George MacDonald Trying Quotations

To try too hard to make people good is one way to make them worse. The only way to make them good is to be good, remembering well the beam and the mote.

It is to the man who is trying to live, to the man who is obedient to the word of the Master, that the word of the Master unfolds itself.

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!

Half of the misery in the world comes from trying to look, instead of trying to be, what one is not.

To try to be brave is to be brave.