George Macdonald Quotes

To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved.

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.

Few delights can equal the mere presence of one whom we trust utterly.

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

Seeing is not believing - it is only seeing.

To try to be brave is to be brave.

Doing the will of God leaves me no time for disputing about His plans.

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

Philosophy is really homesickness.

No story ever really ends, and I think I know why.

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

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.

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

Past tears are present strength.

All that is not God is death.

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.

It is by loving and not by being loved that one can come nearest to the soul of another.

As you grow ready for it, somewhere or other you will find what is needful for you in a book.

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

We don't have a soul. We are a soul. We have a body." George Macdonald, 1892

A man is as free as he chooses to make himself, never an atom freer.

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.

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.

It is when people do wrong things wilfully that they are the more likely to do them again.

Only he knew that to be left alone is not always to be forsaken.

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.

You doubt because you love truth.

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)

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.

There's a point, you know, where treachery is so complete and unashamed that it becomes statesmanship.

I want to help you to grow as beautiful as God meant you to be when He thought of you first.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Well, perhaps; but I begin to think there are better things than being comfortable.

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.

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

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

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.

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]

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.

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.

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.

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.

Doubt may be a poor encouragement to do anything, but it is a bad reason for doing nothing.

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.

Anything big enough to occupy our minds is big enough to hang a prayer on.

...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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

The one principle of hell is – “I am my own

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.

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

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.

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.

My prayers, my God, flow from what I am not; I think thy answers make me what I am.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

There is no slave but the creature that wills against its Creator.

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.

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.

Obedience is the opener of eyes.

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.

...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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It is the heart that is unsure of its God that is afraid to laugh.

The best preparation for the future, is the present well seen to, and the last duty done.

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.

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.

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.

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.

God's finger can touch nothing but to mold it into loveliness.

The only way to come to know where you are is to begin to make yourself at home.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

The greatest forces lie in the region of the uncomprehended.

We must do the thing we must Before the thing we may; We are unfit for any trust Till we can and do obey.

but that is the way fear serves us: it always sides with the thing we are afraid of.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

You would not think any duty small, If you yourself were great.

We are dwellers in a divine universe where no desires are in vain - if only they be large enough.

I am ready,' I replied. 'How do you know you can do it?' 'Because you require it,' I answered.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

...The road to the next duty is the only straight one.

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

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.

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.

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.

We die daily. Happy those who daily come to life as well.

The back door of every tomb opens on a hilltop.

Above all things, I delight in listening to stories, and sometimes in telling them.

Bees and butterflies, moths and dragonflies, the flowers and the brooks and the clouds.

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

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

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

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.

It is amazing from what a mere fraction of a fact concerning him a man will dare judge the whole of another man

But when we are following the light, even its extinction is a guide.

I had chosen the dead rather than the living, the thing thought rather than the thing thinking.

"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.

But it was little to Curdie that men who did not know what he was about should not approve of his proceedings.

Seeing is not believing—it is only seeing.

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.

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.

And when heart and head go together, nothing can stand before them

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

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.

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.

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?

I do not write for children, but for the childlike, whether of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.

This is the tale of Magic Alex, the man who was everywhere: with Leonard Cohen in Hydra; in Crete with Joni Mitchell; in a Paris bathroom when Jimmy Morrison went down; working as a roadie setting up the Beatles last rooftop gig; an assistant to John and Yoko when they had a bed-in at the Amsterdam Hilton; with the Stones when they were charged for pissing against a wall; the first to find and save Dylan after the motorcycle accident; having it off with Mama Cass hours before she choked the big one; arranging the security at Altamont; at Haight-Ashbury with George Harrison and the Grateful Dead; and in the Japanese airport with McCartney after the dope rap. He was the guy Carly Simon was really singing about and the missing slice of ‘Bye, Bye Miss American Pie’.

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.

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.

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

Books are but dead bodies to you, and a library nothing but a catacomb!

To will not from self, but with the Eternal, is to live.

I was a bookworm then, but when I came to know it, I woke among the butterflies.

Wherever there is anything to love, there is beauty in some form.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

May had now set in, but up here among the hills, she was May by curtesy only; or if she was May, she would never be might. She was, indeed, only April with her showers and sunshine, her tearful, childish laughter, and again the frown, and the dispair irremediable. Nay, as if she still kept up a secret correspondence with her cousin March, banished for his rudeness, she would not very seldom shake from her skirts a snow storm, and oftener the dancing hail. Then out would come the sun behind her, and laugh, and say-- "I could not help THAT; but here I am all the same, coming to you as fast as I can!

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.

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.

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.

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.

[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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

...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!

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.