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“The best thing you can do for your fellow, next to rousing his conscience, is â€� 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.”
― George MacDonald, A Dish of Orts

“George MacDonald gives me renewed strength during times of trouble--times when I have seen people tempted to deny God--when he says, "The Son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like his.”
― Madeleine L'Engle, Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art

“I knew now, that it is by loving, and not by being loved, that one can come nearest the soul of another; yea, that, 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. I knew that love gives to him that loveth, power over any soul beloved...”
― George MacDonald, Phantastes

“The love of our neighbor is the only door out of the dungeon of self, where we mope and mow, striking sparks, and rubbing phosphorescences out of the walls, and blowing our own breath in our own nostrils, instead of issuing to the fair sunlight of God, the sweet winds of the universe.”
― George MacDonald

“Ere long, I learned that it was not myself, but only my shadow, that I had lost. 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.”
― George MacDonald, Phantastes

“I do not write for children, but for the childlike, whether of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.”
― George MacDonald

“My soul was like a summer evening, after a heavy fall of rain, when the drops are yet glistening on the trees in the last rays of the down-going sun, and the wind of the twilight has begun to blow.”
― George MacDonald, Phantastes

“Hundreds of hopeless waves rushed constantly shorewards, falling exhausted upon a beach of great loose stones, that seemed to stretch miles and miles in both directions. There was nothing for the eye but mingling shades of gray; nothing for the ear but the rush of the coming, the roar of the breaking, and the moan of the retreating wave.”
― George MacDonald, Phantastes

“Foolish is the man, and there are many such men, who would rid himself or his fellows of discomfort by setting the world right, by waging war on the evils around him, while he neglects that integral part of the world where lies his business, his first business, namely, his own character and conduct.”
― George MacDonald, Hope of the Gospel

“Ah, let a man beware, when his wishes, fulfilled, rain down upon him, and his happiness is unbounded.”
― George MacDonald, Phantastes

“Then I remembered that night is the fairiesâ€� day, and the moon their sun; and I thought—Everything sleeps and dreams now: when the night comes, it will be different.”
― George MacDonald, Phantastes

“And Summer, dear Summer, hath years of June,
With large white clouds, and cool showers at noon;
And a beauty that grows to a weight like grief,
Till a burst of tears is the heart’s relief.”
― George MacDonald, Phantastes

“Sweet sounds can go where kisses may not enter.”
― George MacDonald, Phantastes

“A ghost grew out of the shadowy air,
And sat in the midst of her moony hair.

In her gleamy hair she sat and wept;
In the dreamful moon they lay and slept;

The shadows above, and the bodies below,
Lay and slept in the moonbeams slow.

And she sang, like the moan of an autumn wind
Over the stubble left behind.”
― George MacDonald, Phantastes

“A man who dreams, and knows that he is dreaming, thinks he knows what waking is; but knows it so little, that he mistakes, one after another, many a vague and dim change in his dream for an awaking. When the true waking comes at last, he is filled and overflowed with the power of its reality. So, likewise, one who, in the darkness, lies waiting for the light about to be struck, and trying to conceive, with all the force of his imagination, what the light will be like, is yet, when the reality flames up before him, seized as by a new and unexpected thing, different from and beyond all his imagining. He feels as if the darkness were cast to an infinite distance behind him.”
― George MacDonald, The Portent

“Many a wrong, and it's curing song,
many a road, and many an inn,
Room to roam, but only one home,
for all the world to win.

George MacDonald, (Lilith)”
― george macdonald

“Twilight-kind, oppressing the heart as with a condensed atmosphere of dreamy undefined love and longing.”
― George MacDonald, Phantastes

“It was evening. The sun was below the horizon; but his rosy beams yet illuminated a feathery cloud, that floated high above the world. I arose, I reached the cloud; and, throwing myself upon it, floated with it in sight of the sinking sun. He sank, and the cloud grew gray; but the grayness touched not my heart. It carried its rose-hue within; for now I could love without needing to be loved again.”
― George MacDonald, Phantastes

“I never had been by any means a book-worm; but the very outside of a book had a charm to me. It was a kind of sacrament—an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace; as, indeed, what on God's earth is not?”
― George MacDonald, The Portent

“It is not the hysterical alone for whom the great dash of cold water is good.
All who dream life, instead of living it,
require some similar shock.”
― George MacDonald, Complete Works of George MacDonald

“Thy beauty filleth the very air,
Never saw I a woman so fair.”
― George MacDonald, Phantastes

“Or, if needing years to wake thee
From thy slumbrous solitudes,
Come, sleep-walking, and betake thee
To the friendly, sleeping woods.

Sweeter dreams are in the forest,
Round thee storms would never rave;
And when need of rest is sorest,
Glide thou then into thy cave.”
― George MacDonald, Phantastes

“When I reached my own study, I sat down by a blazing fire...I soon fell into a dreamy state (which a few mistake for thinking, because it is the nearest approach they ever make to it) and in this reverie I kept staring about my bookshelves. I am vey fond of books. Do not mistake me. I do not mean that I love reading. I hope I do. That is no fault--a virtue rather than a fault. But, as the old meaning of the word "fond" was foolish, I use that word: I am foolishly fond of the bodies of books as distinguished from their souls. I do not say that I love their books as distinguished from their souls--I should not keep a book for which I felt no respect or had no use. But I delight in seeing books about me, books even of which there seems to be no prospect that I shall have to read a single chapter. I confess that if they are nicely bound, so as to glow and shine in a firelight, I like them ever so much the better. I suspect that by the time books (which ought to be loved for the truth that is in them) come to be loved as articles of furniture, the mind has gone through a process which the miser's mind goes through--that of passing from the respect of money because of what it can do, to the love of money because it is money. I have not yet reached the furniture stage, and I do not think I every shall. I would rather burn them all. Meantime, I think one safeguard is to encourage one's friends to borrow one's books.... That will probably take some of the shine off them, and put a few thumb-marks in them, which are very wholesome.
- from "Annals of a Quiet Neighbourhood, Ch. 11”
― George MacDonald, Annals of a Quiet Neighborhood

“From Eden’s bowers the full-fed rivers flow,
To guide the outcasts to the land of woe:
Our Earth one little toiling streamlet yields.
To guide the wanderers to the happy fields.”
― George MacDonald, Phantastes

“And we had met at last in this same cave of greenery, while the summer night hung round us heavy with love, and the odours that crept through the silence from the sleeping woods were the only signs of an outer world that invaded our solitude.”
― George MacDonald

“I might here find the magic word of power to banish the demon and set me free, so that I should no longer be a man beside myself.”
― George MacDonald, Phantastes

“I forced my way to the brink, stepped into the boat, pushed it, with the help of the tree-branches, out into the stream, lay down in the bottom, and let my boat and me float whither the stream would carry us.”
― George MacDonald, Phantastes

“And when we met amid the shadows, we were wrapped in the mantle of love, and from its folds looked out fearless on the ghostly world about us. Ghosts or none, they never annoyed us. Our love was a talisman, yea, an elixir of life, which made us equal to the twice-born—the disembodied dead. And they were as a wall of fear about us, to keep far off the unfriendly foot and the prying eye.”
― George MacDonald, The Portent

“George MacDonald, Scottish author, poet and Christian Congregational minister, was a pioneering figure in the field of modern fantasy literature and the mentor of fellow writer Lewis Carroll. His words “Forgiveness is the giving, and so the receiving, of lifeâ€� certainly reinforces the idea of a giving and receiving cycle.”
― Roger Macdonald Andrew, Forgive: Finding Inner Peace Through Words of Wisdom

“George MacDonald is central to a Scottish tradition tormented by theology and with its roots in two worlds. He has been described as a link between John Galt and the kailyard, and his social novels, of which he wrote a good many, are certainly that. To my mind his deeper life is not in these solid, moralistic books, but in the stories usually described as fantasies. The most formidable of these is Lilith, one of the most ambitious books in Scottish literature. It aims to project a total metaphysical vision of the universe, in which evil gives way at last to good through repentance; even the Devil will finally repent.”
― J.B. Pick, The Great Shadow House: Essays on the Metaphysical Tradition in Scottish Fiction