Glen Jacobsom > Glen's Quotes

“To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved.”
― George MacDonald

“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.”
― George MacDonald

“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 Mac Donald, Wilfrid Cumbermede

“Few delights can equal the mere presence of one whom we trust utterly.”
― George MacDonald

“To try to be brave is to be brave.”
― George MacDonald

“It is by loving, and not by being loved, that one can come nearest the soul of another; yea, that, where two love, it is the loving of each other, that originates and perfects and assures their blessedness. I knew that love gives to him that loveth, power over over any soul be loved, even if that soul know him not, bringing him inwardly close to that spirit; a power that cannot be but for good; for in proportion as selfishness intrudes, the love ceases, and the power which springs therefrom dies. Yet all love will, one day, meet with its return. ”
― George MacDonald, Phantastes

“Doing the will of God leaves me no time for disputing about His plans.”
― George MacDonald

“All that is not God is death.”
― George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons: Series I, II, III

“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, A Dish of Orts

“Past tears are present strength.”
― George MacDonald, Phantastes

“If we will but let our God and Father work His will with us, there can be no limit to His enlargement of our existence”
― George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons: Series I, II, III

“A man is as free as he chooses to make himself, never an atom freer.”
― George MacDonald, Lilith

“It is when people do wrong things wilfully that they are the more likely to do them again.”
― George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin

“Whose work is it but your own to open your eyes? But indeed the business of the universe is to make such a fool out of you that you will know yourself for one, and begin to be wise.”
― George MacDonald, Lilith, First and Final

“...it is so silly of people to fancy that old age means crookedness and witheredness and feebleness and sticks and spectacles and rheumatism and forgetfulness! It is so silly! Old age has nothing whatever to do with all that. The right old age means strength and beauty and mirth and courage and clear eyes and strong painless limbs.”
― George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin

“You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it himself. (Quoted by C.S.Lewis in Mere Christianity)”
― George MacDonald

“You doubt because you love truth.”
― George MacDonald, Lilith

“I want to help you to grow as beautiful as God meant you to be when He thought of you first.”
― George MacDonald

“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.”
― George MacDonald

“Her face was fair and pretty, with eyes like two bits of night sky, each with a star dissolved in the blue.”
― George MacDonald, The Princess and the Goblin

“What God may hereafter require of you, you must not give yourself the least trouble about. Everything He gives you to do, you must do as well as ever you can, and that is the best possible preparation for what He may want you to do next. If people would but do what they have to do, they would always find themselves ready for what came next.”
― George MacDonald

“We are and remain such creeping Christians, because we look at ourselves and not at Christ; because we gaze at the marks of our own soiled feet, and the trail of our own defiled garments.... Each, putting his foot in the footprint of the Master, and so defacing it, turns to examine how far his neighbor’s footprint corresponds with that which he still calls the Master’s, although it is but his own.”
― George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons: Series I, II, III

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

“We don't have a soul. We are a soul. We have a body."
George Macdonald, 1892”
― George Macdonald

“there is no harm in being afraid. The only harm is in doing what Fear tells you. Fear is not your master! Laugh in his face and he will run away.”
― George MacDonald, Lilith

“We are often unable to tell people what they need to know, because they want to know something else, and would therefore only misunderstand what we said.”
― George MacDonald

“Love loves unto purity. Love has ever in view the absolute loveliness of that which it beholds. Therefore all that is not beautiful in the beloved, all that comes between and is not of love's kind, must be destroyed. And our God is a consuming fire.”
― George MacDonald

“Anything big enough to occupy our minds is big enough to hang a prayer on.”
― George Macdonald

“Annihilation itself is no death to evil. Only good where evil was, is evil dead. An evil thing must live with its evil until it chooses to be good. That alone is the slaying of evil.”
― George MacDonald

“If both Church and fairy-tale belong to humanity, they may occasionally cross circles, without injury to either.”
― George MacDonald, Adela Cathcart