George MacDonald Art Quotations

This is and has been the Father's work from the beginning-to bring us into the home of His heart.

When we understand the outside of things, we think we have them. Yet the Lord puts his things in subdefined, suggestive shapes, yielding no satisfactory meaning to the mere intellect, but unfolding themselves to the conscience and heart.

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.

The truly wise talk little about religion and are not given to taking sides on doctrinal issues. When they hear people advocating or opposing the claims of this or that party in the church, they turn away with a smile such as men yield to the talk of children. They have no time, they would say, for that kind of thing. They have enough to do in trying to faithfully practice what is beyond dispute.

Now I want you to think that in life troubles will come, which seem as if they never would pass away. The night and storm look as if they would last forever; but the calm and the morning cannot be stayed; the storm in its very nature is transient. The effort of nature, as that of the human heart, ever is to return to its repose, for God is Peace.

He may delay because it would not be safe to give us at once what we ask: we are not ready for it. To give ere we could truly receive, would be to destroy the very heart and hope of prayer, to cease to be our Father. The delay itself may work to bring us nearer to our help, to increase the desire, perfect the prayer, and ripen the receptive condition.

If it were not for the outside world, we would have no inside world to understand things by. Least of all could we understand God without these millions of sights and sounds and scents and motions, weaving their endless harmonies. They come out of His heart to let us know a little of what is in it.

We have to do with God, to whom no one can look without the need of being good waking up in his heart; to think about God is to begin to be good.

Forgiveness is the giving and so the receiving of life. the latter may be an impulse of a moment of heat; whereas the former is a cold and deliberate choice of the heart.

Beauty and sadness always go together. Nature thought beauty too rich to go forth Upon the earth without a meet alloy.

No, there is no escape. There is no heaven with a little of hell in it--no plan to retain this or that of the devil in our hearts or our pockets. Out Satan must go, every hair and feather!

It is the heart that is not sure of its God that is afraid to laugh in His presence.

Then the Old Man of the Earth stooped over the floor of the cave, raised a huge stone from it, and left it leaning. It disclosed a great hole that went plumb-down. "That is the way," he said. "But there are no stairs." "You must throw yourself in. There is no other way.

Love me, beloved; Hades and Death Shall vanish away like a frosty breath; These hands, that now are at home in thine, Shall clasp thee again, if thou art still mine; And thou shalt be mine, my spirit's bride, In the ceaseless flow of eternity's tide, If the truest love thy heart can know Meet the truest love that from mine can flow. Pray God, beloved, for thee and me, That our sourls may be wedded eternally.

When I can no more stir my soul to move, and life is but the ashes of a fire; when I can but remember that my heart once used to live and love, long and aspire- O, be thou then the first, the one thou art; be thou the calling, before all answering love, and in me wake hope, fear, boundless desire.

Her heart - like every heart, if only its fallen sides were cleared away - was an inexhaustible fountain of love: she loved everything she saw.

But words are vain; reject them all— They utter but a feeble part: Hear thou the depths from which they call, The voiceless longing of my heart.

It is vain to think that any weariness, however caused, any burden, however slight, may be got rid of otherwise than by bowing the neck to the yoke of the Father's will. There can be no other rest for heart and soul than He has created. From every burden, from every anxiety, from all dread of shame or loss, even loss of love itself, that yoke will set us free.

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.

Thou art beautiful because God created thee, but thou art a slave to sin... wickedness has made you ugly.

The whole history of the Christian life is a series of resurrections. . . . Every time we find our hearts are troubled, that we are not rejoicing in God, a resurrection must follow; a resurrection out of the night of troubled thought into the gladness of the truth.

A man must learn to love his children, not because they are his, but because they are children, else his love will be scarcely a better thing at last than the party-spirit of the faithful politician.

What a man is lies as certainly upon his countenance as in his heart, though none of his acquaintances may be able to read it. The very intercourse with him may have rendered it more difficult.

Better to have the poet's heart than brain, Feeling than song.

As no scripture is of private interpretation, so is there no feeling in a human heart which exists in that heart alone - which is not, in some form or degree, in every human heart....

In the hearts of witches, love and hate lie close together and often tumble over each other.

All those evil doctrines about God that work misery and madness have their origin in the brains of the wise and prudent, not in the hearts of children.

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

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.

To love righteousness is to make it grow, not to avenge it. Throughout his life on earth, Jesus resisted every impulse to work more rapidly for a lower good.

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”.