George MacDonald

God hides nothing. His very work from the beginning is revelation, — a casting aside of veil after veil, a showing unto men of truth after truth.

Afflictions are but the shadow of His wings.

To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved.

A true friend is forever a friend.

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

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.

Diamond, however, had not been out so late before in all his life, and things looked so strange about him! — just as if he had got into Fairyland, of which he knew quite as much as anybody; for his mother had no money to buy books to set …

Where did you come from baby dear? Out of the everywhere into the here.... Where did you get your eyes so blue? Out of the skies as I came through.

We are and remain such creeping Christians, because we look at ourselves and not at Christ; because we gaze at the marks of our own soiled feet, and the trail of our own defiled garments....Each, putting his foot in the footprint of the …

It may be an infinitely less evil to murder a man than to refuse to forgive him. The former may be the act of a moment of passion: the latter is the heart’s choice.

A condition which of declension would indicate a devil, may of growth indicate a saint.

...the regions where there is only life, and therefore all that is not music is silence.

all love will, one day, meet with its return. All true love will, one day, behold its own image in the eyes of the beloved, and be humbly glad.

where two love, it is the loving of each other, and not the being loved by each other, that originates and perfects and assures their blessedness.

it is by loving, and not by being loved, that one can come nearest the soul of another

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 …

Thou goest thine, and I go mine — Many ways we wend; Many days, and many ways, Ending in one end. Many a wrong, and its curing song; Many a road, and many an inn;

Endurance must conquer, where force could not reach.

Benefits conferred awaken love in some minds, as surely as benefits received in others.

All that man sees has to do with man. Worlds cannot be without an intermundane relationship. The community of the centre of all creation suggests an interradiating connection and dependence of the parts. Else a grander idea is conceivable …

There is no cheating in nature and the simple unsought feelings of the soul. There must be a truth involved in it, though we may but in part lay hold of the meaning.

Why are all reflections lovelier than what we call the reality? — not so grand or so strong, it may be, but always lovelier?

Afterwards I learned, that the best way to manage some kinds of painful thoughts, is to dare them to do their worst; to let them lie and gnaw at your heart till they are tired; and you find you still have a residue of life they cannot kill.

What distressed me most — more even than my own folly — was the perplexing question, How can beauty and ugliness dwell so near?