A devil - "A power that lives against its life

— George MacDonald

Afflictions are but the shadow of His wings.

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

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 does 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

Alas, how easily things go wrong! A sigh too much, a kiss too longhand there follows a mist and a weeping rain And life is never the same again

— George MacDonald

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

All that is not God is death.

— George MacDonald

All words, then, belonging to the inner world of the mind, are of the imagination, are originally poetic words.

— George MacDonald

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

— George MacDonald

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