George MacDonald,

1245:There is no evil in sorrow. True, it is not an essential good, a good in itself, like love; but it will mingle with any good thing, and is even so allied to good that it will open the door of the heart for any good. More of sorrowful than of joyful men are always standing about the everlasting doors that open into the presence of the Most High. (...) I repeat, a man in sorrow is in general far nearer God than a man in joy. Gladness may make a man forget his thanksgiving; misery drives him to his prayers. For we are not yet, we are only becoming. The endless day will at length dawn whose every throbbing moment will heave our hearts Godward ~ George MacDonald,

1246:I fear you will never arrive at an understanding of God so long as you cannot bring yourself to see the good that often comes as a result of pain. For there is nothing, from the lowest, weakest tone of suffering to the loftiest acme of pain, to which God does not respond. There is nothing in all the universe which does not in some way vibrate within the heart of God. No creature suffers alone; He suffers with His creatures and through it is in the process of bringing His sons and daughters through the cleansing and glorifying fires, without which the created cannot be made the very children of God, partakers of the divine nature and peace. ~ George MacDonald,

1247:The day will one day come--or what of the long-promised kingdom of heaven?--when a woman, instead of spending anxious thought on the adornment of her own outward person, will seek with might the adornment of the inward soul of another, and will make that her crown of rejoicing. Nay, are there none such even now? The day will come when a man, rather than build a great house for the overflow of a mighty hospitality, will give himself, in the personal labor of outgoing love, to build spiritual houses like St. Paul--a higher art than any of man's invention. O my brother, what were it not for thee to have a hand in making thy brother beautiful! ~ George MacDonald,

1248:Elgin himself looked ten years younger, now that he’d cast the die, but I thought exuberance had got the better of him when he strode into the saloon later, threw The Origin of Species on the table and announced: "It’s very original, no doubt, but not for a hot evening. What I need is some trollop." I couldn’t believe my ears, and him a church-goer, too. "Well, my lord, I dunno,” says I. "Tientsin ain’t much of a place, but I’ll see what I can drum up —" "Michel’s been reading Doctor Thorne since Taku," cried he. "He must have finished it by now, surely! Ask him, Flashman, will you?" So I did, and had my ignorance, enlightened. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

1249:For love loves unto purity. Love has ever in view the absolute loveliness of that which it beholds. Where loveliness is incomplete, and love cannot love its fill of loving, it spends itself to make more lovely, that it may love more; it strives for perfection, even that itself may be perfected—not in itself, but in the object. As it was love that first created humanity, so even human love, in proportion to its divinity, will go on creating the beautiful for its own outpouring. There is nothing eternal but that which loves and can be loved, and love is ever climbing towards the consummation when such shall be the universe, imperishable, divine. ~ George MacDonald,

1250:Love and marriage are of the Father's most powerful means for the making of his foolish little ones into sons and daughters. But so unlike in many cases are the immediate consequences to those desired and expected, that it is hard for not a few to believe that he is anywhere looking after their fate--caring about them at all. And the doubt would be a reasonable one, if the end of things was marriage. But the end is life--that we become the children of God; after which, all things can and will go their grand, natural course; the heart of the Father will be content for his children, and the hearts of the children will be content in their Father. ~ George MacDonald,

1251:To trust in spite of the look of being forgotten; to keep crying out into the vast whence comes no voice, and where seems no hearing; to struggle after light, where is no glimmer to guide; at every turn to find a door-less wall, yet ever seek a door; to see the machinery of the world pauseless grinding on as if self-moved, caring for no life, nor shifting a hair's-breadth for all entreaty, and yet believe that God is awake and utterly loving; to desire nothing but what comes meant for us from his hand; to wait patiently, willing to die of hunger, fearing only lest faith should fail—such is the victory that overcometh the world, such is faith indeed. ~ George MacDonald,

1252:And it was understood that Scottish Borderers did not take kindly to outside Wardens. The oustanding example was the unfortunate Frenchman, Anthony Darcy, the Sieur de la Bastie, who in 1516 was ill-advised enough to accept the Wardenry of all the Scottish Marches, with particular responsibility in the east. This was Hume country, and they regarded Darcy with “horrid resentment”. He seems to have been a brave, honest and conscientious Warden, which no doubt rendered him all the more odious. The outcome was that the Humes finally caught up with him near Duns, cut off his head, and took it home in triumph, tied by its long locks to a saddle-bow. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

1253:you understood any world besides your own, you would understand your own much better.—When a heart is really alive, then it is able to think live things. There is one heart all whose thoughts are strong, happy creatures, and whose very dreams are lives. When some pray, they lift heavy thoughts from the ground, only to drop them on it again; others send up their prayers in living shapes, this or that, the nearest likeness to each. All live things were thoughts to begin with, and are fit therefore to be used by those that think. When one says to the great Thinker:—‘Here is one of thy thoughts: I am thinking it now!’ that is a prayer—a word to the big heart ~ George MacDonald,

1254:If we will but let our God and Father work His will with us, there can be no limit to His enlargement of our existence, to the flood of life with which He will overflow our consciousness. We have no conception of what life might be, of how vast the consciousness of which we could be made capable. Many can recall some moment in which life seemed richer and fuller than ever before. To some, such moments arrive mostly in dreams. Shall soul, awake or asleep, infold a bliss greater than its Life, the living God, can seal, perpetuate, enlarge? Can the human twilight of a dream be capable of generating or holding a fuller life than the morning of divine activity? ~ George MacDonald,

1255:THERE was once a little princess who—"But, Mr. Author, why do you always write about princesses?" "Because every little girl is a princess." "You will make them vain if you tell them that." "Not if they understand what I mean." "Then what do you mean?" "What do you mean by a princess?" "The daughter of a king." "Very well, then every little girl is a princess, and there would be no need to say anything about it, except that she is always in danger of forgetting her rank, and behaving as if she had grown out of the mud. I have seen little princesses behave like the children of thieves and lying beggars, and that is why they need, to be told they are princesses. ~ George MacDonald,

1256:[91] Why Should It Be Necessary? “But if God is so good as you represent Him, and if He knows all that we need, and better far than we do ourselves, why should it be necessary to ask Him for anything?” I answer, What if He knows Prayer to be the thing we need first and most? What if the main object in God’s idea of prayer be the supplying of our great, our endless need—the need of Himself?…Hunger may drive the runaway child home, and he may or may not be fed at once, but he needs his mother more than his dinner. Communion with God is the one need of the soul beyond all other need: prayer is the beginning of that communion, and some need is the motive of that prayer ~ George MacDonald,

1257:Society is neither my master nor my servant, neither my father nor my sister; and so long as she does not bar my way to the kingdom of heaven, which is the only society worth getting into, I feel no right to complain of how she treats me. I have no claim on her; I do not acknowledge her laws--hardly her existence, and she has no authority over me. Why should she, how could she, constituted as she is, receive such as me? The moment she did so, she would cease to be what she is; and, if all be true that one hears of her, she does me a kindness in excluding me. What can it matter to me, Letty, whether they call me a lady or not, so long as Jesus says “Daughter” to me? ~ George MacDonald,

1258:But at length, O God, will you not cast Death and Hell into the lake of Fire - even into your own consuming self? Death shall then die everlastingly. ... Then indeed will you be all in all. For then our poor brothers and sisters, every one - O God, we trust in you, the Consuming Fire - shall have been burnt clean and brought home. For if their moans, myriads of ages away, would turn heaven for us into hell - shall a man be more merciful than God? Shall, of all His glories, His mercy alone not be infinite? Shall a brother love a brother more than The Father loves a son? - more than The Brother Christ loves His brother? Would He not die yet again to save one brother more? ~ George MacDonald,

1259:I would never speak about faith, but speak about the Lord himself - not theologically, as to the why and wherefore of his death - but as he showed himself in his life on earth, full of grace, love, beauty, tenderness and truth. Then the needy heart cannot help hoping and trusting in him, and having faith, without ever thinking about faith. How a human heart with human feelings and necessities is ever to put confidence in the theological phantom which is commonly called Christ in our pulpits, I do not know. It is commonly a miserable representation of him who spent thirty-three years on our Earth, living himself into the hearts and souls of men, and thus manifesting God to them. ~ George MacDonald,

1260:There are souls innumerable in the world, as dry as the Sahara desert—souls which, when they look most gay and summer-like, are only flaunting the flowers gathered from other people's gardens, stuck without roots into their own unproducing soil. Oh, the dreariness, the sandy sadness of such poor arid souls! They are hungry, and eat husks; they are thirsty, and drink hot wine; their sleep is a stupor, and their life, if not an unrest, then a yielded decay. Only when praised or admired do they feel as if they lived! But Joan was not yet of such. She had had too much discomfort to have entered yet into their number. There was water not yet far from the surface of her consciousness. ~ George MacDonald,

1261:These wedding guests could have done without wine, surely without more wine and better wine. But the Father looks with no esteem upon a bare existence, and is ever working, even by suffering, to render life more rich and plentiful. His gifts are to the overflowing of the cup; but when the cup would overflow, he deepens its hollow, and widens its brim. Our Lord is profuse like his Father, yea, will, at his own sternest cost, be lavish to his brethren. He will give them wine indeed. But even they who know whence the good wine comes, and joyously thank the giver, shall one day cry out, like the praiseful ruler of the feast to him who gave it not, "Thou hast kept the good wine until now. ~ George MacDonald,

1262:To be unable to bear disapproval was an unworthy weakness. But in her case it came nowise of the pride which blame stirs to resentment, but altogether of the self-depreciation which disapproval rouses to yet greater dispiriting. Praise was to her a precious thing, in part because it made her feel as if she could go on; blame, a misery, in part because it made her feel as if all was of no use, she never could do anything right. She had not yet learned that the right is the right, come of praise or blame what may. The right will produce more right and be its own reward--in the end a reward altogether infinite, for God will meet it with what is deeper than all right, namely, perfect love. ~ George MacDonald,

1263:I recognized the handwriting, and my heart gave a skip; when I opened it I got a turn, for it began, 'To my beloved Hector,' and I thought, by God she's cheating on me, and has sent me the wrong letter by mistake. But in the second line was a reference to Achilles, and another to Ajax, so I understood she was just addressing me in terms which she accounted fitting for a martial paladin; she knew no better. It was a common custom at that time, in the more romantic females, to see their soldier husbands and sweethearts as Greek heroes, instead of the whore-mongering, drunken clowns most of them were. However, the Greek heroes were probably no better, so it was not far off the mark. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

1264:If you see me with my face all black, don't be frightened. If you see me flapping wings like a bat's, as big as the whole sky, don't be frightened. If you hear me raging ten times worse than Mrs. Bill, the blacksmith's wife - even if you see me looking in at people's windows like Mrs. Eve Dropper, the gardener's wife - you must believe that I am doing my work. Nay, diamond, if I change into a serpent or a tiger, you must not let go your hold of me, for my hand will never change in yours if you keep a good hold. If you keep a hold, you will know who I am all the time, even when you look at me and can't see me the least like the North Wind. I may look something very awful. Do you understand? ~ George MacDonald,

1265:Naturally the first emotion of man toward the being he calls God, but of whom he knows so little, is fear. Where it is possible that fear should exist, it is well it should exist, cause continual uneasiness, and be cast out by nothing less than love…. Until love, which is the truth toward God, is able to cast out fear, it is well that fear should hold; it is a bond, however poor, between that which is and That which creates—a bond that must be broken, but a bond that can be broken only by the tightening of an infinitely closer bond. Verily God must be terrible to those that are far from Him: for they fear He will do, yea, He is doing with them what they do not, cannot desire, and can ill endure. ~ George MacDonald,

1266:She was simply a young woman who believed that the man called Jesus Christ is a real person, such as those represent him who profess to have known him; and she therefore believed the man himself—believed that, when he said a thing, he entirely meant it, knowing it to be true; believed, therefore, that she had no choice but do as he told her. That man was the servant of all; therefore, to regard any honest service as degrading would be, she saw, to deny Christ, to call the life of creation's hero a disgrace. Nor was he the first servant; he did not of himself choose his life; the Father gave it him to live--sent him to be a servant, because he, the Father, is the first and greatest servant of all. ~ George MacDonald,

1267:In sum, disciples might do well to avoid the bibliolatry that characterizes scripture as unerring truth. Parley Pratt made this point himself in The Fountain of Knowledge, a small pamphlet he wrote in 1844. With elegant metaphor, he noted that scripture resulted from revelatory process and was thus the product of revealed truth, not the other way around. We do well to look to a stream for nourishing water, but we do better to secure the fountain. That fountain, Pratt noted, is “the gift of revelation,” which “the restoration of all things” heralds.21 Or, in George MacDonald’s metaphor, we should hold the scriptures as “the moon of our darkness, . . . not dear as the sun towards which we haste." p56 ~ Terryl L Givens,

1268:The sign or cause of coming death is an indescribable longing for something, they know not what, which seizes them, and drives them into solitude, consuming them within, till the body fails. When a youth and a maiden look too deep into each other's eyes, this longing seizes and possesses them; but instead of drawing nearer to each other, they wander away, each alone, into solitary places, and die of their desire. But it seems to me, that thereafter they are born babes upon our earth: where, if, when grown, they find each other, it goes well with them; if not, it will seem to go ill. MacDonald, George. Phantastes, a Faerie Romance for Men and Women (Kindle Locations 1214-1218). Kindle Edition. ~ George MacDonald,

1269:There is no water in oxygen, no water in hydrogen: it comes bubbling fresh from the imagination of the living God, rushing from under the great white throne of the glacier. The very thought of it makes one gasp with an elemental joy no metaphysician can analyse. The water itself, that dances, and sings, and slakes the wonderful thirst--symbol and picture of that draught for which the woman of Samaria made her prayer to Jesus--this lovely thing itself, whose very wetness is a delight to every inch of the human body in its embrace--this live thing which, if I might, I would have running through my room, yea, babbling along my table--this water is its own self its own truth, and is therein a truth of God. ~ George MacDonald,

1270:For all clergymen whom I had yet met, regarded mankind and their interests solely from the clerical point of view, seeming far more desirous that a man should be a good church man, as they called it, than that he should love God. Hence, there was always an indescribable and, to me, unpleasant odour of their profession about them. If they knew more concerning the life of the world than other men, why should everything they said remind one of mustiness and mildew? In a word, why were they not men at worst, when at best they ought to be more of men than other men?--And here lay the difficulty: by no effort could I get the face before me to fit into the clerical mould which I had all ready in my own mind for it. ~ George MacDonald,

1271:Ah, but,' says the partisan of God, 'the Almighty stands in a relation very different from that of an earthly father: there is no parallel.' I grant it: there is no parallel. The man did not create the child, he only yielded to an impulse created in himself: God is infinitely more bound to provide for his child than any man is to provide for his. The relation is infinitely, divinely closer. It is God to whom every hunger, every aspiration, every desire, every longing of our nature is to be referred; he made all our needs—made us the creatures of a thousand necessities—and have we no claim on him? Nay, we have claims innumerable, infinite; and his one great claim on us is that we should claim our claims of him. ~ George MacDonald,

1272:For when you say that, to be saved, a man must hold this or that, then are you leaving the living God and his will, and putting trust in some notion about him or his will. To make my meaning clearer,—some of you say we must trust in the finished work of Christ; or again, our faith must be in the merits of Christ—in the atonement he has made—in the blood he has shed: all these statements are a simple repudiation of the living Lord, in whom we are told to believe, who, by his presence with and in us, and our obedience to him, lifts us out of darkness into light, leads us from the kingdom of Satan into the glorious liberty of the sons of God. No manner or amount of belief about him is the faith of the New Testament. ~ George MacDonald,

1273:She had turned thought and feeling into life, into reality, into creation. They speak of the creations of the human intellect, of the human imagination! there is nothing man can do comes half so near the making of the Maker as the ordering of his way--except one thing: the highest creation of which man is capable, is to will the will of the Father. That has in it an element of the purely creative, and then is man likest God. But simply to do what we ought, is an altogether higher, diviner, more potent, more creative thing, than to write the grandest poem, paint the most beautiful picture, carve the mightiest statue, build the most worshiping temple, dream out the most enchanting commotion of melody and harmony. ~ George MacDonald,

1274:Be very sure, my son, God is the only adviser to be trusted, and you must do what he tells you, even if it lead you to a stake, to be burned by the slow fire of poverty.—O my Father!" cried the old man, breaking out suddenly in prayer, "my soul is a flickering flame of which thou art the eternal, inextinguishable fire. I am blessed because thou art. Because thou art life, I live. Nothing can hurt me, because nothing can hurt thee. To thy care I leave my son, for thou lovest him as thou hast loved me. Deal with him as thou hast dealt with me. I ask for nothing, care for nothing but thy will. Strength is gone from me, but my life is hid in thee. I am a feeble old man, but I am dying into the eternal day of thy strength. ~ George MacDonald,

1275:Remember, if indeed thou art able to know it, that not in any church is the service done that he requires. He will say to no man, 'You never went to church: depart from me; I do not know you;' but, 'Inasmuch as you never helped one of my father's children, you have done nothing for me.' Church or chapel is not the place for divine service. It is a place of prayer, a place of praise, a place to feed upon good things, a place to learn of God, as what place is not? It is a place to look in the eyes of your neighbour, and love God along with him. But the world in which you move, the place of your living and loving and labour, not the church you go to on your holiday, is the place of divine service. Serve your neighbour, and you serve him. ~ George MacDonald,

1276:As the love of him who is love transcends ours as the heavens are higher than the earth, so must he desire in his child infinitely more than the most jealous love of the best mother can desire in hers. He would have him rid of all discontent, all fear, all grudging, all bitterness in word or thought, all gauging and measuring of his own with a different rod from that he would apply to another's. He will have no curling of the lip; no indifference in him to the man whose service in any form he uses; no desire to excel another, no contentment at gaining by his loss. He will not have him receive the smallest service without gratitude; would not hear from him a tone to jar the heart of another, a word to make it ache, be the ache ever so transient. ~ George MacDonald,

1277:The Lord of gladness delights in the laughter of a merry heart. These wedding guests could have done without wine, surely without more wine and better wine. But the Father looks with no esteem upon a bare existence, and is ever working, even by suffering, to render life more rich and plentiful. His gifts are to the overflowing of the cup; but when the cup would overflow, he deepens its hollow, and widens its brim. Our Lord is profuse like his Father, yea, will, at his own sternest cost, be lavish to his brethren. He will give them wine indeed. But even they who know whence the good wine comes, and joyously thank the giver, shall one day cry out, like the praiseful ruler of the feast to him who gave it not, "Thou hast kept the good wine until now. ~ George MacDonald,

1278:Then, with a horror of pitiful amazement, she saw a great cross marked in two cruel stripes on his back; and the thoughts that thereupon went coursing through her loving imagination, it would be hard to set forth. Could it be that the Lord was still, child and man, suffering for his race, to deliver his brothers and sisters from their sins? -- wandering, enduring, beaten, blessing still? accepting the evil, slaying it, and returning none? his patience the one rock where the evil word finds no echo; his heart the one gulf into which the dead-sea wave rushes with no recoil -- from which ever flows back only purest water, sweet and cool; the one abyss of destroying love, into which all wrong tumbles, and finding no reaction, is lost, ceases for evermore? ~ George MacDonald,

1279:It avails nothing to answer that we lost our birthright by the fall. I do not care to argue that I did not fall when Adam fell; for I have fallen many a time, and there is a shadow on my soul which I or another may call a curse; I cannot get rid of a something that always intrudes between my heart and the blue of every sky. But it avails nothing, either for my heart or their argument, to say I have fallen and been cast out: can any repudiation, even that of God, undo the facts of an existent origin? Nor is it merely that he made me: by whose power do I go on living? When he cast me out, as you say, did I then begin to draw my being from myself—or from the devil? In whom do I live and move and have my being? It cannot be that I am not the creature of God. ~ George MacDonald,

1280:Had she presumed in coming--anticipated the guidance of Providence, and was she therefore now where she had no right to be? She could not tell; but, anyhow, here she was, and no one could be anywhere without the fact involving its own duty. Even if she had put herself there, and was to blame for being there, that did not free her from the obligations of the position, and she was willing to do whatever should now be given her to do. God was not a hard master; if she had made a mistake, he would pardon her, and either give her work here, where she found herself, or send her elsewhere. I need not say that thinking was not all her care; for she thought in the presence of Him who, because he is always setting our wrong things right, is called God our Saviour. ~ George MacDonald,

1281:Doorkeepers He was not merely of the salt of the earth, but of the leaven of the kingdom, contributing more to the true life of the world than many a thousand far more widely known and honoured. Such as this man are the chief springs of thought, feeling, inquiry, action, in their neighbourhood; they radiate help and breathe comfort; they reprove, they counsel, they sympathize; in a word, they are doorkeepers of the house of God. Constantly upon its threshold, and every moment pushing the door to peep in, they let out radiance enough to keep the hearts of men believing in the light. They make an atmosphere about them in which spiritual things can thrive, and out of their school often come men who do greater things, better they cannot do, than they. Malcolm, ch. ~ George MacDonald,

1282:For the world is - allow us the homely figure - the human being turned inside out. All that moves in the mind is symbolized in Nature. Or, to use another more philosophical, and certainly not less poetic figure, the world is a sensuous analysis of humanity, and hence an inexhaustible wardrobe for the clothing of human thought. Take any word expressive of emotion - take the word 'emotion' itself - and you will find that its primary meaning is of the outer world. In the swaying of the woods, in the unrest of the "wavy plain" the imagination saw the picture of a well-known condition of the human mind; and hence the word 'emotion'. The man who cannot invent will never discover. Wisdom as well as folly will serve a fool's purpose; he turns all into folly. ~ George MacDonald,

1283:But this part of my dream, the most lovely of all, I can find no words to describe; nor can I even recall to my own mind the half of what I felt. I only know that something was given me then, some spiritual apprehension, to be again withdrawn, but to be given to us all, I believe, some day, out of his infinite love, and withdrawn no more. Every heart that had ever ached, or longed, or wandered, I knew was there, folded warm and soft, safe and glad. And it seemed in my dream that to know this was the crown of all my bliss—yes, even more than to be myself in my Father's arms. Awake, the thought of multitude had always oppressed my mind; it did not then. From the comfort and joy it gave me to see them there, I seemed then first to know how my own heart had ached for them. ~ George MacDonald,

1284:The God who is ever uttering himself in the changeful profusions of nature; who takes millions of years to form a soul that shall understand him and be blessed; who never needs to be, and never is, in haste; who welcomes the simplest thought of truth or beauty as the return for seed he has sown upon the old fallows of eternity, who rejoices in the response of a faltering moment to the age-long cry of his wisdom in the streets; the God of music, of painting, of building, the Lord of Hosts, the God of mountains and oceans; whose laws go forth from one unseen point of wisdom, and thither return without an atom of loss; the God of history working in time unto christianity; this God is the God of little children, and he alone can be perfectly, abandonedly simple and devoted. ~ George MacDonald,

1285:But I still state unhesitatingly, that for pure, vacillating stupidity, for superb incompetence to command, for ignorance combined with bad judgment --in short, for the true talent for catastrophe -- Elphy Bey stood alone. Others abide our question, but Elphy outshines them all as the greatest military idiot of our own or any other day. Only he could have permitted the First Afghan War and let it develop to such ruinous defeat. It was not easy: he started with a good army, a secure position, some excellent officers, a disorganized enemy, and repeated opportunities to save the situation. But Elphy, with the touch of true genius, swept aside these obstacles with unerring precision, and out of order wrought complete chaos. We shall not, with luck, look upon his like again. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

1286:Once, as I passed by a cottage, there came out a lovely fairy child, with two wondrous toys, one in each hand. The one was the tube through which the fairy-gifted poet looks when he beholds the same thing everywhere; the other that through which he looks when he combines into new forms of loveliness those images of beauty which his own choice has gathered from all regions wherein he has travelled. Round the child’s head was an aureole of emanating rays. As I looked at him in wonder and delight, round crept from behind me the something dark, and the child stood in my shadow. Straightway he was a commonplace boy, with a rough broad-brimmed straw hat, through which brim the sun shone from behind. The toys he carried were a multiplying-glass and a kaleidoscope. I sighed and departed. ~ George MacDonald,

1287:she had no stay, no root in herself yet. Well do I know not one human being ought, even were it possible, to be enough for himself; each of us needs God and every human soul he has made, before he has enough; but we ought each to be able, in the hope of what is one day to come, to endure for a time, not having enough. Letty was unblamable that she desired the comfort of humanity around her soul, but I am not sure that she was quite unblamable in not being fit to walk a few steps alone, or even to sit still and expect. […] and now her heart was like a child left alone in a great room. She had not yet learned that we must each bear his own burden, and so become able to bear each the burden of the other. Poor friends we are, if we are capable only of leaning, and able never to support. ~ George MacDonald,

1288:I find I must borrow yet another parable from George MacDonald. Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of—throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself. ~ C S Lewis,

1289:When she opened her eyes, she saw nothing but a strange lovely blue over and beneath and all about her. The lady and the beautiful room had vanished from her sight, and she seemed utterly alone. But instead of being afraid, she felt more than happy - perfectly blissful. And from somewhere came the voice of the lady, singing a strange sweet song, of which she could distinguish every word; but of the sense she had only a feeling - no understanding. Nor could she remember a single line after it was gone. It vanished, like the poetry in a dream, as fast as it came. In after years, however, she would sometimes fancy that snatches of melody suddenly rising in her brain must be little phrases and fragments of the air of that song; and the very fancy would make her happier, and abler to do her duty. ~ George MacDonald,

1290:Things that we are right in thinking bad, must be bad to God as well as to us; but may there not be things so far above us, that we cannot take them in, and they seem bad because they are so far above us in goodness that we see them partially and untruly? There must be room in his wisdom for us to mistake! He would try to trust! He would say, "If thou art my father, be my father, and comfort thy child. Perhaps thou hast some way! Perhaps things are not as thou wouldst have them, and thou art doing what can be done to set them right! If thou art indeed true to thy own, it were hard not to be believed—hard that one of thine own should not trust thee, should not give thee time to make things clear, should behave to thee as if thou wouldst not explain, when it is that we are unable to understand! ~ George MacDonald,

1291:GGibbie never thought about himself, therefore was there wide room for the entrance of the spirit. Does the questioning thought arise to any reader: How could a man be conscious of bliss without the thought of himself? I answer the doubt: When a man turns to look at himself, that moment the glow of the loftiest bliss begins to fade; the pulsing fire-flies throb paler in the passionate night; an unseen vapour steams up from the marsh and dims the star-crowded sky and the azure sea; and the next moment the very bliss itself looks as if it had never been more than a phosphorescent gleam -- the summer lightning of the brain. For then the man sees himself but in his own dim mirror, whereas ere he turned to look in that, he knew himself in the absolute clarity of God's present thought out-bodying him. ~ George MacDonald,

1292:It was a glorious morning. The wind had fallen quite, and the sun was shining as if he would say, "Keep up your hearts; I am up here still. I have not forgotten you. By and by you shall see more of me." But Nature lay dead, with a great white sheet cast over face and form. Not dead?—Just as much dead as ever was man, save for the inner death with which he kills himself, and which she cannot die. It is only to the eyes of his neighbours that the just man dies: to himself, and to those on the other side, he does not die, but is born instead: "He that liveth and believeth in me shall never die." But the poor old lord felt the approaching dank and cold of the sepulchre as the end of all things to him—if indeed he would be permitted to lie there, and not have to get up and go to worse quarters still. ~ George MacDonald,

1293:...[T]wo of you can be no match for the three giants, I will find you, if I can, a third brother, who will take on himself the third share of the fight, and the preparation...I will show him to you in a glass, and, when he comes, you will know him at once. If he will share your endeavors, you must teach him all you know, and he will repay you well, in present song, and in future deeds.' She opened the door of a curious old cabinet that stood in the room. On the inside of this door was an oval convex mirror...we at length saw reflected the place where we stood, and the old dame seated in her chair...at the feet of the dame lay a young man...weeping. 'Surely this youth will not serve our ends,' said I, 'for he weeps.' The old woman smiled. 'Past tears are present strength,'said she. ~ George MacDonald,

1294:But Mary had not come into the world to be sad or to help another to be sad. Sorrowful we may often have to be, but to indulge in sorrow is either not to know or to deny God our Saviour. True, her heart ached for Letty; and the ache immediately laid itself as close to Letty's ache as it could lie; but that was only the advance-guard of her army of salvation, the light cavalry of sympathy: the next division was help; and behind that lay patience, and strength, and hope, and faith,and joy. This last, modern teachers, having failed to regard it as a virtue, may well decline to regard as a duty; but he is a poor Christian indeed in whom joy has not at least a growing share, and Mary was not a poor Christian--at least, for the time she had been learning, and as Christians go in the present aeon of their history. ~ George MacDonald,

1295:Doubt swells and surges, with swelling doubt behind! My soul in storm is but a tattered sail, Streaming its ribbons on the torrent gale; In calm, 'tis but a limp and flapping thing: Oh! swell it with thy breath; make it a wing, To sweep through thee the ocean, with thee the wind Nor rest until in thee its haven it shall find. Roses are scentless, hopeless are the morns, Rest is but weakness, laughter crackling thorns, But love is life. To die of love is then The only pass to higher life than this. All love is death to loving, living men; All deaths are leaps across clefts to the abyss. Weakness needs pity, sometimes love's rebuke; Strength only sympathy deserves and draws - And grows by every faithful loving look. Ripeness must always come with loss of might. ~ George MacDonald,

1296:Under Janet, Gibbie was saved the thousand agonies that befall the conscientious disciple, from the forcing upon him, as the thoughts and will of the eternal Father of our spirits, of the ill expressed and worse understood experiences, the crude conjectures, the vulgar imaginations of would-be teachers of the multitude. Containing truth enough to save those of sufficiently low development to receive such teaching without disgust, it contains falsehood enough, but for the Spirit of God, to ruin all nobler—I mean all childlike natures, utterly; and many such it has gone far to ruin, driving them even to a madness in which they have died. Jesus alone knows the Father, and can reveal him. Janet studied only Jesus, and as a man knows his friend, so she, only infinitely better, knew her more than friend—her Lord and her God. Do ~ George MacDonald,

1297:Anybody with leisure can do that who is willing to begin where everything ought to be begun--that is, at the beginning. Nothing worth calling good can or ever will be started full grown. The essential of any good is life, and the very body of created life, and essential to it, being its self operant, is growth. The larger start you make, the less room you leave for life to extend itself. You fill with the dead matter of your construction the places where assimilation ought to have its perfect work, building by a life-process, self-extending, and subserving the whole. Small beginnings with slow growings have time to root themselves thoroughly--I do not mean in place nor yet in social regard, but in wisdom. Such even prosper by failures, for their failures are not too great to be rectified without injury to the original idea. ~ George MacDonald,

1298:But this was not all, for she soon found that the thread, after going straight down for a little way, turned first sideways in one direction, then sideways in another, and then shot, at various angles, hither and thither inside the heap, so that she began to be afraid that to clear the thread she must remove the whole huge gathering. She was dismayed at the very idea, but, losing no time, set to work with a will; and with aching back, and bleeding fingers and hands, she worked on, sustained by the pleasure of seeing the heap slowly diminish and begin to show itself on the opposite side of the fire. Another thing which helped to keep up her courage was that, as often as she uncovered a turn of the thread, instead of lying loose upon the stone, it tightened up; this made her sure that her grandmother was at the end of it somewhere. ~ George MacDonald,

1299:Troubled soul, thou are not bound to feel but thou art bound to arise. God loves thee whether thou feelest or not. Thou canst not love when thou wilt, but thou art bound to fight the hatred in thee to the last. Try not to feel good when thou art not good, but cry to Him who is good. He changes not because thou changest. Nay, He has an especial tenderness of love toward thee for that thou art in the dark and hast no light, and His heart is glad when thou doest arise and say, “I will go to my Father.”…Fold the arms of thy faith, and wait in the quietness until light goes up in thy darkness. For the arms of thy Faith I say, but not of thy Action: bethink thee of something that thou oughtest to do, and go to do it, if it be but the sweeping of a room, or the preparing of a meal, or a visit to a friend. Heed not thy feeling: Do thy work. ~ George MacDonald,

1300:I brooded over the past; I never, at this time, so far as I remember, dreamed of looking forward. I had no hope. It never occurred to me that things might grow better. I was dull and wretched. I may just say here in passing, that I think this experience is in a great measure what has enabled me to understand the peculiar misery of the poor in our large towns,--they have no hope, no impulse to look forward, nothing to expect; they live but in the present, and the dreariness of that soon shapes the whole atmosphere of their spirits to its own likeness. Perhaps the first thing one who would help them has to do is to aid the birth of some small vital hope in them; that is better than a thousand gifts, especially those of the ordinary kind, which mostly do harm, tending to keep them what they are,--a prey to present and importunate wants. ~ George MacDonald,

1301:If God said, “I forgive you,” to a man who hated his brother, and if (as is impossible) that voice of forgiveness should reach the man, what would it mean to him? How would the man interpret it? Would it not mean to him, “You may go on hating. I do not mind it. You have had great provocation, and are justified in your hate”? No doubt God takes what wrong there is, and what provocation there is, into the account; but the more provocation, the more excuse that can be urged for the hate, the more reason, if possible, that the hater should be delivered from the hell of his hate, that God’s child should be made the loving child that He meant him to be. The man would think, not that God loved the sinner, but that He forgave the sin, which God never does. Every sin meets its due fate—inexorable expulsion from the paradise of God’s Humanity. ~ George MacDonald,

1302:there were solid gold and silver vessels and ornaments, crusted with gems, miles of jewel-sewn brocade, gorgeous pictures and statues that the troops just hacked and smashed, beautiful enamel and porcelain trampled underfoot, weapons and standards set with rubies and emeralds which were gouged and hammered from their settings—all this among the powder-smoke and blood, with native soldiers who’d never seen above ten rupees in their lives, and slum-ruffians from Glasgow and Liverpool, all staggering about drunk on plunder and killing and destruction. One thing I’m sure of: there was twice as much treasure destroyed as carried away, and we officers were too busy bagging our share to do anything about it. I daresay a philosopher would have made heavy speculation about that scene, if he’d had time to spare from filling his pockets. I ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

1303:Entering by a wide gateway, but without gates, into an inner court, surrounded on all sides by great marble pillars supporting galleries above, I saw a large fountain of porphyry in the middle, throwing up a lofty column of water, which fell, with a noise as of the fusion of all sweet sounds, into a basin beneath; overflowing which, it ran into a single channel towards the interior of the building. Although the moon was by this time so low in the west, that not a ray of her light fell into the court, over the height of the surrounding buildings; yet was the court lighted by a second reflex from the sun of other lands. For the top of the column of water, just as it spread to fall, caught the moonbeams, and like a great pale lamp, hung high in the night air, threw a dim memory of light (as it were) over the court below. ~ George MacDonald,

1304:He had the fault of thinking too well of himself--which who has not who thinks of himself at all, apart from his relation to the holy force of life, within yet beyond him? It was the almost unconscious, assuredly the undetected, self-approbation of the ordinarily righteous man, the defect of whose righteousness makes him regard himself as upright, but the virtue of whose uprightness will at length disclose to his astonished view how immeasurably short of rectitude he comes. At the age of thirty, Godfrey Wardour had not yet become so displeased with himself as to turn self-roused energy upon betterment; and until then all growth must be of doubtful result. … His friends notwithstanding gave him credit for great imperturbability; but in such willfully undemonstrative men the evil burrows the more insidiously that it is masked by a constrained exterior. ~ George MacDonald,

1305:Love is one, and love is changeless. For love loves unto purity. Love has ever in view the absolute loveliness of that which it beholds. Where loveliness is incomplete, and love cannot love its fill of loving, it spends itself to make more lovely, that it may love more; it strives for perfection, even that itself may be perfected–not in itself, but in the object. As it was love that first created humanity, so even human love, in proportion to its divinity, will go on creating the beautiful for its own outpouring. There is nothing eternal but that which loves and can be loved, and love is ever climbing towards the consummation when such shall be the universe, imperishable, divine. Therefore all that is not beautiful in the beloved, all that comes between and is not of love’s kind, must be destroyed. And our God is a consuming fire. ~ George MacDonald,

1306:It had been well if he had been left with only a wounded heart, but in that heart lay wounded pride. He hid it carefully, and the keener in consequence grew the sensitiveness, almost feminine, which no stranger could have suspected beneath the manner he wore. Under that bronzed countenance, with its firm-set mouth and powerful jaw--below that clear blue eye, and that upright easy carriage, lay a faithful heart haunted by a sense of wrong: he who is not perfect in forgiveness must be haunted thus; he only is free whose love for the human is so strong that he can pardon the individual sin; he alone can pray the prayer,"Forgive us our trespasses," out of a full heart. Forgiveness is the only cure of wrong. And hand in hand with Sense-of-injury walks ever the weak sister-demon Self-pity, so dear, so sweet to many--both of them the children of Philautos, not of Agape. ~ George MacDonald,

1307:Now in these subterranean caverns lived a strange race of beings, called by some gnomes, by some kobolds, by some goblins. There was a legend current in the country that at one time they lived above ground, and were very like other people. But for some reason or other, concerning which there were different legendary theories, the king had laid what they thought too severe taxes upon them, or had required observances of them they did not like, or had begun to treat them with more severity, in some way or other, and impose stricter laws; and the consequence was that they had all disappeared from the face of the country. According to the legend, however, instead of going to some other country, they had all taken refuge in the subterranean caverns, whence they never came out but at night, and then seldom showed themselves in any numbers, and never to many people at once. ~ George MacDonald,

1308:Thou doubtest because thou lovest the truth. Some would willingly believe life but a phantasm, if only it might for ever afford them a world of pleasant dreams: thou art not of such! Be content for a while not to know surely. The hour will come, and that ere long, when, being true, thou shalt behold the very truth, and doubt will be for ever dead. Scarce, then, wilt thou be able to recall the features of the phantom. Thou wilt then know that which thou canst not now dream. Thou hast not yet looked the Truth in the face, hast as yet at best but seen him through a cloud. That which thou seest not, and never didst see save in a glass darkly—that which, indeed, never can be known save by its innate splendour shining straight into pure eyes—that thou canst not but doubt, and art blameless in doubting until thou seest it face to face, when thou wilt no longer be able to doubt it. ~ George MacDonald,

1309:No revelation can be other than partial. If for true revelation a man must be told all the truth, then farewell to revelation; yea, farewell to the sonship. For what revelation, other than a partial, can the highest spiritual condition receive of the infinite God? But it is not therefore untrue because it is partial. Relatively to a lower condition of the receiver, a more partial revelation might be truer than that would be which constituted a fuller revelation to one in a higher condition; for the former might reveal much to him, the latter might reveal nothing. Only, whatever it might reveal, if its nature were such as to preclude development and growth, thus chaining the man to its incompleteness, it would be but a false revelation fighting against all the divine laws of human existence. The true revelation rouses the desire to know more by the truth of its incompleteness. ~ George MacDonald,

1310:Roses, wild roses, everywhere! So plentiful were they, they were not only perfumed the air, they seemed to dye it a faint rose-hue. The colour floated abroad with the scent, and clomb, and spread, until the whole wesr blushed and glowed with the gathered incense of roses. And my heart fainted with longing in my bosom. Could I but see the spirit of the Earth, as I saw once the in dwelling woman of the beech-tree, and my beauty of the pale marble, I should be content. Content! -Oh, how gladly would I die of the light of her eyes! Yea, I would cease to be, if that would bring me one word of love from the one mouth. The twilight sand around, and infolded me with sleep. I slept as I had not slept for months. I did not awake till late in the morning; when, refreshed in body and mind I rose as from the death that wipes out the sadness of life, and then dies itself in the new morrow. ~ George MacDonald,

1311:Demands unknown before are continually being made upon the Christian: it is the ever fresh rousing and calling, asking and sending of the Spirit that worketh in the children of obedience. When he thinks he has attained, then is he in danger; when he finds the mountain he has so long been climbing show suddenly a distant peak, radiant in eternal whiteness, and all but lost in heavenly places, a peak whose glory-crowned apex it seems as if no human foot could ever reach—then is there hope for him; proof there is then that he has been climbing, for he beholds the yet unclimbed; he sees what he could not see before; if he knows little of what he is, he knows something of what he is not. He learns ever afresh that he is not in the world as Jesus was in the world; but the very wind that breathes courage as he climbs is the hope that one day he shall be like him, seeing him as he is. ~ George MacDonald,

1312:He would dream waking dreams about Jesus, gloriously childlike. He fancied he came down every now and then to see how things were going in the lower part of his kingdom; and that when he did so, he made use of Glashgar and its rocks for his stair, coming down its granite scale in the morning, and again, when he had ended his visit, going up in the evening by the same steps. Then high and fast would his heart beat at the thought that some day he might come upon his path just when he had passed, see the heather lifting its head from the trail of his garment, or more slowly out of the prints left by his feet, as he walked up the stairs of heaven, going back to his Father. Sometimes, when a sheep stopped feeding and looked up suddenly, he would fancy that Jesus had laid his hand on its head, and was now telling it that it must not mind being killed; for he had been killed, and it was all right. ~ George MacDonald,

1313:I would remind my reader that Donal was a Celt, with a nature open to every fancy of love or awe -- one of the same breed with the foolish Galatians, and like them ready to be bewitched; but bearing a heart that welcomed the light with glad rebound -- loved the lovely, nor loved it only, but turned towards it with desire to become like it. Fergus too was a Celt in the main, but was spoiled by the paltry ambition of being distinguished. He was not in love with loveliness, but in love with praise. He saw not a little of what was good and noble, and would fain be such, but mainly that men might regard him for his goodness and nobility; hence his practical notion of the good was weak, and of the noble, paltry. His one desire in doing anything, was to be approved of or admired in the same -- approved of in the opinions he held, in the plans he pursued, in the doctrines he taught . . . ~ George MacDonald,

1314:I've been very influenced by folklore, fairy tales, and folk ballads, so I love all the classic works based on these things -- like George Macdonald's 19th century fairy stories, the fairy poetry of W.B. Yeats, and Sylvia Townsend Warner's splendid book The Kingdoms of Elfin. (I think that particular book of hers wasn't published until the 1970s, not long before her death, but she was an English writer popular in the middle decades of the 20th century.) I'm also a big Pre-Raphaelite fan, so I love William Morris' early fantasy novels. Oh, and "Lud-in-the-Mist" by Hope Mirrlees (Neil Gaiman is a big fan of that one too), and I could go on and on but I won't! ~ Terri Windling,

1315:did I not tell you to tell your father and mother that you were to set out for the court? And you know that lies to the north. You must learn to use far less direct directions than that. You must not be like a dull servant that needs to be told again and again before he will understand. You have orders enough to start with, and you will find, as you go on, and as you need to know, what you have to do. But I warn you that perhaps it will not look the least like what you may have been fancying I should require of you. I have one idea of you and your work, and you have another. I do not blame you for that - you cannot help it yet; but you must be ready to let my idea, which sets you working, set your idea right. Be true and honest and fearless, and all shall go well with you and your work, and all with whom your work lies, and so with your parents - and me too, Curdie,' she added after a little pause. ~ George MacDonald,

1316:How terribly, then, have the theologians misrepresented God in the measures of the low and showy, not the lofty and simple humanities! Nearly all of them represent him as a great King on a grand throne, thinking how grand he is, and making it the business of his being and the end of his universe to keep up his glory, wielding the bolts of a Jupiter against them that take his name in vain. They would not allow this, but follow out what they say, and it comes much to this. Brothers, have you found our king? There he is, kissing little children and saying they are like God. There he is at table with the head of a fisherman lying on his bosom, and somewhat heavy at heart that even he, the beloved disciple, cannot yet understand him well. The simplest peasant who loves his children and his sheep were - no, not a truer, for the other is false, but - a true type of our God beside that monstrosity of a monarch. ~ George MacDonald,

1317:Let me once more assert that Mr Malison was not a bad man. The misfortune was, that his notion of right fell in with his natural fierceness; and that, in aggravation of the too common feeling with which he had commenced his relations with his pupils, namely, that they were not only the natural enemies of the master, but therefore of all law, theology had come in and taught him that they were in their own nature bad — with a badness for which the only set-off he knew or could introduce was blows. Independently of any remedial quality that might be in them, these blows were an embodiment of justice; for "every sin," as the catechism teaches, "deserveth God's wrath and curse both in this life and that which is to come." The master therefore was only a co-worker with God in every pandy he inflicted on his pupils. I do not mean that he reasoned thus, but that such-like were the principles he had to act upon. ~ George MacDonald,

1318:slow.             And she sang, like the moan of an autumn wind              Over the stubble left behind:               Alas, how easily things go wrong!                A sigh too much, or a kiss too long,               And there follows a mist and a weeping rain,                  And life is never the same again.                 Alas, how hardly things go right!                  'Tis hard to watch on a summer night,                  For the sigh will come and the kiss will stay,                  And the summer night is a winter day.             "Oh, lovely ghosts my heart is woes              To see thee weeping and wailing so.             Oh, lovely ghost," said the fearless knight,              "Can the sword of a warrior set it right?             Or prayer of bedesman, praying mild,              As a cup of water a feverish child,             Sooth thee at last, in dreamless mood              To sleep the sleep a dead lady should? ~ George MacDonald,

1319:I am always hearing. . . the sound of a far off song. I do not exactly know where it is, or what it means; and I don't hear much of it, only the odour of its music, as it were, flitting across the great billows of the ocean outside this air in which I make such a storm; but what I do hear, is quite enough to make me able to bear the cry from the drowning ship. So it would you if you could hear it.' 'No it wouldn't,' returned Diamond stoutly. 'For they wouldn't hear the music of the far-away song; and if they did, it wouldn't do them any good. You see you and I are not going to be drowned, and so we might enjoy it.' 'But you have never heard the psalm, and you don't know what it is like. Somehow, I can't say how, it tells me that all is right; that it is coming to swallow up all the cries. . . . It wouldn't be the song it seems if it did not swallow up all their fear and pain too, and set them singing it themselves with all the rest. ~ George MacDonald,

1320:Well do I remember a friend of mine telling me once--he was then a labourer in the field of literature, who had not yet begun to earn his penny a day, though he worked hard--telling me how once, when a hope that had kept him active for months was suddenly quenched--a book refused on which he had spent a passion of labour--the weight of money that must be paid and could not be had, pressing him down like the coffin-lid that had lately covered the ONLY friend to whom he could have applied confidently for aid--telling me, I say, how he stood at the corner of a London street, with the rain, dripping black from the brim of his hat, the dreariest of atmospheres about him in the closing afternoon of the City, when the rich men were going home, and the poor men who worked for them were longing to follow; and how across this waste came energy and hope into his bosom, swelling thenceforth with courage to fight, and yield no ear to suggested failure. And ~ George MacDonald,

1321:Sad, indeed, would the whole matter be, if the Bible had told us everything God meant us to believe. But herein is the Bible itself greatly wronged. It nowhere lays claim to be regarded as the Word, the Way, the Truth. The Bible leads us to Jesus, the inexhaustible, the ever unfolding Revelation of God. It is Christ "in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge," not the Bible, save as leading to him. And why are we told that these treasures are hid in him who is the Revelation of God? Is it that we should despair of finding them and cease to seek them? Are they not hid in him that they may be revealed to us in due time—that is, when we are in need of them? Is not their hiding in him the mediatorial step towards their unfolding in us? Is he not the Truth?—the Truth to men? Is he not the High Priest of his brethren, to answer all the troubled questionings that arise in their dim humanity? For it is his heart which Contains of good, wise, just, the perfect shape. ~ George MacDonald,

1322:Godfrey and Hesper made a glorious pair to look at--but would theirs be a happy union?--Happy, I dare say--and not too happy. He who sees to our affairs will see that the “too” is not in them. There were fine elements in both, and, if indeed they loved, and now I think, from very necessity of their two hearts, they must have loved, then all would, by degrees, by slow degrees, most likely, come right with them. If they had been born again both, before they began, so to start fresh, then like two children hand in hand they might have run in through the gates into the city. But what is love, what is loss, what defilement even, what are pains, and hopes, and disappointments, what sorrow, and death, and all the ills that flesh is heir to, but means to this very end, to this waking of the soul to seek the home of our being--the life eternal? Verily we must be born from above, and be good children, or become, even to our self-loving selves, a scorn, a hissing, and an endless reproach. ~ George MacDonald,

1323:His theories of religion were neither large nor lofty; he accepted those that were handed down to him, and did not trouble himself as to whether they were correct. He did what was better: he tried constantly to obey the law of God, whether he found it in the Bible or in his own heart. Thus he was greater in the kingdom of heaven than thousands that knew more, had better theories about God, and could talk much more fluently concerning religion than he. By obeying God he let God teach him. So his heart was always growing; and where the heart grows, there is no fear of the intellect; there it also grows, and in the best fashion of growth. He was very good to his people, and not foolishly kind. He tried his best to help them to be what they ought to be, to make them bear their troubles, be true to one another, and govern themselves. He was like a father to them. For some, of course, he could do but little, because they were locked boxes with nothing in them; but for a few he did much. ~ George MacDonald,

1324:It is not simply that God has arbitrarily made us such that He is our only good. Rather God is the only good of all creatures: and by necessity, each must find its good in that kind and degree of fruition of God which is proper to its nature. The kind and degree may vary with the creature's nature: but that there ever could be any other good, is an atheistic dream. George Macdonald, in a passage I cannot now find, represents God as saying to men, 'You must be strong with my strength and blessed with my blessedness, for I have no other to give you.' That is the conclusion of the whole matter. God gives what He has, not what He has not: He gives the happiness that there is, not the happiness that is not. To be God - to be like God and to share His goodness in creaturely response - to be miserable - these are the only three alternatives. If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows - that only food that any possible universe ever can grow - then we must starve eternally. ~ C S Lewis,

1325:The air was still; when a breath awoke, it but touched his cheek like the down of a feather, and the stillness was there again. The stillness grew great, and slowly descended upon him. It deepened and deepened. Surely it would deepen to a voice! -- it was about to speak! It was as if a great single thought was the substance of the silence, and was all over and around him, and closer to him than his clothes, than his body, than his hands. I am describing the indescribable, and compelled to make it too definite for belief. In colder speech, an experience had come to the child; a link in the chain of his development glided over the windlass of his uplifting; a change passed upon him. In after years, when Gibbie had the idea of God, when he had learned to think about him, to desire his presence, to believe that a will of love enveloped his will, as the brooding hen spreads her wings over her eggs -- as often as the thought of God came to him, it came in the shape of the silence on the top of Glashgar. ~ George MacDonald,

1326:Then came the reflection, how little at any time could a father do for the wellbeing of his children! The fact of their being children implied their need of an all-powerful father: must there not then be such a father? Therewith the truth dawned upon him, that first of truths, which all his church-going and Bible-reading had hitherto failed to disclose, that, for life to be a good thing and worth living, a man must be the child of a perfect father, and know him. In his terrible perturbation about his children, he lifted up his heart—not to the Governor of the world; not to the God of Abraham or Moses; not in the least to the God of the Kirk; least of all to the God of the Shorter Catechism; but to the faithful creator and Father of David Barclay. The aching soul which none but a perfect father could have created capable of deploring its own fatherly imperfection, cried out to the father of fathers on behalf of his children, and as he cried, a peace came stealing over him such as he had never before felt. ~ George MacDonald,

1327:Yet perhaps even this view falls short of the truth. It is not simply that God has arbitrarily made us such that He is our only good. Rather, God is the only good of all creatures: and by necessity each must find its good in that kind and degree of the fruition of God which is proper to its nature. The kind and degree may vary with the creature's nature: but that there ever could be any other good is an atheistic dream. ... George Macdonald... represents God as saying to men, 'You must be strong with my strength and blessed with my blessedness for I have no other to give you.' That is the whole conclusion of the matter. God gives what He has, not what He has not: He gives the happiness that there is, not the happiness that is not. To be God - to be like God and to share His goodness in creaturely response - to be miserable - these are the only three alternatives. If we will not learn to eat the only food that the universe grows - the only food that any possible universe can ever grow - then we must starve eternally. ~ C S Lewis,

1328:They who believe in the influences of the stars over the fates of men, are, in feeling at least, nearer the truth than they who regard the heavenly bodies as related to them merely by a common obedience to an external law. All that man sees has to do with man. Worlds cannot be without an intermundane relationship. The community of the centre of all creation suggests an interradiating connection and dependence of the parts. Else a grander idea is conceivable than that which is already imbodied. The blank, which is only a forgotten life, lying behind the consciousness, and the misty splendour, which is an undeveloped life, lying before it, may be full of mysterious revelations of other connexions with the worlds around us, than those of science and poetry. No shining belt or gleaming moon, no red and green glory in a self-encircling twin-star, but has a relation with the hidden things of a man's soul, and, it may be, with the secret history of his body as well. They are portions of the living house wherein he abides. ~ George MacDonald,

1329:But if God is so good as you represent Him, and if He knows all that we need, and better far than we do ourselves, why should it be necessary to ask Him for anything?” I answer, What if He knows Prayer to be the thing we need first and most? What if the main object in God’s idea of prayer be the supplying of our great, our endless need—the need of Himself?…Hunger may drive the runaway child home, and he may or may not be fed at once, but he needs his mother more than his dinner. Communion with God is the one need of the soul beyond all other need: prayer is the beginning of that communion, and some need is the motive of that prayer…. So begins a communion, a taking with God, a coming-to-one with Him, which is the sole end of prayer, yea, of existence itself in its infinite phases. We must ask that we may receive: but that we should receive what we ask in respect of our lower needs, is not God’s end in making us pray, for He could give us everything without that: to bring His child to his knee, God withholds that man may ask. ~ George MacDonald,

1330:Not for years and years had Janet been to church; she had long been unable to walk so far; and having no book but the best, and no help to understand it but the highest, her faith was simple, strong, real, all-pervading. Day by day she pored over the great gospel -- I mean just the good news according to Matthew and Mark and Luke and John -- until she had grown to be one of the noble ladies of the kingdom of heaven -- one of those who inherit the earth, and are ripening to see God. For the Master, and his mind in hers, was her teacher. She had little or no theology save what he taught her, or rather, what he is. And of any other than that, the less the better; for no theology, except the Theou logos, is worth the learning, no other being true. To know him is to know God. And he only who obeys him, does or can know him; he who obeys him cannot fail to know him. To Janet, Jesus Christ was no object of so-called theological speculation, but a living man, who somehow or other heard her when she called to him, and sent her the help she needed. ~ George MacDonald,

1331:...To trust in the strength of God in our weakness; to say, ‘I am weak: so let me be: God is strong;’ to seek from him who is our life, as the natural, simple cure of all that is amiss with us, power to do, and be, and live, even when we are weary,—this is the victory that overcometh the world. To believe in God our strength in the face of all seeming denial, to believe in him out of the heart of weakness and unbelief, in spite of numbness and weariness and lethargy; to believe in the wide-awake real, through all the stupefying, enervating, distorting dream; to will to wake, when the very being seems athirst for a godless repose;—these are the broken steps up to the high fields where repose is but a form of strength, strength but a form of joy, joy but a form of love. ‘I am weak,’ says the true soul, ‘but not so weak that I would not be strong; not so sleepy that I would not see the sun rise; not so lame but that I would walk! Thanks be to him who perfects strength in weakness, and gives to his beloved while they sleep! ~ George MacDonald,

1332:Ga’n git ‘em, marras! Remember Arroyo!” “Booger Arroyo!” roared Grandarse, and the corporal pulled himself up into a sitting position, and as we swung past he was trying to sing, in a harsh unmusical croak. Aye, Ah ken John Peel an’ Ruby too, Ranter an’ Ringwood, Bellman an’ True From a find to a check, from a check to a view From a view to a death in the morning! He was a romantic, that one, but whoever he was I’m grateful to him, for I can say I have heard the regimental march sung, and the regimental war cry shouted, as we went in under Japanese fire. I don’t know how many casualties we took at that point – seven dead and thirty-three wounded was the count at the end of the day – but I do know that the companies never stopped or even broke stride; they “kept ga’n”, and I must be a bit of a romantic, too, I suppose, for whenever I think back on those few minutes when the whizz-bangs caught us, and see again those unfaltering green lines swinging steadily on, one word comes into my Scottish head: Englishmen. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

1333:For, when we say that God is Love, do we teach men that their fear of him is groundless? No. As much as they fear will come upon them, possibly far more. But there is something beyond their fear,—a divine fate which they cannot withstand, because it works along with the human individuality which the divine individuality has created in them. The wrath will consume what they call themselves; so that the selves God made shall appear, coming out with tenfold consciousness of being, and bringing with them all that made the blessedness of the life the men tried to lead without God. They will know that now first are they fully themselves. The avaricious, weary, selfish, suspicious old man shall have passed away. The young, ever young self, will remain. That which they thought themselves shall have vanished: that which they felt themselves, though they misjudged their own feelings, shall remain—remain glorified in repentant hope. For that which cannot be shaken shall remain. That which is immortal in God shall remain in man. The death that is in them shall be consumed. ~ George MacDonald,

1334:Creators of literary fairy tales from the 17th-century onward include writers whose works are still widely read today: Charles Perrault (17th-century France), Hans Christian Andersen (19th-century Denmark), George Macdonald and Oscar Wilde (19th-century England). The Brothers Grimm (19th-century Germany) blurred the line between oral and literary tales by presenting their German "household tales" as though they came straight from the mouths of peasants, though in fact they revised these stories to better reflect their own Protestant ethics. It is interesting to note that these canonized writers are all men, since this is a reversal from the oral storytelling tradition, historically dominated by women. Indeed, Straparola, Basile, Perrault, and even the Brothers Grimm made no secret of the fact that their source material came largely or entirely from women storytellers. Yet we are left with the impression that women dropped out of the history of fairy tales once they became a literary form, existing only in the background as an anonymous old peasant called Mother Goose. ~ Terri Windling,

1335:I believe that every fact in nature is a revelation of God, is there such as it is because God is such as he is; and I suspect that all its facts impress us so that we learn God unconsciously. True, we cannot think of any one fact thus, except as we find the soul of it—its fact of God; but from the moment when first we come into contact with the world, it is to us a revelation of God, his things seen, by which we come to know the things unseen. How should we imagine what we may of God, without the firmament over our heads, a visible sphere, yet a formless infinitude! What idea could we have of God without the sky? The truth of the sky is what it makes us feel of the God that sent it out to our eyes. If you say the sky could not but be so and such, I grant it—with God at the root of it. There is nothing for us to conceive in its stead—therefore indeed it must be so. In its discovered laws, light seems to me to be such because God is such. Its so-called laws are the waving of his garments, waving so because he is thinking and loving and walking inside them." -George MacDonald ~ George MacDonald,

1336:Whatever Janet, then, might, perhaps—I do not know—have imagined it her duty to say to Gibbie had she surmised his ignorance, having long ceased to trouble her own head, she had now no inclination to trouble Gibbie's heart with what men call the plan of salvation. It was enough to her to find that he followed her Master. Being in the light she understood the light, and had no need of system, either true or false, to explain it to her. She lived by the word proceeding out of the mouth of God. When life begins to speculate upon itself, I suspect it has begun to die. And seldom has there been a fitter soul, one clearer from evil, from folly, from human device—a purer cistern for such water of life as rose in the heart of Janet Grant to pour itself into, than the soul of Sir Gibbie. But I must not call any true soul a cistern: wherever the water of life is received, it sinks and softens and hollows, until it reaches, far down, the springs of life there also, that come straight from the eternal hills, and thenceforth there is in that soul a well of water springing up into everlasting life. ~ George MacDonald,

1337:The Border reivers were aggressive, ruthless, violent people, notoriously quick on the draw, ready and occasionally eager to kill in action, when life or property or honour were at stake. They were a brave people, and risked their lives readily enough; when they had to die, they appear to have done so without undue dramatics or bogus defiance which would have been wasted anyway. They lived in a society where deadly family feud was common, and when they were engaged in feud they killed frequently and brutally, as we shall see. When they were not engaged in feud, they certainly killed less readily. Their ordinary reiving did not, perhaps, entail quite as much bloodshed as one might expect in the violent circumstances. Bishop Leslie and Scott explain this by pointing out that the Borderers regarded reiving as legitimate (which is true), but that they held murder to be a crime, and consequently were reluctant to commit it—except in the heat of action or when covered by the virtual absolution of deadly feud. It is rather like saying that a heavy drinker, in his sober moments, is an abstemious man. ~ George MacDonald Fraser,

1338:Bread!--Yes, I think it might honestly be called bread that Walter Drake had ministered. It had not been free from chalk or potatoes: bits of shell and peel might have been found in it, with an occasional bit of dirt, and a hair or two; yes, even a little alum, and that is bad , because it tends to destroy, not satisfy the hunger. There was sawdust in it, and parchment-dust, and lumber-dust; it was ill salted, badly baked, sad; sometimes it was blue-moldy, and sometimes even maggoty; but the mass of it was honest flour, and those who did not recoil from the look of it, or recognize the presence of the variety of foreign matter, could live upon it, in a sense, up to a certain pitch of life. But a great deal of it was not of his baking at all--he had been merely the distributor--crumbling down other bakers' loaves and making them up again in his own shapes. In his declining years, however, he had been really beginning to learn the business. Only, in his congregation were many who not merely preferred bad bread of certain kinds, but were incapable of digesting any of high quality. ~ George MacDonald,

1339:Then she began to be frightened indeed. Every moment she kept feeling the thread backwards and forwards, and as she went farther and farther into the darkness of the great hollow mountain, she kept thinking more and more about her grandmother, and all that she had said to her, and how kind she had been, and how beautiful she was, and all about her lovely room, and the fire of roses, and the great lamp that sent its light through stone walls. And she became more and more sure that the thread could not have gone there of itself, and that her grandmother must have sent it. But it tried her dreadfully when the path went down very steep, and especially When she came to places where she had to go down rough stairs, and even sometimes a ladder. Through one narrow passage after another, over lumps of rock and sand and clay, the thread guided her, until she came to a small hole through which she had to creep. Finding no change on the other side, 'Shall I ever get back?' she thought, over and over again, wondering at herself that she was not ten times more frightened, and often feeling as if she were only walking in the story of a dream. ~ George MacDonald,

1340:They grew weary, and sat down on the rocky floor, for wait they would — indeed, wait they must. Each set his lamp by his knee, and watched it die. Slowly it sank, dulled, looked lazy and stupid. But ever as it sank and dulled, the image in his mind of the Lady of Light grew stronger and clearer. Together the two lamps panted and shuddered. First one, then the other went out, leaving for a moment a great red, evil-smelling snuff. Then all was the blackness of darkness up to their very hearts and everywhere around them. Was it? No. Far away — it looked miles away — shone one minute faint point of green light — where, who could tell? They only knew that it shone. It grew larger, and seemed to draw nearer, until at last, as they watched with speechless delight and expectation, it seemed once more within reach of an outstretched hand. Then it spread and melted away as before, and there were eyes — and a face — and a lovely form — and lo! the whole cavern blazing with lights innumerable, and gorgeous, yet soft and interfused — so blended, indeed, that the eye had to search and see in order to separate distinct spots of special colour. ~ George MacDonald,

1341:God is all right—why should we mind standing in the dark for a minute outside his window? Of course we miss the inness, but there is a bliss of its own in waiting. What if the rain be falling, and the wind blowing; what if we stand alone, or, more painful still, have some dear one beside us, sharing our outness; what even if the window be not shining, because of the curtains of good inscrutable drawn across it; let us think to ourselves, or say to our friend, ‘God is; Jesus is not dead; nothing can be going wrong, however it may look so to hearts unfinished in childness.’ Let us say to the Lord, ‘Jesus, art thou loving the Father in there? Then we out here will do his will, patiently waiting till he open the door. We shall not mind the wind or the rain much. Perhaps thou art saying to the Father, ‘Thy little ones need some wind and rain: their buds are hard; the flowers do not come out. I cannot get them made blessed without a little more winter-weather.’ Then perhaps the Father will say, ‘Comfort them, my son Jesus, with the memory of thy patience when thou wast missing me. Comfort them that thou wast sure of me when everything about thee seemed so unlike me, so unlike the place thou hadst left. ~ George MacDonald,

1342:But how is one to tell whether it be in truth the spirit of God that is speaking in a man?' You are not called upon to tell. The question for you is whether you have the spirit of Christ yourself. The question is for you to put to yourself, the question is for you to answer to yourself: Am I alive with the life of Christ? Is his spirit dwelling in me? Everyone who desires to follow the Master has the spirit of the Master, and will receive more, that he may follow closer, nearer, in his very footsteps. He is not called upon to prove to this or that or any man that he has the light of Jesus; he has to let his light shine. It does not follow that his work is to teach others, or that he is able to speak large truths in true forms. When the strength or the joy or the pity of the truth urges him, let him speak it out and not be afraid—content to be condemned for it; comforted that if he mistake, the Lord himself will condemn him, and save him 'as by fire.' The condemnation of his fellow men will not hurt him, nor a whit the more that it be spoken in the name of Christ. If he speak true, the Lord will say 'I sent him.' For all truth is of him; no man can see a true thing to be true but by the Lord, the spirit. ~ George MacDonald,

1343:Great stems rose about me, uplifting a thick multitudinous roof above me of branches, and twigs, and leaves-- the bird and insect world uplifted over mine, with its own landscapes, its own thickets, and paths, and glades, and dwellings; its own bird-ways and insect-delights. Great boughs crossed my path; great roots based the tree-columns, and mightily clasped the earth, strong to lift and strong to uphold. It seemed an old, old forest, perfect in forest ways and pleasure. And when, in the midst of this ectasy, I remembered that under some close canopy of leaves, by some giant stem, or in some mossy cave, or beside some leafy well, sat the lady of marble, whom my songs had called forth into the outer world, waiting (might it not be?) to meet and thank her deliverer in a twilight which would veil her confusion, the whole night became one dream-realm of joy, the central form of which was everywhere present, although unbeheld. Then, remembering how my songs seemed to have called her form the marble, piercing through the pearly shroud of alabaster -- "Why," thought I, "should not my voice reach her now, through the ebon night that inwraps her." My voice burst into song so spontaneously that it seemed involuntarily: ~ George MacDonald,

1344:[God] is simply and altogether our friend, our father--our more than friend, father, and mother--our infinite love-perfect God. Grand and strong beyond all that human imagination can conceive of poet-thinking and kingly action, he is delicate beyond all that human tenderness can conceive of husband or wife, homely beyond all that human heart can conceive of father or mother. He has not two thoughts about us. With him all is simplicity of purpose and meaning and effort and end--namely, that we should be as he is, think the same thoughts, mean the same things, possess the same blessedness. It is so plain that any one may see it, every one ought to see it, every one shall see it. It must be so. He is utterly true and good to us, nor shall anything withstand his will. How terribly, then, have the theologians misrepresented God in the measures of the low and showy, not the lofty and simple humanities! Nearly all of them represent him as a great King on a grand throne, thinking how grand he is, and making it the business of his being and the end of his universe to keep up his glory, wielding the bolts of a Jupiter against them that take his name in vain. They would not allow this, but follow out what they say, and it comes much to this. ~ George MacDonald,

1345:All the books were beginning to turn against me. Indeed, I must have been blind as a bat not to have seen it long before, the ludicrous contradiction between my theory of life and my actual experiences as a reader. George MacDonald had done more to me than any other writer; of course it was a pity that he had that bee in his bonnet about Christianity. He was good in spite of it. Chesterton has more sense than all the other moderns put together; bating, of course, his Christianity. Johnson was one of the few authors whom I felt I could trust utterly; curiously enough, he had the same kink. Spenser and Milton by a strange coincidence had it too. Even among ancient authors the same paradox was to be found. The most religious (Plato, Aeschylus, Virgil) were clearly those on whom I could really feed. On the other hand, those writers who did not suffer from religion and with whom in theory my sympathy ought to have been complete -- Shaw and Wells and Mill and Gibbon and Voltaire -- all seemed a little thin; what as boys we called "tinny". It wasn't that I didn't like them. They were all (especially Gibbon) entertaining; but hardly more. There seemed to be no depth in them. They were too simple. The roughness and density of life did not appear in their books. ~ C S Lewis,

1346:There is no heaven with a little hell in it - no plan to retain this or that of the devil in our hearts or our pockets. Out Satan must go, every hair and feather! ... There is no clothing in a robe of imputed righteousness, the poorest of legal cobwebs spun by spiritual spiders. ... Christ is our righteousness, not that we should escape punishment, still less escape being righteous, but as the live potent Creator of righteousness in us, so that we, with our wills receiving His spirit, shall like Him resist unto blood, striving against sin; shall know in ourselves, as He knows, what a lovely thing is righteousness, what a mean, ugly, unnatural thing is unrighteousness. He is our righteousness, and that righteousness is no fiction, no pretense, no imputation. ... Any system which tends to persuade men that there is any salvation but that of becoming righteous even as Jesus is righteous; that a man can be made good, as a good dog is good, without his own willed share in the making; that a man is saved by having his sins hidden under a robe of imputed righteousness - that system, so far this tendency, is of the devil and not of God. Thank God, not even error shall injure the true of heart. They grow in truth, and as love casts out fear, so truth casts out falsehood. ~ George MacDonald,

1347:The curate called everything Helen's. He had a great contempt for the spirit of men who marry rich wives and then lord it over their money, as if they had done a fine thing in get- ting hold of it, and the wife had been but keeping it from its rightful owner. They do not know what a confession their whole bear- ing is, that but for their wives' money, they would be the merest, poorest nobodies. So small are they that even that suffices to make them feel big ! But Helen did not like it, especially when he would ask her if he might have this or that, or do so and so. Any com- mon man who heard him would have thought him afraid of his wife; but a large-hearted woman would at once have understood, as did Helen, that it came all of his fine sense of truth, and reality, and obligation. Still Helen would have had him forget all such matters in con- nection with her. They were one beyond obligation. She had given him herself, and what were bank-notes after that ? But he thought of her always as an angel who had taken him in, to comfort, and bless, and cherish him with love, that he might the better do the work of his God and hers ; therefore his obligation to her was his glory. ~ George MacDonald,

1348:Come then, let us do something!” said Davie. “Come away,” rejoined Donal. “What shall we do first?” “I don't know: you must tell me, sir.” “What would you like best to do—I mean if you might do what you pleased?” Davie thought a little, then said: “I should like to write a book.” “What kind of a book?” “A beautiful story.” “Isn’t it just as well to read such a book? Why should you want to write one?” “Because then I should have it go just as I wanted it! I am always—almost always—disappointed with the thing that comes next. But if I wrote it myself, then I shouldn’t get tired of it; it would be what pleased me, and not what pleased somebody else.” “Well,” said Donal, after thinking for a moment, “suppose you begin to write a book!” “Oh, that will be fun!—much better than learning verbs and nouns!” “But the verbs and nouns are just the things that go to make a story—with not a few adjectives and adverbs, and a host of conjunctions; and, if it be a very moving story, a good many interjections! These all you have got to put together with good choice, or the story will not be one you would care to read.—Perhaps you had better not begin till I see whether you know enough about those verbs and nouns to do the thing decently. ~ George MacDonald,

1349:How could the Revisers choose this last reading, 'an heir through God,' and keep the word adoption? From the passage it is as plain as St. Paul could make it, that, by the word translated adoption, he means the raising of a father's own child from the condition of tutelage and subjection to others, a state which, he says, is no better than that of a slave, to the position and rights of a son. None but a child could become a son; the idea is—a spiritual coming of age; only when the child is a man is he really and fully a son. The thing holds in the earthly relation. How many children of good parents—good children in the main too—never know those parents, never feel towards them as children might, until, grown up, they have left the house—until, perhaps, they are parents themselves, or are parted from them by death! To be a child is not necessarily to be a son or daughter. The childship is the lower condition of the upward process towards the sonship, the soil out of which the true sonship shall grow, the former without which the latter were impossible. God can no more than an earthly parent be content to have only children: he must have sons and daughters—children of his soul, of his spirit, of his love—not merely in the sense that he loves them, or even that they love him, but in the sense that they love like him, love as he loves. ~ George MacDonald,

1350:The thing that is unknown, yet known to be, will always be more or less formidable. When it is known as immeasurably greater than we, and as having claims and making demands upon us, the more vaguely these are apprehended, the more room is there for anxiety; and when the conscience is not clear, this anxiety may well mount to terror. According to the nature of the mind which occupies itself with the idea of the Supreme, whether regarded as maker or ruler, will be the kind and degree of the terror. To this terror need belong no exalted ideas of God; those fear him most who most imagine him like their own evil selves, only beyond them in power, easily able to work his arbitrary will with them. That they hold him but a little higher than themselves, tends nowise to unity with him: who so far apart as those on the same level of hate and distrust? Power without love, dependence where is no righteousness, wake a worship without devotion, a loathliness of servile flattery. Neither, where the notion of God is better, but the conscience is troubled, will his goodness do much to exclude apprehension. The same consciousness of evil and of offence which gave rise to the bloody sacrifice, is still at work in the minds of most who call themselves Christians. Naturally the first emotion of man towards the being he calls God, but of whom he knows so little, is fear. ~ George MacDonald,

1351:deep--Was there--could there be a God at all? a real being who might actually hear his prayer? In this crowd of houses and shops and churches, amidst buying and selling, and ploughing and praising and backbiting, this endless pursuit of ends and of means to ends, while yet even the wind that blew where it listed blew under laws most fixed, and the courses of the stars were known to a hair's-breadth, --was there--could there be a silent invisible God working his own will in it all? Was there a driver to that chariot whose multitudinous horses seemed tearing away from the pole in all directions? and was he indeed, although invisible and inaudible, guiding that chariot, sure as the flight of a comet, straight to its goal? Or was there a soul to that machine whose myriad wheels went grinding on and on, grinding the stars into dust, matter into man, and man into nothingness? Was there--could there be a living heart to the universe that did positively hear him--poor, misplaced, dishonest, ignorant Thomas Wingfold, who had presumed to undertake a work he neither could perform nor had the courage to forsake, when out of the misery of the grimy little cellar of his consciousness he cried aloud for light and something to make a man of him? For now that Thomas had begun to doubt like an honest being, every ugly thing within him began to show itself to his awakened probity. ~ George MacDonald,

1352:Tis a good thing to be light-handed,” said the king. “‘Tis a bad thing to be light-fingered,” answered the queen. “‘Tis a good thing to be light-footed,” said the king. “‘Tis a bad thing–“ began the queen; but the king interrupted her. “In fact,” said he, with the tone of one who concludes an argument in which he has had only imaginary opponents, and in which, therefore, he has come off triumphant–“in fact, it is a good thing altogether to be light-bodied.” “But it is a bad thing altogether to be light-minded,” retorted the queen, who was beginning to lose her temper. This last answer quite discomfited his Majesty, who turned on his heel, and betook himself to his counting-house again. But he was not half-way towards it, when the voice of his queen overtook him. “And it’s a bad thing to be light-haired,” screamed she, determined to have more last words, now that her spirit was roused. The queen’s hair was black as night; and the king’s had been, and his daughter’s was, golden as morning. But it was not this reflection on his hair that arrested him; it was the double use of the word light. For the king hated all witticisms, and punning especially. And besides, he could not tell whether the queen meant light-haired or light-heired; for why might she not aspirate her vowels when she was ex-asperated herself? ~ George MacDonald,

1353:The main obstacle to success he soon discovered to be Letty's exceeding distrust of herself. I would not be mistaken to mean that she had too little confidence in herself; of that no one can have too little. Self-distrust will only retard, while self-confidence will betray. The man ignorant in these things will answer me, "But you must have one or the other." "You must have neither," I reply. "You must follow the truth, and, in that pursuit, the less one thinks about himself, the pursuer, the better. Let him so hunger and thirst after the truth that the dim vision of it occupies all his being, and leaves no time to think of his hunger and his thirst. Self-forgetfulness in the reaching out after that which is essential to us is the healthiest of mental conditions. One has to look to his way, to his deeds, to his conduct--not to himself. In such losing of the false, or merely reflected, we find the true self. There is no harm in being stupid, so long as a man does not think himself clever; no good in being clever, if a man thinks himself so, for that is a short way to the worst stupidity. If you think yourself clever, set yourself to do something; then you will have a chance of humiliation. With good faculties, and fine instincts, Letty was always thinking she must be wrong, just because it was she was in it--a lovely fault, no doubt, but a fault greatly impeditive to progress, and tormenting to a teacher. ~ George MacDonald,

1354:Mary was proud of her husband, not merely because he was a musician, but because he was a blacksmith. For, with the true taste of a right woman, she honored the manhood that could do hard work. The day will come, and may I do something to help it hither, when the youth of our country will recognize that, taken in itself, it is a more manly, and therefore in the old true sense a more gentle thing, to follow a good handicraft, if it make the hands black as a coal, than to spend the day in keeping books, and making up accounts, though therein the hands should remain white--or red, as the case may be. Not but that, from a higher point of view still, all work, set by God, and done divinely, is of equal honor; but, where there is a choice, I would gladly see boy of mine choose rather to be a blacksmith, or a watchmaker, or a bookbinder, than a clerk. Production, making, is a higher thing in the scale of reality, than any mere transmission, such as buying and selling. It is, besides, easier to do honest work than to buy and sell honestly. The more honor, of course, to those who are honest under the greater difficulty! But the man who knows how needful the prayer, "Lead us not into temptation," knows that he must not be tempted into temptation even by the glory of duty under difficulty. In humility we must choose the easiest, as we must hold our faces unflinchingly to the hardest, even to the seeming impossible, when it is given us to do. ~ George MacDonald,

1355:if I found the sermon neither healing nor inspiring, I found the prayers full of hope and consolation. They at least are safe beyond human caprice, conceit, or incapacity. Upon them, too, the man who is distressed at the thought of how little of the needful food he had been able to provide for his people, may fall back for comfort, in the thought that there at least was what ought to have done them good, what it was well worth their while to go to church for. But I did think they were too long for any individual Christian soul, to sympathise with from beginning to end, that is, to respond to, like organ-tube to the fingered key, in every touch of the utterance of the general Christian soul. For my reader must remember that it is one thing to read prayers and another to respond; and that I had had very few opportunities of being in the position of the latter duty. I had had suspicions before, and now they were confirmed—that the present crowding of services was most inexpedient. And as I pondered on the matter, instead of trying to go on praying after I had already uttered my soul, which is but a heathenish attempt after much speaking, I thought how our Lord had given us such a short prayer to pray, and I began to wonder when or how the services came to be so heaped the one on the back of the other as they now were. No doubt many people defended them; no doubt many people could sit them out; but how many people could pray from beginning to end of them ~ George MacDonald,

1356:The main practical difficulty, with some at least of the Peace-makers, is how to carry themselves toward the undoers of peace, the disuniters of souls. Perhaps the most potent of these are not those powers of the church visible who care for canon and dogma more than for truth, and for the church more than for Christ; who take uniformity for unity; who strain at a gnat and swallow a camel, nor knowing what spirit they are of; such men, I say, are perhaps neither the most active nor the most potent force working for the disintegration of the body of Christ. I imagine also that neither are the party-liars of politics the worst foes to divine unity, ungenerous, and often knowingly falseas they are t their opponents, to whom they seem to have no desire to be honest and fair. I think rather, they must be the babbling lairs of the social circle, and the faithless brothers and unloving sisters of disunited human families. But why inquire? Every self-assertion, every form of self-seeking however small or poor, world-noble or grotesque, is a separating and scattering force. And these forces are multitudinous, these points of radial repulsion are innumerable, because of the prevailing passion of mean souls to seem great, and feel important. …the partisan of self will sometimes gnaw asunder the most precious of bonds, poisen whole broods of infant loves. Such real schismatics go about, where not inventing evil, yet rejoicing in iniquity; mishearing; misrepresenting; paralyzing affection; separating hearts. ~ George MacDonald,

1357:Now the children, there, are not born as the children are born in worlds nearer to the sun. For they arrive no one knows how. A maiden, walking alone, hears a cry: for even there a cry is the first utterance; and searching about, she findeth, under an overhanging rock, or within a clump of bushes, or, it may be, betwixt gray stones on the side of a hill, or in any other sheltered and unexpected spot, a little child. This she taketh tenderly, and beareth home with joy, calling out, "Mother, mother"—if so be that her mother lives—"I have got a baby—I have found a child!" All the household gathers round to see;—"WHERE IS IT? WHAT IS IT LIKE? WHERE DID YOU FIND IT?" and such-like questions, abounding. And thereupon she relates the whole story of the discovery; for by the circumstances, such as season of the year, time of the day, condition of the air, and such like, and, especially, the peculiar and never-repeated aspect of the heavens and earth at the time, and the nature of the place of shelter wherein it is found, is determined, or at least indicated, the nature of the child thus discovered. Therefore, at certain seasons, and in certain states of the weather, according, in part, to their own fancy, the young women go out to look for children. They generally avoid seeking them, though they cannot help sometimes finding them, in places and with circumstances uncongenial to their peculiar likings. But no sooner is a child found, than its claim for protection and nurture obliterates all feeling of choice in the matter. ~ George MacDonald,

1358:The main practical difficulty, with some at least of the Peace-makers, is how to carry themselves toward the undoers of peace, the disuniters of souls. Perhaps the most potent of these are not those powers of the church visible who care for canon and dogma more than for truth, and for the church more than for Christ; who take uniformity for unity; who strain at a gnat and swallow a camel, nor knowing what spirit they are of; such men, I say, are perhaps neither the most active nor the most potent force working for the disintegration of the body of Christ. I imagine also that neither are the party-liars of politics the worst foes to divine unity, ungenerous, and often knowingly false, as they are to their opponents, to whom they seem to have no desire to be honest and fair. I think rather, they must be the babbling lairs of the social circle, and the faithless brothers and unloving sisters of disunited human families. But why inquire? Every self-assertion, every form of self-seeking however small or poor, world-noble or grotesque, is a separating and scattering force. And these forces are multitudinous, these points of radial repulsion are innumerable, because of the prevailing passion of mean souls to seem great, and feel important. …the partisan of self will sometimes gnaw asunder the most precious of bonds, poison whole broods of infant loves. Such real schismatics go about, where not inventing evil, yet rejoicing in iniquity; mishearing; misrepresenting; paralyzing affection; separating hearts. ~ George MacDonald,

1359:It is a little strength that longs for more; it is infant righteousness that hungers after righteousness. To every soul dissatisfied with itself, comes this word, at once rousing and consoling, from the Power that lives and makes him live—that in his hungering and thirsting he is blessed, for he shall be filled. His hungering and thirsting is the divine pledge of the divine meal. The more he hungers and thirsts the more blessed is he; the more room is there in him to receive that which God is yet more eager to give than he to have. It is the miserable emptiness that makes a man hunger and thirst; and, as the body, so the soul hungers after what belongs to its nature. (…) Therefore, that he is empty of good, needs discourage no one; for what is emptiness but room to be filled? Emptiness is need of good; the emptiness that desires good, is itself good. (…) A man could not even be ashamed of himself, without some 'feeling sense' of the beauty of rightness. By divine degrees the man will at length grow sick of himself, and desire righteousness with a pure hunger (…) To be filled with righteousness, will be to forget even righteousness itself in the bliss of being righteous, that is, a child of God. The thought of righteousness will vanish in the fact of righteousness. When a creature is just what he is meant to be, what only he is fit to be; when, therefore, he is truly himself, he never thinks what he is. He is that thing; why think about it? It is no longer outside of him that he should contemplate or desire it. ~ George MacDonald,

1360:The aspiring child is often checked by the dull disciple who has learned his lessons so imperfectly that he has never got beyond his school-books. Full of fragmentary rules, he has perceived the principle of none of them. The child draws near to him with some outburst of unusual feeling, some scintillation of a lively hope, some wide-reaching imagination that draws into the circle of religious theory the world of nature, and the yet wider world of humanity, for to the child the doings of the Father fill the spaces; he has not yet learned to divide between God and nature, between Providence and grace, between love and benevolence;—the child comes, I say, with his heart full, and the answer he receives from the dull disciple is—" God has said nothing about that in his word, therefore we have no right to believe anything about it. It is better not to speculate on such matters. However desirable it may seem to us, we have nothing to do with it. It is not revealed." For such a man is incapable of suspecting, that what has remained hidden from him may have been revealed to the babe. With the authority, therefore, of years and ignorance, he forbids the child, for he believes in no revelation but the Bible, and in the word of that alone. For him all revelation has ceased with and been buried in the Bible, to be with difficulty exhumed, and, with much questioning of the decayed form, re-united into a rigid skeleton of metaphysical and legal contrivance for letting the love of God have its way unchecked by the other perfections of his being. ~ George MacDonald,

1361:Mary Magdalene With wandering eyes and aimless zeal, She hither, thither, goes; Her speech, her motions, all reveal A mind without repose. She climbs the hills, she haunts the sea, By madness tortured, driven; One hour's forgetfulness would be A gift from very heaven! She slumbers into new distress; The night is worse than day: Exulting in her helplessness; Hell's dogs yet louder bay. The demons blast her to and fro; She has not quiet place, Enough a woman still, to know A haunting dim disgrace. A human touch! a pang of death! And in a low delight Thou liest, waiting for new breath, For morning out of night. Thou risest up: the earth is fair, The wind is cool; thou art free! Is it a dream of hell's despair Dissolves in ecstasy? That man did touch thee! Eyes divine Make sunrise in thy soul; Thou seest love in order shine:- His health hath made thee whole! Thou, sharing in the awful doom, Didst help thy Lord to die; Then, weeping o'er his empty tomb, Didst hear him Mary cry. He stands in haste; he cannot stop; Home to his God he fares: 'Go tell my brothers I go up To my Father, mine and theirs.' Run, Mary! lift thy heavenly voice; Cry, cry, and heed not how; Make all the new-risen world rejoice- Its first apostle thou! What if old tales of thee have lied, Or truth have told, thou art All-safe with Him, whate'er betide Dwell'st with Him in God's heart! ~ George MacDonald,

1362:Ask a man of mere science, what is the truth of a flower: he will pull it to pieces, show you its parts, explain how they operate, how they minister each to the life of the flower; he will tell you what changes are wrought in it by scientific cultivation; where it lives originally, where it can live; the effects upon it of another climate; what part the insects bear in its varieties—and doubtless many more facts about it. Ask the poet what is the truth of the flower, and he will answer: 'Why, the flower itself, the perfect flower, and what it cannot help saying to him who has ears to hear it.' The truth of the flower is, not the facts about it, be they correct as ideal science itself, but the shining, glowing, gladdening, patient thing throned on its stalk—the compeller of smile and tear from child and prophet. The man of science laughs at this, because he is only a man of science, and does not know what it means; but the poet and the child care as little for his laughter as the birds of God, as Dante calls the angels, for his treatise on aerostation. The children of God must always be mocked by the children of the world, whether in the church or out of it—children with sharp ears and eyes, but dull hearts. Those that hold love the only good in the world, understand and smile at the world's children, and can do very well without anything they have got to tell them. In the higher state to which their love is leading them, they will speedily outstrip the men of science, for they have that which is at the root of science, that for the revealing of which God's science exists. What shall it profit a man to know all things, and lose the bliss, the consciousness of well-being, which alone can give value to his knowledge? ~ George MacDonald,

1363:The grandeur of the poem is that Job pleads his cause with God against all the remonstrance of religious authority, recognizing no one but God, and justified therein. And the grandest of all is this, that he implies, if he does not actually say, that God owes something to his creature. This is the beginning of the greatest discovery of all—that God owes himself to the creature he has made in his image, for so he has made him incapable of living without him. This, his creatures' highest claim upon him, is his divinest gift to them. For the fulfilling of this their claim he has sent his son, that he may himself, the father of him and of us, follow into our hearts. Perhaps the worst thing in a theology constructed out of man's dull possible, and not out of the being and deeds and words of Jesus Christ, is the impression it conveys throughout that God acknowledges no such obligation. Are not we the clay, and he the potter? how can the clay claim from the potter? We are the clay, it is true, but his clay, but spiritual clay, live clay, with needs and desires—and rights; we are clay, but clay worth the Son of God's dying for, that it might learn to consent to be shaped unto honour. We can have no merits—a merit is a thing impossible; but God has given us rights. Out of him we have nothing; but, created by him, come forth from him, we have even rights towards him—ah, never, never against him! his whole desire and labour is to make us capable of claiming, and induce us to claim of him the things whose rights he bestowed in creating us. No claim had we to be created: that involves an absurdity; but, being made, we have claims on him who made us: our needs are our claims. A man who will not provide for the hunger of his child, is condemned by the whole world. ~ George MacDonald,

1364:To let their light shine, not to force on them their interpretations of God's designs, is the duty of Christians towards their fellows. If you who set yourselves to explain the theory of Christianity, had set yourselves instead to do the will of the Master, the one object for which the Gospel was preached to you, how different would now be the condition of that portion of the world with which you come into contact! Had you given yourselves to the understanding of his word that you might do it, and not to the quarrying from it of material wherewith to buttress your systems, in many a heart by this time would the name of the Lord be loved where now it remains unknown. The word of life would then by you have been held out indeed. Men, undeterred by your explanations of Christianity, for you would not be forcing them on their acceptance, and attracted by your behaviour, would be saying to each other, as Moses said to himself when he saw the bush that burned with fire and was not consumed, 'I will now turn aside and see this great sight!' they would be drawing nigh to behold how these Christians loved one another, and how just and fair they were to every one that had to do with them! to note that their goods were the best, their weight surest, their prices most reasonable, their word most certain! that in their families was neither jealousy nor emulation! that mammon was not there worshipped! that in their homes selfishness was neither the hidden nor the openly ruling principle; that their children were as diligently taught to share, as some are to save, or to lay out only upon self—their mothers more anxious lest a child should hoard than lest he should squander; that in no house of theirs was religion one thing, and the daily life another; that the ecclesiastic did not think first of his church, nor the peer of his privileges. ~ George MacDonald,

1365:Such words are pleasing in the ear of the father of spirits. He is not a God to accept the flattery which declares him above obligation to his creatures; a God to demand of them a righteousness different from his own; a God to deal ungenerously with his poverty-stricken children; a God to make severest demands upon his little ones! Job is confident of receiving justice. There is a strange but most natural conflict of feeling in him. His faith is in truth profound, yet is he always complaining. It is but the form his faith takes in his trouble. Even while he declares the hardness and unfitness of the usage he is receiving, he yet seems assured that, to get things set right, all he needs is admission to the presence of God—an interview with the Most High. To be heard must be to have justice. He uses language which, used by any living man, would horrify the religious of the present day, in proportion to the lack of truth in them, just as it horrified his three friends, the honest pharisees of the time, whose religion was 'doctrine' and rebuke. God speaks not a word of rebuke to Job for the freedom of his speech:—he has always been seeking such as Job to worship him. It is those who know only and respect the outsides of religion, such as never speak or think of God but as the Almighty or Providence, who will say of the man who would go close up to God, and speak to him out of the deepest in the nature he has made, 'he is irreverent.' To utter the name of God in the drama—highest of human arts, is with such men blasphemy. They pay court to God, not love him; they treat him as one far away, not as the one whose bosom is the only home. They accept God's person. 'Shall not his excellency'—another thing quite than that you admire—' make you afraid? Shall not his dread'—another thing quite than that to which you show your pagan respect—' fall upon you? ~ George MacDonald,

1366:When once to a man the human face is the human face divine, and the hand of his neighbour is the hand of a brother, then will he understand what St Paul meant when he said, "I could wish that myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren." But he will no longer understand those who, so far from feeling the love of their neighbour an essential of their being, expect to be set free from its law in the world to come. There, at least, for the glory of God, they may limit its expansive tendencies to the narrow circle of their heaven. On its battlements of safety, they will regard hell from afar, and say to each other, "Hark! Listen to their moans. But do not weep, for they are our neighbours no more." St Paul would be wretched before the throne of God, if he thought there was one man beyond the pale of his mercy, and that as much for God's glory as for the man's sake. And what shall we say of the man Christ Jesus? Who, that loves his brother, would not, upheld by the love of Christ, and with a dim hope that in the far-off time there might be some help for him, arise from the company of the blessed, and walk down into the dismal regions of despair, to sit with the last, the only unredeemed, the Judas of his race, and be himself more blessed in the pains of hell, than in the glories of heaven? Who, in the midst of the golden harps and the white wings, knowing that one of his kind, one miserable brother in the old-world-time when men were taught to love their neighbour as themselves, was howling unheeded far below in the vaults of the creation, who, I say, would not feel that he must arise, that he had no choice, that, awful as it was, he must gird his loins, and go down into the smoke and the darkness and the fire, travelling the weary and fearful road into the far country to find his brother?—who, I mean, that had the mind of Christ, that had the love of the Father? ~ George MacDonald,

1367:There has been much cherishing of the evil fancy, often without its taking formal shape, that there is some way of getting out of the region of strict justice, some mode of managing to escape doing all that is required of us; but there is no such escape. A way to avoid any demand of righteousness would be an infinitely worse way than the road to the everlasting fire, for its end would be eternal death. No, there is no escape. There is no heaven with a little of hell in it—no plan to retain this or that of the devil in our hearts or our pockets. Out Satan must go, every hair and feather! Neither shalt thou think to be delivered from the necessity of being good by being made good. God is the God of the animals in a far lovelier way, I suspect, than many of us dare to think, but he will not be the God of a man by making a good beast of him. Thou must be good; neither death nor any admittance into good company will make thee good; though, doubtless, if thou be willing and try, these and all other best helps will be given thee. There is no clothing in a robe of imputed righteousness, that poorest of legal cobwebs spun by spiritual spiders. To me it seems like an invention of well-meaning dulness to soothe insanity; and indeed it has proved a door of escape out of worse imaginations. It is apparently an old 'doctrine;' for St. John seems to point at it where he says, 'Little children, let no man lead you astray; he that doeth righteousness is righteous even as he is righteous.' Christ is our righteousness, not that we should escape punishment, still less escape being righteous, but as the live potent creator of righteousness in us, so that we, with our wills receiving his spirit, shall like him resist unto blood, striving against sin; shall know in ourselves, as he knows, what a lovely thing is righteousness, what a mean, ugly, unnatural thing is unrighteousness. He is our righteousness, and that righteousness is no fiction, no pretence, no imputation. ~ George MacDonald,

1368:These things cannot be loved. The best man hates them most; the worst man cannot love them. But are these the man? Does a woman bear that form in virtue of these? Lies there not within the man and the woman a divine element of brotherhood, of sisterhood, a something lovely and lovable,—slowly fading, it may be,—dying away under the fierce heat of vile passions, or the yet more fearful cold of sepulchral selfishness—but there? Shall that divine something, which, once awakened to be its own holy self in the man, will loathe these unlovely things tenfold more than we loathe them now—shall this divine thing have no recognition from us? It is the very presence of this fading humanity that makes it possible for us to hate. If it were an animal only, and not a man or a woman that did us hurt, we should not hate: we should only kill. We hate the man just because we are prevented from loving him. We push over the verge of the creation—we damn—just because we cannot embrace. For to embrace is the necessity of our deepest being. That foiled, we hate. Instead of admonishing ourselves that there is our enchained brother, that there lies our enchanted, disfigured, scarce recognizable sister, captive of the devil, to break, how much sooner, from their bonds, that we love them!—we recoil into the hate which would fix them there; and the dearly lovable reality of them we sacrifice to the outer falsehood of Satan's incantations, thus leaving them to perish. Nay, we murder them to get rid of them, we hate them. Yet within the most obnoxious to our hate, lies that which, could it but show itself as it is, and as it will show itself one day, would compel from our hearts a devotion of love. It is not the unfriendly, the unlovely, that we are told to love, but the brother, the sister, who is unkind, who is unlovely. Shall we leave our brother to his desolate fate? Shall we not rather say, "With my love at least shalt thou be compassed about, for thou hast not thy own lovingness to infold thee; love shall come as near thee as it may; and when thine comes forth to meet mine, we shall be one in the indwelling God"? ~ George MacDonald,

1369:It is terrible to represent God as unrelated to us in the way of appeal to his righteousness. How should he be righteous without owing us anything? How would there be any right for the judge of all the earth to do if he owed nothing? Verily he owes us nothing that he does not pay like a God; but it is of the devil to imagine imperfection and disgrace in obligation. So far is God from thinking so that in every act of his being he lays himself under obligation to his creatures. Oh, the grandeur of his goodness, and righteousness, and fearless unselfishness! When doubt and dread invade, and the voice of love in the soul is dumb, what can please the father of men better than to hear his child cry to him from whom he came, 'Here I am, O God! Thou hast made me: give me that which thou hast made me needing.' The child's necessity, his weakness, his helplessness, are the strongest of all his claims. If I am a whale, I can claim a sea; if I am a sea, I claim room to roll, and break in waves after my kind; if I am a lion, I seek my meat from God; am I a child, this, beyond all other claims, I claim—that, if any of my needs are denied me, it shall be by the love of a father, who will let me see his face, and allow me to plead my cause before him. And this must be just what God desires! What would he have, but that his children should claim their father? To what end are all his dealings with them, all his sufferings with and for and in them, but that they should claim their birthright? Is not their birthright what he made them for, made in them when he made them? Is it not what he has been putting forth his energy to give them ever since first he began them to be—the divine nature, God himself? The child has, and must have, a claim on the father, a claim which it is the joy of the father's heart to acknowledge. A created need is a created claim. God is the origin of both need and supply, the father of our necessities, the abundant giver of the good things. Right gloriously he meets the claims of his child! The story of Jesus is the heart of his answer, not primarily to the prayers, but to the divine necessities of the children he has sent out into his universe. ~ George MacDonald,

1370:Wherefore, we receiving a kingdom which cannot be moved, let us have grace, whereby we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear, for our God is a consuming fire."—We have received a kingdom that cannot be moved—whose nature is immovable: let us have grace to serve the Consuming Fire, our God, with divine fear; not with the fear that cringes and craves, but with the bowing down of all thoughts, all delights, all loves before him who is the life of them all, and will have them all pure. The kingdom he has given us cannot be moved, because it has nothing weak in it: it is of the eternal world, the world of being, of truth. We, therefore, must worship him with a fear pure as the kingdom is unshakeable. He will shake heaven and earth, that only the unshakeable may remain, (verse 27): he is a consuming fire, that only that which cannot be consumed may stand forth eternal. It is the nature of God, so terribly pure that it destroys all that is not pure as fire, which demands like purity in our worship. He will have purity. It is not that the fire will burn us if we do not worship thus; but that the fire will burn us until we worship thus; yea, will go on burning within us after all that is foreign to it has yielded to its force, no longer with pain and consuming, but as the highest consciousness of life, the presence of God. When evil, which alone is consumable, shall have passed away in his fire from the dwellers in the immovable kingdom, the nature of man shall look the nature of God in the face, and his fear shall then be pure; for an eternal, that is a holy fear, must spring from a knowledge of the nature, not from a sense of the power. But that which cannot be consumed must be one within itself, a simple existence; therefore in such a soul the fear towards God will be one with the homeliest love. Yea, the fear of God will cause a man to flee, not from him, but from himself; not from him, but to him, the Father of himself, in terror lest he should do Him wrong or his neighbour wrong. And the first words which follow for the setting forth of that grace whereby we may serve God acceptably are these—" Let brotherly love continue." To love our brother is to worship the Consuming Fire. ~ George MacDonald,

1371:Ah, but, dear North Wind, you don't know how nice it is to feel your arms about me. It is a thousand times better to have them and the wind together, than to have only your hair and the back of your neck and no wind at all." "But it is surely more comfortable there?" "Well, perhaps; but I begin to think there are better things than being comfortable." "Yes, indeed there are. Well, I will keep you in front of me. You will feel the wind, but not too much. I shall only want one arm to take care of you; the other will be quite enough to sink the ship." "Oh, dear North Wind! how can you talk so?" "My dear boy, I never talk; I always mean what I say." "Then you do mean to sink the ship with the other hand?" "Yes." "It's not like you." "How do you know that?" "Quite easily. Here you are taking care of a poor little boy with one arm, and there you are sinking a ship with the other. It can't be like you." "Ah! but which is me? I can't be two mes, you know." "No. Nobody can be two mes." "Well, which me is me?" "Now I must think. There looks to be two." "Yes. That's the very point.—You can't be knowing the thing you don't know, can you?" "No." "Which me do you know?" "The kindest, goodest, best me in the world," answered Diamond, clinging to North Wind. "Why am I good to you?" "I don't know." "Have you ever done anything for me?" "No." "Then I must be good to you because I choose to be good to you." "Yes." "Why should I choose?" "Because—because—because you like." "Why should I like to be good to you?" "I don't know, except it be because it's good to be good to me." "That's just it; I am good to you because I like to be good." "Then why shouldn't you be good to other people as well as to me?" "That's just what I don't know. Why shouldn't I?" "I don't know either. Then why shouldn't you?" "Because I am." "There it is again," said Diamond. "I don't see that you are. It looks quite the other thing." "Well, but listen to me, Diamond. You know the one me, you say, and that is good." "Yes." "Do you know the other me as well?" "No. I can't. I shouldn't like to." "There it is. You don't know the other me. You are sure of one of them?" "Yes." "And you are sure there can't be two mes?" "Yes." "Then the me you don't know must be the same as the me you do know,—else there would be two mes?" "Yes." "Then the other me you don't know must be as kind as the me you do know?" "Yes." "Besides, I tell you that it is so, only it doesn't look like it. That I confess freely. Have you anything more to object?" "No, no, dear North Wind; I am quite satisfied. ~ George MacDonald,

1372:Não, não há escapatória. Não existe céu com um pouco de inferno nele – não tentemos reter isso ou aquilo do mal em nossos corações ou em nossos bolsos. Satanás deve sair, cada fiapo, cada fio de cabelo.” (George MacDonald) O poeta inglês William Blake (1757-1827) escreveu 'O Casamento do Céu e do Inferno'. Se escrevo sobre o Divórcio, não é porque me julgue à altura para antagonizar com tão grande gênio, nem porque tenha pleno conhecimento do que ele queria dizer. No entanto, em um sentido ou outro, é constante a tentativa de fazer tal casamento. Essa tentativa baseia-se na crença de que a realidade nunca se apresenta a nós como uma escolha inevitável entre 'isso ou aquilo'; de que, com habilidade, paciência e (sobretudo) tempo suficiente, seria possível encontrar uma maneira de acomodar as duas alternativas; e de que a simples evolução, adaptação ou refinamento conseguirá, de algum jeito, transformar o mal em bem, sem que sejamos interpelados a rejeitar, de modo definitivo e integral, aquilo que desejamos conservar. Essa crença é, a meu juízo, um erro desastroso. Você não pode levar toda a bagagem consigo em todas as viagens; em alguma jornada, sua mão e seu olho direitos podem estar entre as coisas que você terá de deixar para trás. Não vivemos num mundo onde todos os caminhos são como raios de um círculo, que, se suficientemente percorridos, gradualmente se aproximariam um do outro e, ao fim, convergiriam no centro; vivemos, sim, num mundo onde cada caminho, depois de alguns quilômetros, se bifurca e onde cada uma das duas ramificações, por sua vez, se biparte novamente; e, em cada encruzilhada, você precisa tomar uma decisão. Mesmo no nível biológico, a vida não é como um rio, e sim como uma árvore. A vida não flui no sentido da unidade, mas, ao contrário, afasta-se dela, e as criaturas se diferenciam entre si à medida que se aprimoram. O bem, quando amadurece, distingue-se não apenas do mal, mas também de outro bem. Não creio que todos aqueles que optam por caminhos equivocados pereçam, mas seu resgate consiste em serem colocados de volta na estrada certa. Uma operação de adição pode ser corrigida: mas isso só pode ser feito retornando até encontrar o erro e refazendo o cálculo a partir dali; nunca simplesmente prosseguindo. O mal pode ser desfeito, mas não pode 'evoluir' para o bem. O tempo não o cura. O feitiço deve ser revertido, aos poucos, 'com sussurros de trás para frente, de poder disjuntivo' (peça ‘Comus’, do poeta inglês John Milton – 1608-1674) – ou, então, o encanto não cessará. É 'uma coisa ou outra'. Se insistirmos em preservar o Inferno (ou mesmo a Terra), não veremos o Céu: se aceitarmos o Céu, não poderemos guardar sequer o menor e o mais íntimo 'suvenir' do Inferno. Acredito, com efeito, que toda pessoa que alcançar o Céu descobrirá que o que abandonou (mesmo que seja arrancando seu olho direito) na verdade não era nada: que o cerne daquilo que estava ansiosamente procurando, mesmo em seus desejos mais pervertidos, estará lá, além das expectativas, aguardando por ela nos 'Países Altos'. Nesse sentido, os que tiverem completado a jornada (e somente estes) poderão verdadeiramente dizer que o bem está em tudo, e o Céu, em todo lugar. Entretanto, deste lado da estrada, não devemos tentar antecipar essa observação retrospectiva. Se o fizermos, provavelmente estaremos abraçando o falso e desastroso avesso e fantasia de que tudo é bom e de que todo lugar é o Céu. Mas e a terra? – você perguntará. Imagino que, no fim, ninguém a achará um lugar muito diferente. Penso que, se escolhida em prejuízo do Céu, a terra acabará se revelando uma mera região no Inferno e, se colocada em segundo lugar, depois do Céu, se mostrará desde o início como uma parte do próprio Céu. ~ C S Lewis,

1373:They [mountains] are portions of the heart of the earth that have escaped from the dungeon down below, and rushed up and out. For the heart of the earth is a great wallowing mass, not of blood, as in the hearts of men and animals, but of glowing hot melted metals and stones. And as our hearts keep us alive, so that great lump of heat keeps the earth alive: it is a huge power of buried sunlight—that is what it is. Now think: out of that caldron, where all the bubbles would be as big as the Alps if it could get room for its boiling, certain bubbles have bubbled out and escaped—up and away, and there they stand in the cool, cold sky—mountains. Think of the change, and you will no more wonder that there should be something awful about the very look of a mountain: from the darkness—for where the light has nothing to shine upon, it is much the same as darkness—from the heat, from the endless tumult of boiling unrest—up, with a sudden heavenward shoot, into the wind, and the cold, and the starshine, and a cloak of snow that lies like ermine above the blue-green mail of the glaciers; and the great sun, their grandfather, up there in the sky; and their little old cold aunt, the moon, that comes wandering about the house at night; and everlasting stillness, except for the wind that turns the rocks and caverns into a roaring organ for the young archangels that are studying how to let out the pent-up praises of their hearts, and the molten music of the streams, rushing ever from the bosoms of the glaciers fresh-born. Think too of the change in their own substance—no longer molten and soft, heaving and glowing, but hard and shining and cold. Think of the creatures scampering over and burrowing in it, and the birds building their nests upon it, and the trees growing out of its sides, like hair to clothe it, and the lovely grass in the valleys, and the gracious flowers even at the very edge of its armour of ice, like the rich embroidery of the garment below, and the rivers galloping down the valleys in a tumult of white and green! And along with all these, think of the terrible precipices down which the traveller may fall and be lost, and the frightful gulfs of blue air cracked in the glaciers, and the dark profound lakes, covered like little arctic oceans with floating lumps of ice. All this outside the mountain! But the inside, who shall tell what lies there? Caverns of awfullest solitude, their walls miles thick, sparkling with ores of gold or silver, copper or iron, tin or mercury, studded perhaps with precious stones—perhaps a brook, with eyeless fish in it, running, running ceaseless, cold and babbling, through banks crusted with carbuncles and golden topazes, or over a gravel of which some of the stones are rubies and emeralds, perhaps diamonds and sapphires—who can tell?—and whoever can't tell is free to think—all waiting to flash, waiting for millions of ages—ever since the earth flew off from the sun, a great blot of fire, and began to cool. Then there are caverns full of water, numbing cold, fiercely hot—hotter than any boiling water. From some of these the water cannot get out, and from others it runs in channels as the blood in the body: little veins bring it down from the ice above into the great caverns of the mountain's heart, whence the arteries let it out again, gushing in pipes and clefts and ducts of all shapes and kinds, through and through its bulk, until it springs newborn to the light, and rushes down the mountain side in torrents, and down the valleys in rivers—down, down, rejoicing, to the mighty lungs of the world, that is the sea, where it is tossed in storms and cyclones, heaved up in billows, twisted in waterspouts, dashed to mist upon rocks, beaten by millions of tails, and breathed by millions of gills, whence at last, melted into vapour by the sun, it is lifted up pure into the air, and borne by the servant winds back to the mountain tops and the snow, the solid ice, and the molten stream. ~ George MacDonald,

   1 Occultism

APPENDIX I - Curriculum of A. A., #Liber ABA, #Aleister Crowley, #Occultism       Lilith, by George MacDonald. ::: A good introduction to the Astral.       La-Bas , by J. K. Huysmans. ::: An account of the extravagances caused by the Sin-complex.