Inspirational Quotes by George MacDonald
“I firmly believe people have hitherto been a great deal too much taken up about doctrine and far too little about practice. The word doctrine, as used in the Bible, means teaching of duty, not theory. I preached a sermon about this. We are far too anxious to be definite and to have finished, well-polished, sharp-edged systems — forgetting that the more perfect a theory about the infinite, the surer it is to be wrong, the more impossible it is to be right.”
“On a summer morning she woke to a sense of returning health. She had been lying like a waste shore, at low spring-tide, covered with dry seaweeds, withered jelly-fishes, and a multitudinous life that gasped for the ocean: at last the cook washing throb of the great sea of bliss, whose fountain is the heart of God, had stolen upon her consciousness, and she knew that she lived.”
“There must be hope while there is existence; for where there is existence there must be God; and God is forever good nor can be other than good.”
“And we had met at last in this same cave of greenery, while the summer night hung round us heavy with love, and the odours that crept through the silence from the sleeping woods were the only signs of an outer world that invaded our solitude.”
“If you do not obey Him, you will not know Him. You will tell me, some of you, that I am always beating that anvil–that obedience to Christ is Christianity. Let me die insisting upon it. For my Lord insists upon it.”
“When I learn the meaning of a word, I know the word; but when I say to myself, 'I know the word,' there comes a reflection of the word back from the mirror of my mind, making a second impression, and after that I am at least not so likely to forget it...“When, then, I think about the impression that the word makes upon me, how it is affecting me with the knowledge of itself, then I am what I should call self-conscious of the word—conscious not only that I know the word, but that I know the phenomena of knowing the word—conscious of what I am as regards my knowing of the word.”
“She married:— O, most wicked speed, to post/With such dexterity to incestuous sheets!”
“Ay, sir. To be honest, as this world goes, is to be one man picked out of ten thousand.”
“Be thou a spirit of health or goblin damn'd... Thou comest in such a questionable shape That I will speak to thee...”
topics: inspirational
“We fatten all the other creatures, to fatten ourselves, and we fatten ourselves for the worms. A fat king and a skinny beggar are only two different subterfuges, two dishes, but for one table - it's the end.”
“When sorrows come, they don't come as lonely outposts, but swell in troops”
“It’s a pity that the rich have more freedom to hang or drown themselves than the rest of us Christians.”
topics: hamlet-act-5-scene-1
“(Hamlet Ophelia'ya) " Evlenirsen şu acı sözü çeyiz diye götürürsün benden: Buzlar kadar el değmedik, karlar gibi temiz de olsan çamur atılmaktan kurtulmayacaksın. Manastıra git. Haydi, elveda! Ama ille de evleneceksen, sersemin biriyle evlen: Çünkü akıllılar sizin kendilerini ne canavara çevireceğinizi bilirler. Manastıra, manastıra git; çarçabuk hem de. Elveda!”
“But all is in vain, for that is our mood. Even the nature keeps it's habits and doesn't care, for what the shame objects.”
“Ser ou não ser, eis a questão. Qual é mais digna ação da alma; sofrer os dardos penetrantes da sorte injusta, ou opor-se a esta corrente de calamidades e dar-lhes fim com atrevida resistência? Morrer... dormir... nada mais... Morrer é dormir, sonhar talvez...”
topics: filosófico
“İnsan iki şey beklemez mi dualarından: Günah işlememek, işleyince de bağışlanmak.”
“People are so ready to think themselves change when it is only their mood that is changed! Those who are good-tempered because it is a fine day, will be ill-tempered when it rains: their selves are just the same both days; only in one case , the fine weather has got them, in the other the rainy.”
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George MacDonald was a Scottish author, poet, and Christian minister.
Known particularly for his poignant fairy tales and fantasy novels, George MacDonald inspired many authors, such as W. H. Auden, J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, E. Nesbit and Madeleine L'Engle. G. K. Chesterton cited The Princess and the Goblin as a book that had "made a difference to my whole existence."
Even Mark Twain, who initially disliked MacDonald, became friends with him, and there is some evidence that Twain was influenced by MacDonald.
MacDonald grew up influenced by his Congregational Church, with an atmosphere of Calvinism. But MacDonald never felt comfortable with some aspects of Calvinist doctrine; indeed, legend has it that when the doctrine of predestination was first explained to him, he burst into tears (although assured that he was one of the elect). Later novels, such as Robert Falconer and Lilith, show a distaste for the idea that God's electing love is limited to some and denied to others.