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

— George MacDonald

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 ways 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.

— George MacDonald

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 Savior but the ministering genius of our destruction.

— George MacDonald

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.

— George MacDonald

If we speak of direct means for the culture of the imagination, the whole is comprised in two words--food and exercise.

— George MacDonald

Ignorance is no reason with a fool for holding his tongue.

— George MacDonald

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.

— George MacDonald

I must show the blacksmith and the shopkeeper once more--two years after marriage--time long enough to have made common people as common to each other as the weed by the roadside; but these are not common to each other yet, and never will be. They will never complain of being _disillusioned_, for they have never been alluded. They look up each to the other still, because they were right in looking up each to the other from the first. Each was, and therefore each is and will be, real.

— George MacDonald

Indeed, a man is rather being thought than thinking, when a new thought arises in his mind.

— George MacDonald

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.

— George MacDonald