Click on the link at the end of each quote to rank, download, & share the graphic. Highly ranked quotes appear at the top of the sidebar on the left. Each quote page also includes links to get the book from which the quote was taken and more context.
Click on the link at the end of each quote to rank, download, & share the graphic. Highly ranked quotes appear at the top of the sidebar on the left. Each quote page also includes links to get the book from which the quote was taken and more context.
Aging and Death
Belief / Faith
Character
Friendship
Hell
Love of God
Obedience
Prayer
Aging and Death
“Age is not all decay; it is the ripening, the swelling, of the fresh life within, that withers and bursts the husk.”View & rate this quote.
“I do care to live—tremendously, but I don’t mind where. He who made this room so well worth living in, may surely be trusted with the next!” View & rate this quote.
“I have come through the door of Dismay; and the way back from the world into which that has led me, is through my tomb. Upon that the red sign lies, and I shall find it one day, and be glad.” View & rate this quote.
“They think that it is life, strong in them, that makes them forget death; whereas, in truth, it is death, strong in them, that makes them forget life.” View & rate this quote.
“Years are Christ’s napkins to wipe off the sin.” View & rate this quote.
“No story, however, ends in this world. The first volume may have been very dull, and yet the next be full of delight.” View & rate this quote.
“For all true hearts death is a uniting, not a dividing power.” View & rate this quote.
“As the child-bed is watched on earth with anxious expectancy, so the couch of the dying, as we call them, may be surrounded by the birth-watchers of the other world.” View & rate this quote.
“The glad creator never made man for sorrow: it is but a stormy strait through which he must pass to his ocean of peace. He makes the joy the last in every song.” View & rate this quote.
Belief / Faith
“Good souls many will one day be horrified at the things they now believe of God. … They can make little progress in the knowledge of God, while … holding evil things true of him.” View & rate this quote.
“Doubt is the hammer that breaks the windows clouded with human fancies, and lets in the pure light.” View & rate this quote.
“It is the heart that is not yet sure of its God that is afraid to laugh in His presence.” View & rate this quote.
“When once a man has set out to find God, he must find him or die.” View & rate this quote.
“You may be convinced that there is no God such as this or that in whom men imagine they believe, but you cannot be convinced there is no God.” View & rate this quote.
“Everything difficult indicates something more than our theory of life yet embraces, checks some tendency to abandon the strait path, leaving open only the way ahead.” View & rate this quote.
“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.” View & rate this quote.
“For here in a wonderful manner I saw the imagination outrunning the intellect, and manifesting to the heart what the brain could not yet understand.” View & rate this quote.
“It is the one terrible heresy of the church, that it has always been presenting something else than obedience as faith in Christ.” View & rate this quote.
“Seeing is not believing, it is only seeing.” View & rate this quote.
“The very first step towards action is the death warrant of doubt.” View & rate this quote.
“He who does that which he sees, shall understand; he who is set upon understanding rather than doing, shall go on stumbling and mistaking and speaking foolishness.” View & rate this quote.
“No teacher should strive to make men think as he thinks, but to lead them to the living Truth, to the Master himself, of whom alone they can learn anything, who will make them in themselves know what is true by the very seeing of it.” View & rate this quote.
“Doubts are the messengers of the Living One to rouse the honest heart. They are the first knock at our door of things that are not yet, but have to be, understood.” View & rate this quote.
“Theologians have done more to hide the Gospel of Christ than any of its adversaries.” View & rate this quote.
“I am bound to refuse every interpretation that seems to me unworthy of Him, for to accept such would be to sin against the Holy Ghost.” View & rate this quote.
“Fools must experience a thing themselves before they will believe it … Faith is the only charm by which the experience of one becomes a vantage-ground for the start of another.” View & rate this quote.
“Had Christians been believing in God better, more grandly, the present phase of unbelief … would not have appeared in our day. View & rate this quote.
“To believe in a being who, in his weakness and poverty, if such could be, would die for his creatures, would be to believe in a God indeed.” View & rate this quote.
“Science teaches that a man must not say he knows what he does not know; not that what a man does not know he may say does not exist.” View & rate this quote.
“The good of all evil is to make a way for love, which is essential good. Therefore evil exists, and will exist until love destroy and cast it out.” View & rate this quote.
“He had never put it to himself which would be the worse deception—to believe there was a God when there was none; or to believe there was no God when there was one.” View & rate this quote.
“Nor did it now occur to him what a small affair it was to find a book fallible, compared with finding the God of whom the book spoke fallible upon its testimony.” View & rate this quote.
Character
“Whoever is diligent will soon be cheerful.”View & rate this quote.
“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.” View & rate this quote.
“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.” View & rate this quote.
“It is a small thing to a man whether or not his neighbor be merciful to him; it is life or death to him whether or not he be merciful to his neighbor…The reward of the merciful is, that by their mercy they are rendered capable of receiving the mercy of God- yea God Himself, who is mercy.” View & rate this quote.
“Every one of us is something that the other is not, and therefore knows something–it may be without knowing that he knows it–which no one else knows: and . . . it is everyone’s business, as one of the kingdom of light and inheritor in it all, to give his portion to the rest.” View & rate this quote.
“A 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.” View & rate this quote.
“To enjoy heartily and thankfully, and do cheerfully without, when God wills we should, is the way to live in regard to things of the lower nature; these must nowise be confounded with the things of the world.” View & rate this quote.
“It is the nature of a thing, not the clearness of its outline, that determines its operation.” View & rate this quote.
“There are good things God must delay giving until his child has a pocket to hold them–til he gets his child to make that pocket. He must first make him fit to receive and to have.” View & rate this quote.
“The Lord knows what men need; they know only what they want. They want ease; he knows they need purity.” View & rate this quote.
“Friends, cast your idol into the furnace; melt your mammon down, coin him up, make God’s money of him, and send him coursing. Make of him cups to carry the gift of God, the water of life, through the world.” View & rate this quote.
“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.” View & rate this quote.
“The only vengeance worth having on sin is to make the sinner himself its executioner.” – View & rate this quote.
“A condition which, of declension, would indicate a devil may, of growth, indicate a saint.” View & rate this quote.
“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.” View & rate this quote.
“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.” View & rate this quote.
“Which is the richer–the man who, his large money spent, would have no refuge; or he for whose necessity a hundred would sacrifice comfort?” View & rate this quote.
“The way to worship God while the daylight lasts is to work; the service of God, the only “divine service,” is the helping of our fellows.” View & rate this quote.
“A man ought never to feel rich for riches, nor poor for poverty. The perfect man must always feel rich, because God is rich.” View & rate this quote.
“The sooner you can get a boy to be a law to himself, the sooner you make a man of him.” View & rate this quote.
“The true lover of justice is one who would rather die a slave than interfere with the rights of others … Injustice to you is not an awful thing like injustice in you.” View & rate this quote
“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.” View & rate this quote.
“Work is not always required of a man. There is such a thing as a sacred idleness,” View & rate this quote.
“The sooner you can get a boy to be a law to himself, the sooner you make a man of him.” View & rate this quote.
Friendship
“If instead of a gem, or even of a flower, we would cast the gift of a lovely thought into the heart of a friend, that would be giving, as the angels, I suppose, must give.” View & rate this quote.
“To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved.” View & rate this quote.
“The pure eye for an honest perspective of another’s viewpoint can only accompany the loving heart.” View & rate this quote.
“I hope it is not necessary to agree with a man in everything before we can have a high opinion of him.” View & rate this quote.
“Candor is a perilous duty.” View & rate this quote.
Hell
“God loves, yea, is love. Therefore hell itself must be subservient to that love and but an embodiment of it.” View & rate this quote.
“The very fire of hell is the fire of love. But it is a love that will burn the evil out of you.” View & rate this quote.
“All the snow that fell on it vanished, as death and hell shall one day vanish in the fire of God.” View & rate this quote.
“In low theologies, hell is invariably the deepest truth, and the love of God is not so deep as hell.” View & rate this quote.
Love of God
“A man might flatter, or bribe, or coax a tyrant; but there is no refuge from the love of God.” View & rate this quote
“The Heaven of Christ is a loving of all, a forgetting of self, a dwelling of each in all, and all in each.” View & rate this quote.
“To know God as the beginning and end, the root and cause, the giver, the enabler, the love and joy and perfect good, the present one existence in all things and degrees and conditions, is life; and faith, in its simplest, truest, mightiest form is–to do his will.” View & rate this quote.
“Though Jesus Christ is very hard to satisfy, He is very easy to please.” View & rate this quote.
“I believe that justice and mercy are simply one and the same thing; without justice to the full there can be no mercy, and without mercy to the full there can be no justice.” View & rate this quote.
“When souls have been ill-taught about God, the true God will not let them gaze too long upon the Moloch which men have set up to represent him. He will turn away their minds from that which men call him, and fill them with some of his own lovely thoughts or works, such as may by degrees prepare the way for a vision of the Father.” View & rate this quote.
“Brothers, sisters, have you found our King? There he is, kissing little children and saying they are like God.” View & rate this quote.
“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.” View & rate this quote.
“What was it that made him glorious? It was that, like his Father, he ministered to the wants of men.” View & rate this quote.
Obedience
“You will tell me, some of you, that I am always beating that anvil, that obedience to Christ is Christianity. Let me die insisting upon it. For my Lord insists upon it.” View & rate this quote.
“A Christian is just one that does what the Lord Jesus tells him. Neither more nor less than that makes a Christian.” View & rate this quote.
“When a man truly and perfectly says with Jesus, and as Jesus said it, ‘Thy will be done,’ he closes the everlasting life-circle; the life of the Father and the Son flows through him; he is a part of the divine organism.” View & rate this quote.
“One of the hardest demands on the obedience of faith is to do nothing; it is often so much easier to do foolishly!” View & rate this quote.
“As the Father unresting works for the weal of men, so every son, following the Master-Son, must work also.” View & rate this quote.
Prayer
“The prayer argues a need – that need will be supplied. One day is with the Lord as a thousand years, and a thousand years as one day. All who have prayed shall one day justify God and say – “Thy answer is beyond my prayer, as Thy thoughts and Thy ways are beyond my thoughts and my ways.” View & rate this quote.
“The God to whom we pray is nearer to us than the very prayer itself ere it leaves the heart.” View & rate this quote.
Thank you for this lovely site. I am a recent reader of George MacDonald, and love almost everything of his that I have read. I am looking for a quote of his that reads “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.” I do not remember where I first ran across this quote, do you happen to know where he said this? Thank you!