George MacDonald

“The only vengeance worth having on your enemies is to make them your friends.”

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

“You don't have a soul. You are a Soul. You have a body.”

“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 of by God is to have been born true.”

“The principal part of faith is patience.”

“It is not in the nature of politics that the best men should be elected. The best men do not want to govern their fellowmen.”

“The best way to know God is to love many things.”

“Obedience is the key to every door.”

“Forgiveness is the giving, and so the receiving, of life.”

“It is by loving, and not by being loved, that one can come nearest the soul of another.”

“Nothing is so deadening to the divine as an habitual dealing with the outsides of holy things.”

“There is no harm in being afraid. The only harm is in doing what Fear tells you.”

“To have what we want is riches, but to be able to do without is power.”

“The birds that wake the morning, and those that love the shade; The winds that sweep the mountain or lull the drowsy glade... they all are telling secrets, For our souls are all akin.”

“If you knew what God knows about death you would clap your listless hands.”

“The imagination of a man is made in the image of the imagination of God.”

“Never tell a child you have a secret unless you mean to tell it.”

“We are all walking repositories of hidden treasures.”

“Work is not always required. There is such a thing as sacred idleness.”

“A man's real belief is that which he lives by. What a man believes is the thing he does, not the thing he thinks.”