George MacDonald

God Himself — His thoughts, His will, His love, His judgments are men's home. To think His thoughts, to choose His will, to judge His judgments, and thus to know that He is in us, with us, is to be at home.

Division has done more to hide Christ from the view of men than all the infidelity that has ever been spoken.

All is loss that comes between us and Christ.

Come, come to Him who made thy heart; Come weary and oppressed; To come to Jesus is thy part; His part, to give thee rest.

That which is in a man, not that which lies beyond his vision is the main factor in what is about to befall him: the operation upon him is the event.

We are often unable to tell people what they need to know because they want to know something else.

We spoil countless precious things by intellectual greed. He who will be a man, and will not be a child, must — he cannot help himself — become a little man, that is, a dwarf. He will, however, need no consolation, for he is sure to think …

If there be music in my reader, I would gladly wake it.

My tales may not be roses, but I will not boil them.

I say again, if I cannot draw a horse, I will not write THIS IS A HORSE under what I foolishly meant for one.

A man may well himself discover truth in what he wrote; for he was dealing all the time with things that came from thoughts beyond his own.

One difference between God's work and man's is, that, while God's work cannot mean more than he meant, man's must mean more than he meant.

If he be not a true man, he will draw evil out of the best; we need not mind how he treats any work of art! If he be a true man, he will imagine true things: what matter whether I meant them or not?

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.

The greatest forces lie in the region of the uncomprehended.

A fairytale, like a butterfly or a bee, helps itself on all sides, sips at every wholesome flower, and spoils not one.

A fairytale is not an allegory. There may be allegory in it, but it is not an allegory. He must be an artist indeed who can, in any mode, produce a strict allegory that is not a weariness to the spirit.

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.

A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean.

Some thinkers would feel sorely hampered if at liberty to use no forms but such as existed in nature, or to invent nothing save in accordance with the laws of the world of the senses; but it must not therefore be imagined that they desire …

of all fairytales I know, I think Undine the most beautiful.

Were I asked, what is a fairytale? I should reply, Read Undine: that is a fairytale

He brings hidden things out of the light of his own being into the light of ours.

What I would say is this, that the light is not blinding because God would hide, but because the truth is too glorious for our vision.