George MacDonald Men Quotations

Many a thief is a better man than many a clergyman, and miles nearer to the gate of the kingdom.

It is not the cares of today, but the cares of tomorrow, that weigh a man down.

A beast does not know that he is a beast, and the nearer a man gets to being a beast, the less he knows it.

It is not in the nature of politics that the best men should be elected. The best men do not want to govern their fellowmen.

It matters little where a man may be at this moment; the point is whether he is growing.

Man finds it hard to get what he wants, because he does not want the best; God finds it hard to give, because He would give the best, and man will not take it.

The seed dies into a new life, and so does man.

In Giving, a man receives more than he gives; and the more is in proportion to the worth of the thing given.

God chooses that men should be tried, but let a man beware of tempting his neighbor.

God is the God of the animals in a far lovelier way, I suspect, than many of us dare to think, but he will not be the God of a man by making a good beast of him.

The Lord never came to deliver men from the consequences of their sins while yet those sins remained...Yet men, loving their sins and feeling nothing of their dread hatefulness, have, consistent with their low condition, constantly taken this word concerning the Lord to mean that he came to save them from the punishment of their sins.

God never gave man a thing to do concerning which it were irreverent to ponder how the Son of God would have done it.

Until a man has love, it is well he should have fear. So long as there are wild beasts about, it is better to be afraid than secure.

He (God) can be revealed only to the child; perfectly, to the pure child only. All the discipline of the world is to make men children, that God may be revealed to them.

Those Christians who are very strict in their observances, think a good deal more of the Sabbath than of man, a great deal more of the Bible than of the truth, and ten times more of their creed than of the will of God. Of course, if they heard anyone utter such words as I have just written, they would say he was and atheist.

In the midst of death we are in life. Life is the only reality; what men call death is but a shadow...

LET A MAN THINK AND CARE ever so little about God, he does not therefore exist without God. God is here with him, upholding, warming, delighting, teaching him-making life a good thing to him. God gives him himself, though the man knows it not.

In short, a man must be set free from the sin he is , which makes him do the sin he does .

I would not favour a fiction to keep a whole world out of hell. The hell that a lie would keep any man out of is doubtless the very best place for him to go to. It is truth... that saves the world.

To the dim and bewildered vision of humanity, God's care is more evident in some instances than in others; and upon such instances men seize, and call them providences. It is well that they can; but it would be gloriously better if they could believe that the whole matter is one grand providence.

Division has done more to hide Christ from the view of men than all the infidelity that has ever been spoken.

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.

Except the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ Jesus make a man sick of his opinions, he may hold them to doomsday for me; for no opinion, I repeat is Christianity, and no preaching of any plan of salvation is the preaching of the glorious gospel of the living God.

For this, deep waters whelm the fruitful lea, Wars ravage, famine wastes, plague withers, nor Shall cease till men have chosen the better part.

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.

I repent me of the ignorance wherein I ever said that God made man out of nothing: there is no nothing out of which to make anything; God is all in all, and he made us out of himself.

To say on the authority of the Bible that God does a thing no honourable man would do, is to lie against God; to say that it is therefore right, is to lie against the very spirit of God.

In very truth, a wise imagination, which is the presence of the spirit of God, is the best guide that man or woman can have; for it is not the things we see the most clearly that influence us the most powerfully; undefined, yet vivid visions of something beyond, something which eye has not seen nor ear heard, have far more influence than any logical sequences whereby the same things may be demonstrated to the intellect. It is the nature of the thing, not the clearness of its outline, that determines its operation. We live by faith, and not by sight.

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.

The part of the philanthropist is indeed a dangerous one; and the man who would do his neighbour good must first study how not to do him evil, and must begin by pulling the beam out of his own eye.

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.

A man is in bondage to whatever he cannot part with that is less than himself.

There is but one thing that can free a man from superstition, and that is belief. All history proves it. The most sceptical have ever been the most credulous.

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.

It is a happy thing for us that this is really all we have to concern ourselves about--what to do next. No man can do the second thing. He can do the first.

It was part of war; men died, more would die, that was past, and what mattered now was the business in hand; those who lived would get on with it. Whatever sorrow was felt, there was no point in talking or brooding about it, much less in making, for form's sake, a parade of it. Better and healthier to forget it, and look to tomorrow.The celebrated British stiff upper lip, the resolve to conceal emotion which is not only embarrassing and useless, but harmful, is just plain commons sense

Not only then has each man his individual relation to God, but each man has his peculiar relation to God.

The direst foe of courage is the fear itself, not the object of it; and the man who can overcome his own terror is a hero and more.

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 than that which is already embodied.

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!

The ruin of a man's teaching comes of his followers, such as having never touched the foundation he has laid, build upon it wood, hay, and stubble, fit only to be burnt. Therefore, if only to avoid his worst foes, his admirers, a man should avoid system. The more correct a system the worse will it be misunderstood; its professed admirers will take both its errors and their misconceptions of its truths, and hold them forth as its essence.

This is a wise, sane Christian faith: that a man commit himself, his life, and his hopes to God; that God undertakes the special protection of that man; that therefore that man ought not to be afraid of anything.

God Himself - His thoughts, His will, His love, His judgments are men's home. To think His thoughts, to choose His will, to judge His judgments, and thus to know that He is in us, with us, is to be at home.

A man may sink by such slow degrees that, long after he is a devil, he may go on being a good churchman or a good dissenter and thinking himself a good Christian.

No man can make haste to be rich without going against the will of God, in which case it is the one frightful thing to be successful.

Things come to the poor that can't get in at the door of the rich. Their money somehow blocks it up. It is a great privilege to be poor--one that no man covets, and brat a very few have sought to retain, but one that yet many have learned to prize.

For the greatest fool and rascal in creation there is yet a worse condition; and that is, not to know it, but to think himself a respectable man.

Common people, whether lords or shop-keepers, are slow to understand that possession, whether in the shape of birth or lands or money or intellect, is a small affair in the difference between men.

As Christ is the blossom of humanity, so the blossom of every man is Christ perfected in him.

They are not the best students who are most dependent on books. What can be got out of them is at best only material; a man must build his house for himself.

What can money do to console a man with a headache?

I do not myself believe there is any misfortune. What men call such is merely the shadowside of a good.

A man is as free as he chooses to make himself, never an atom freer.

No man ever sank under the burden of the day. It is when tomorrow's burden is added to the burden of today that the weight is more than a man can bear.

In whatever man does without God, he must fail miserably, or succeed more miserably.

Man's rank is his power to uplift.

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”.

We profess to think Jesus the grandest and most glorious of men, yet hardly care to be like him. When we are offered his Spirit, that is, his very nature within us, for the asking, we will hardly take the trouble to ask for it.

No man has the mind of Christ, except him who makes it his business to obey him.

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.

It has been well said that no man ever sank under the burden of the day. It is, when tomorrow's burden is added to the burden of today, that the weight is more than a man can bear. Never load yourselves so, my friends. If you find yourselves so loaded, at least remember this: it is your own doing, not God's. He begs you to leave the future to Him, and mind the present.

It is not the high summer alone that is God's. The winter also is His. And into His winter He came to visit us. And all man's winters are His - the winter of our poverty, the winter of our sorrow, the winter of our unhappiness - even 'the winter of our discontent.

The Son of God suffered unto death, not that men might not suffer, but that their sufferings might be like His.

It is not the cares of today, but the cares of tomorrow, that weigh a man down. For the needs of today we have corresponding strength given. For the morrow we are told to trust. It is not ours yet. It is when tomorrow's burden is added to the burden of today that the weight is more than a man can bear.

A man's real belief is that which he lives by. What a man believes is the thing he does, not the thing he thinks.