George MacDonald

Where a man does not love, the not-loving must seem rational. For no one loves because he sees why, but because he loves. No human reason can be given for the highest necessity of divinely created existence. For reasons are always from above downward.

Christ is the way out, and the way in: the way from slavery, conscious or unconscious, into liberty; the way from the unhomeliness of things to the home we desire but do not know; the way from the stormy skirts of the Father's garment to the peace of his bosom.

A man must not choose his neighbor: he must take the neighbor that God sends him...The neighbor is just the man who is next to you at the moment, the man with whom any business has brought you into contact.

You will be dead so long as you refuse to die.

No, there is no escape. There is no heaven with a little of hell in it — no plan to retain this or that of the devil in our hearts or our pockets. Out Satan must go, every hair and feather!

Communion with God is the one need of the soul beyond all other need; prayer is the beginning of that communion.

God will shake heaven and earth, that only the unshakable may remain: he is a consuming fire, that only that which cannot be consumed may stand forth eternal.

The darkness knows neither the light nor itself; only the light knows itself and the darkness also. None but God hates evil and understands it.

You've got to save your own soul first, and then the souls of your neighbors if they will let you; and for that reason you must cultivate, not a spirit of criticism, but the talents that attract people to the hearing of the Word.

And if we believe that God is everywhere, why should we not think Him present even in the coincidences that sometimes seem so strange? For, if He be in the things that coincide, He must be in the coincidence of those things.

How strange this fear of death is! Yet we are never frightened at a sunset.

The Bible nowhere lays claim to be regarded as THE Word, THE Way, THE Truth. The Bible leads us to Jesus, the inexhaustible, the ever unfolding Revelation of God. It is Christ "in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge," not the Bible, save as leading to Him.

God regards men not as they are merely, but as they shall be; not as they shall be merely, but as they are now growing, or capable of growing, toward that image after which He made them that they might grow to it.

The true man trusts in a strength which is not his, and which he does not feel, does not even always desire.

Why should the good of anyone depend on the prayer of another? I can only answer with the return question, "Why should my love be powerless to help another?"

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.

All that is not God is death.

Love without religion is the plucked rose. Religion without love — there is no such thing.

That man is perfect in faith who can come to God in the utter dearth of his feelings and 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."

To know a primrose is a higher thing than to know all the botany of it — just as to know Christ is an infinitely higher thing than to know all theology, all that is said about His person, or babbled about His work.