George MacDonald

To have what we want is riches; but to be able to do without is power.

George MacDonald

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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.

George MacDonald, The Fantastic Imagination

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Gather my broken fragments to a whole,

As these four quarters make a shining day.

Into thy basket, for my golden bowl,

Take up the things that I have cast away

In vice or indolence or unwise play.

Let mine be a merry, all-receiving heart,

But make it a whole, with light in every part.”

George MacDonald

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Certainly work is not always required of a man. There is such a thing as a sacred idleness -

the cultivation of which is now fearfully neglected.

George MacDonald

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My prayers, my God, flow from what I am not; I think Thy answers make me what I am.

George MacDonald

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I want to help you to grow as beautiful as God meant you to be when he thought of you first.

George MacDonald

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“After a few days, Willie got tired of [the water-wheel] and no blame to him, for it was no earthly use beyond amusement, and that which can only amuse can never amuse long. I think the reason children get tired of their toys so soon is just that it is against human nature to be really interested in what is of no use. If you say that a beautiful thing is always interesting, I answer, that a beautiful thing is of the highest use. Is not the diamond that flashes all its colours into the heart of a poet as useful as the diamond with which the glazier divides the sheets of glass into panes for our windows?”

George MacDonald, The Gutta Percha Willie

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There is no strength in unbelief.

Even the unbelief of what is false is no source of might.

It is the truth shining from behind that gives the strength to disbelieve.

George MacDonald on Unbelief

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

George MacDonald, Lilith (1895), Chapter IX.

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“A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean. If my drawing, on the other hand, is so far from being a work of art that it needs THIS IS A HORSE written under it, what can it matter that neither you nor your child should know what it means? It is there not so much to convey a meaning as to wake a meaning. But a man may then imagine in your work what he pleases, what you never meant! Not what he pleases, but what he can. 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?”

George MacDonald, The Fantastic Imagination.

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But God lets men have their playthings, like the children they are, that they may learn to distinguish them from true possessions. If they are not learning that he takes them from them, and tries the other way: for lack of them and its misery, they will perhaps seek the true!

George MacDonald, Donal Grant

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As the thoughts move in the mind of a man, so move the worlds of men and women in the mind of God…

the offspring of his imagination. Man is but a thought of God.

George MacDonald

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Faith is that which, knowing the Lord’s will, goes and does it; or, not knowing it, stands and waits,

content in ignorance as in knowledge, because God wills — neither pressing into the hidden future,

nor careless of the knowledge which opens the path of action.

George MacDonald

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“There is more hid in Christ than we shall ever learn, here or there either; but they that begin first to inquire will soonest be gladdened with revelation; and with them He will be best pleased, for the slowness of His disciples troubled Him of old. To say that we must wait for the other world, to know the mind of Him who came to this world to give Himself to us, seems to me the foolishness of a worldly and lazy spirit. The Son of God is the teacher of men, giving to them of His Spirit — that Spirit which manifests the deep things of God, being to a man the mind of Christ. The great heresy of the Church of the present day is unbelief in this Spirit.”

George MacDonald on Christianity

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“The perfection of His relation to us swallows up all our imperfections, all our defeats, all our evils; for our childhood is born of His fatherhood. That man is perfect in faith who can come to God in the utter dearth of his feelings and his desires, without a glow or an aspiration, with the weight of low thoughts, failures, neglects, and wandering forgetfulness, and say to Him, “Thou art my refuge, because Thou art my home”. ” George MacDonald on Christianity

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“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 him wrong on the subject.”

George MacDonald, At the Back of the North Wind

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“Leaning over him was the large, beautiful, pale face of a woman. Her dark eyes looked a little angry, for they had just begun to flash; but a quivering in her sweet upper lip made her look as if she were going to cry. What was the most strange was that away from her head streamed out her black hair in every direction, so that the darkness in the hay-loft looked as if it were made of her, hair but as Diamond gazed at her in speechless amazement, mingled with confidence–for the boy was entranced with her mighty beauty–her hair began to gather itself out of the darkness, and fell down all about her again, till her face looked out of the midst of it like a moon out of a cloud. From her eyes came all the light by which Diamond saw her face and her, hair; and that was all he did see of her yet.”

George MacDonald, At the Back of the North Wind

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“Now for the next question: you’re not to call me ma’am. You must call me just my own name–respectfully, you know–just North Wind.”

“Well, please, North Wind, you are so beautiful, I am quite ready to go with you.”

“You must not be ready to go with everything beautiful all at once, Diamond.”

“But what’s beautiful can’t be bad. You’re not bad, North Wind?”

“No; I’m not bad. But sometimes beautiful things grow bad by doing bad, and it takes some time for their badness to spoil their beauty. So little boys may be mistaken if they go after things because they are beautiful.”

“Well, I will go with you because you are beautiful and good, too.”

“Ah, but there’s another thing, Diamond:–What if I should look ugly without being bad–look ugly myself because I am making ugly things beautiful?–What then?”

“I don’t quite understand you, North Wind. You tell me what then.”

“Well, I will tell you. If you see me with my face all black, don’t be frightened. If you see me flapping wings like a bat’s, as big as the whole sky, don’t be frightened. If you hear me raging ten times worse than Mrs. Bill, the blacksmith’s wife–even if you see me looking in at people’s windows like Mrs. Eve Dropper, the gardener’s wife– you must believe that I am doing my work. Nay, Diamond, if I change into a serpent or a tiger, you must not let go your hold of me, for my hand will never change in yours if you keep a good hold. If you keep a hold, you will know who I am all the time, even when you look at me and can’t see me the least like the North Wind. I may look something very awful. Do you understand?”

“Quite well,” said little Diamond.

“Come along, then,” said North Wind, and disappeared behind the mountain of hay.

Diamond crept out of bed and followed her.

George MacDonald, At the Back of the North Wind