George MacDonald Thinking Quotations

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.

You would not think any duty small, If you yourself were great.

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.

It is our best work that God wants, not the dregs of our exhaustion. I think he must prefer quality to quantity.

Suppose you didn't know him, would that make any difference?' 'No,' said Willie, after thinking a little. 'Other people would know him if I didn't.' 'Yes, and if nobody knew him, God would know him, and anybody God has thought worth making, it's an honor to do anything for.

I tell you, there are more worlds, and more doors to them, than you will think of in many years!

There is no inborn longing that shall not be fulfilled. I think that is as certain as the forgiveness of sins.

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.

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.

We should teach our children to think no more of their bodies when dead than they do of their hair when cut off, or of their old clothes when they have done with them.

How many people would like to be good, if only they might be good without taking trouble about it! They do not like goodness well enough to hunger and thirst after it, or to sell all that they have that they may buy it; they will not batter at the gate of the kingdom of heaven; but they look with pleasure on this or that aerial castle of righteousness, and think it would be rather nice to live in it.

No story ever really ends, and I think I know why.

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.

Well, perhaps; but I begin to think there are better things than being comfortable.

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

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.

When we are out of sympathy with the young, then I think our work in this world is over

But I begin to think the chief difficulty in writing a book must be to keep out what does not belong to it.

I would rather be what God chose to make me than the most glorious creature that I could think of; for to have been thought about, born in God's thought, and then made by God, is the dearest, grandest and most precious thing in all thinking.

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.