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

— George MacDonald

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

Forgiveness is the giving, and so the receiving, of life.

— George MacDonald

For others, as for ourselves, we must trust him. If we could thoroughly understand anything, that would be enough to prove it divine; 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

From the neglect of a real duty, she became the slave of a false one.

— George MacDonald

...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

Heed not thy feeling. Do thy work.

— George MacDonald

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 War dour 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

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

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 Cayman's heart it was misery; in the soul of St John it was perfect blessedness.

— George MacDonald