Landon > Landon's Quotes

“The Bible is clear here: I am to love my neighbor as myself, in the manner needed, in a practical way, in the midst of the fallen world, at my particular point of history. This is why I am not a pacifist. Pacifism in this poor world in which we live -- this lost world -- means that we desert the people who need our greatest help.”
― Francis Schaeffer

“In face of this modern nihilism, Christians are often lacking in courage. We tend to give the impression that we will hold on to the outward forms whatever happens, even if God really is not there. But the opposite ought to be true of us, so that people can see that we demand the truth of what is there and that we are not dealing merely with platitudes. In other words, it should be understood that we take this question of truth and personality so seriously that if God were not there we would be among the first of those who had the courage to step out of the queue.”
― Francis Schaeffer

“Most people catch their presuppositions from their family and surrounding society, the way that a child catches the measles. But people with understanding realize that their presuppositions should be *chosen* after a careful consideration of which worldview is true.”
― Francis A. Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture

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

“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 to the soul of another.”
― George MacDonald

“When I can no more stir my soul to move, and life is but the ashes of a fire; when I can but remember that my heart once used to live and love, long and aspire- O, be thou then the first, the one thou art; be thou the calling, before all answering love, and in me wake hope, fear, boundless desire.”
― George MacDonald, The Diary of an Old Soul

“As you grow ready for it, somewhere or other you will find what is needful for you in a book.”
― George MacDonald, The Marquis of Lossie

“Philosophy is really homesickness.”
― George MacDonald

“There is this difference between the growth of some human beings and that of others: in the one case it is a continuous dying, in the other a continuous resurrection.”
― George MacDonald, The Princess and Curdie

“I write, not for children,but for the child-like, whether they be of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.”
― George MacDonald

“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

“I don't know how to thank you.'
Then I will tell you. There is only one way I care for. Do better, and grow better, and be better.”
― George MacDonald, The Princess and Curdie

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“Well, perhaps; but I begin to think there are better things than being comfortable.”
― George MacDonald, At the Back of the North Wind

“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

“I learned that it is better, a thousand-fold, for a proud man to fall and be humbled, than to hold up his head in his pride and fancied innocence. 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. In nothing was my ideal lowered, or dimmed, or grown less precious; I only saw it too plainly, to set myself for a moment beside it. Indeed, my ideal soon became my life; whereas, formerly, my life had consisted in a vain attempt to behold, if not my ideal in myself, at least myself in my ideal.”
― George MacDonald, Phantastes: A Faerie Romance for Men and Women

“I am sometimes almost terrified at the scope of the demands made upon me, at the perfection of the self-abandonment required of me; yet outside of such absoluteness can be no salvation.”
― George MacDonald

“There is no slave but the creature that wills against its Creator.”
― George MacDonald, Lilith

“Doubt may be a poor encouragement to do anything, but it is a bad reason for doing nothing.”
― George MacDonald, Lilith

“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

“Primarily, God is not bound to punish sin; he is bound to destroy sin.
The only vengeance worth having on sin
is to make the sinner himself its executioner.”
― George MacDonald