David Gregg > David's Quotes

“And her life will perhaps be the richer, for holding now within it the memory of what came, but could not stay.”
― George MacDonald, Phantastes

“I rose as from the death that wipes out the sadness of life, and then dies itself in the new morrow.”
― George MacDonald, Phantastes

“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.”
― George MacDonald, Phantastes

“I saw thee ne'er before;
I see thee never more;
But love, and help, and pain, beautiful one,
Have made thee mine, till all my years are done.”
― George MacDonald, Phantastes

“Once, as I passed by a cottage, there came out a lovely fairy child, with two wondrous toys, one in each hand. The one was the tube through which the fairy-gifted poet looks when he beholds the same thing everywhere; the other that through which he looks when he combines into new forms of loveliness those images of beauty which his own choice has gathered from all regions wherein he has travelled. Round the child’s head was an aureole of emanating rays. As I looked at him in wonder and delight, round crept from behind me the something dark, and the child stood in my shadow. Straightway he was a commonplace boy, with a rough broad-brimmed straw hat, through which brim the sun shone from behind. The toys he carried were a multiplying-glass and a kaleidoscope. I sighed and departed.”
― George MacDonald

“The injured party does not want to be compensated because he has been wronged; he wants to be healed because he has been hurt.”
― G.K. Chesterton

“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.”
― George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons: Series I, II, III

“Things which sound like platitudes become vital, living and powerful when you have to learn them in dark tunnels.”
― Elizabeth Elliot

“Neither limits nor adversity are what ruin men. Under pressure, they handle themselves pretty well. It’s the lack of limits they can’t handle. That’s when they run amok. So, if you really want to see what a man is made of let him think he can get away with something.”
― Bill Bonner

“Words spoken cannot be recalled, and many a man and many a woman who has spoken a word at once regretted, are far too proud to express that regret.”
― Anthony Trollope, He Knew He Was Right

“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.”
― George MacDonald, At the Back of the North Wind

“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

“La dernière chose qu'on trouve en faisant un ouvrage est de savoir celle qu'il faut mettre la première. (The last thing one settles in writing a book is what one should put in first.)”
― Blaise Pascal, Pensées

“A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean. If my drawing, on the other hand, is so far from being a work of art that it needs THIS IS A HORSE written under it, what can it matter that neither you nor your child should know what it means? It is there not so much to convey a meaning as to wake a meaning. If it do not even wake an interest, throw it aside. A meaning may be there, but it is not for you. If, again, you do not know a horse when you see it, the name written under it will not serve you much. At all events, the business of the painter is not to teach zoology.”
― George MacDonald, The Light Princess and Other Fairy Stories

“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.”
― George MacDonald, Unspoken Sermons: Series I, II, III

“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

“We must do the thing we must
Before the thing we may;
We are unfit for any trust
Till we can and do obey.”
― George MacDonald, Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2

“You would not think any duty small,
If you yourself were great.”
― George MacDonald, Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2

“The man that feareth, Lord, to doubt,
In that fear doubteth thee.”
― George MacDonald, Poetical Works of George MacDonald, Vol. 2

“You think because you understand 'one' you must also understand 'two', because one and one make two. But you must also understand 'and'.”
― Mawlana Jalal-al-Din Rumi

“A good man complains of no one; he does not look to faults.”
― Shams Of Tabriz

“Love, in its own nature, demands the perfecting of the beloved.”
― C.S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain

“I cannot be an optimist but I am a prisoner of hope.”
― Cornel West

“Each moment is the fruit of forty thousand years.”
― Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel

“My prayers, my God, flow from what I am not;
I think thy answers make me what I am.”
― George MacDonald, The Diary of an Old Soul & the White Page Poems

“Could you not give me some sign, or tell me something about you that never changes, or some other way to know you, or thing to know you by?" — "No, Curdie: that would be to keep you from knowing me. You must know me in quite another way from that. It would not be the least use to you or me either if I were to make you know me in that way. It would be but to know the sign of me — not to know me myself.”
― George MacDonald, The Princess and Curdie

“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.”
― George MacDonald, What's Mine's Mine

“Someone who thinks death is the scariest thing doesn't know a thing about life.”
― Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

“Face the facts of being what you are, for that is what changes what you are.”
― Søren Kierkegaard

“Love is the expression of the one who loves, not of the one who is loved. Those who think they can love only the people they prefer do not love at all. Love discovers truths about individuals that others cannot see”
― Soren Kierkegaard