50 Great Quotes from George MacDonald
Brilliance from the man who shaped C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien
I first encountered the work of George MacDonald by reading his wonderful fairy tales, The Princess and the Goblin and The Princess and Curdie. Little did I realize that he was a poet, preacher, essayist, and profound thinker who had an indelible impact on both C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. As I began to explore his work I ran across George MacDonald: An Anthology 365 Readings put together by Lewis. It is wonderful. These 50 quotes are drawn from that book and are the best of the best of George MacDonald, in my estimation.
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.
As he cannot keep the law without first rising into the love of his neighbor, so he cannot love his neighbor without first rising higher still.
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.
What father is not pleased with the first tottering attempt of his little one to walk? What father would be satisfied with anything but the manly step of the full-grown son?
The immediate end of the commandments never was that men should succeed in obeying them, but that, finding they could not do that which yet must be done, finding the more they tried the more was required of them, they should be driven to the source of life and law — of their life and His law - to seek from Him such reinforcement of life as should make the fulfillment of the law as possible, yea, as natural, as necessary.
The miracles of Jesus were the ordinary works of His Father, wrought small and swift that we might take them in.
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.
He that is made in the image of God must know Him or be desolate. ... Witness the dissatisfaction, yea, desolation of my soul - wretched, alone, unfinished, without Him. It cannot act from itself, save in God; acting from what seems itself without God, is no action at all, it is a mere yielding to impulse. All within is disorder and spasm.
"But if God is so good as you represent Him, and if He knows all that we need, and better far than we do our-selves, 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....
Every gift of God is but a harbinger of His greatest and only sufficing gift —that of Himself. 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.
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.
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?"
And there is a communion with God that asks for nothing, yet asks for everything.... 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.
Perhaps, indeed, the better the gift we pray for, the more time is necessary for its arrival. To give us the spiritual gift we desire, God may have to begin far back in our spirit, in regions unknown to us, and do much work that we can be aware of only in the results; for our consciousness is to the extent of our being but as the flame of the volcano to the world-gulf whence it issues; in the gulf of our unknown being God works behind our consciousness. With His holy influence, with His own presence (the one thing for which most earnestly we cry) He may be approaching our consciousness from behind, coming forward through regions of our darkness into our light, long before we begin to be aware that He is answering our request-has answered it, and is visiting His child.
Do not drive justice to extremities. Duty is imperative; it must be done. It is useless to think to escape the eternal law of things: yield of yourself, nor compel God to compel you.
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.
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.
Many doubtless mistake the joy of life for life itself, and, longing after the joy, languish with a thirst at once poor and inextinguishable; but even that, thirst points to the one spring. 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.
The true man trusts in a strength which is not his, and which he does not feel, does not even always desire.
To know a primrose is a higher thing than to know all the botany of it— just as to know Christ is an infinitely higher thing than to know all theology, all that is said about His person, or babbled about His work.
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.
Christ is the way out, and the way in: the way from slavery, conscious or unconscious, into liberty; the way from the unhomeliness of things to the home we desire but do not know; the way from the stormy skirts of the Father's garments to the peace of His bosom.
True victory over self is the victory of God in the man, not of the man alone. It is not subjugation that is enough, but subjugation by God. In whatever man does without God, he must fail miserably-or succeed more miserably.
We must be jealous for God against ourselves and look well to the cunning and deceitful self-ever cunning and deceitful until it is informed of God-until it is thoroughly and utterly denied. ... Until then its very denials, its very turnings from things dear to it for the sake of Christ, will tend to foster its self-regard, and, generate in it a yet deeper self-worship.
The careless soul receives the Father's gifts as if it were a way things had of dropping into his hand... yet is he ever complaining, as if someone were accountable for the checks which meet him at every turn. For the good. that comes to him, he gives no thanks —who is there to thank? At the disappointments that befall him he grumbles —there must be someone to blame!
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.
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.
Let him who would know the truth of the Maker, become sorely athirst, and drink of the brook by the way —then lift up his heart-not at that moment to the Maker of oxygen and hydrogen, but to the Inventor and Mediator of thirst and water, that man might foresee a little of what his soul might find in God.
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.
The one principle of hell is—"I am my own!"
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?
To put off obeying Him till we find a credible theory concerning Him is to set aside the potion we know it our duty to drink, for the study of the various schools of therapy.
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.
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.
There is one kind of religion in which the more devoted a man is, the fewer proselytes he makes: the worship of himself.
Love makes everything lovely: hate concentrates itself on the one thing hated.
To tell the truth, I feel a good deal younger. For then I only knew that a man had to take up his cross; whereas now I know that a man has to follow Him.
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 world holds, and be content without it.
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.
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.
It is the heart that is not yet sure of its God that is afraid to laugh in His presence.
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.
No man can order his life, for it comes flowing over him from behind.... The one secret of life and development is not to devise and plan but to fall in with the forces at work-to do every moment's duty aright-that being the part in the process allotted to us: and let come —not what will, for there is no such thing -but what the eternal thought wills for each of us, has intended in each of us from the first.
By obeying one learns how to obey.
With every morn my life afresh must break
The crust of self, gathered about me fresh.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.
Complaint against God is far nearer to God than indifference about Him.
We are often unable to tell people what they need to know, because they want to know something else.
I really enjoy this anthology!
Just got MacDonald’s “Diary of an Old Soul” in the mail. Are you familiar with it? I think it’s a cool premise and am looking forward to reading bits as able.
I thought # 5 was Lewis. Perhaps he was quoting GM. Thank you for this collection!