George MacDonald Quotes

Mind is a door that leads you outside in the world; meditation is the door that leads you to your interiority - to the very innermost shrine of your being.

Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.

I think I'm a spiritual person. I don't really go to church often when services are on, but I like going in when they are empty and quiet, and just sitting there and thinking for a little while.

What's on your mind, if you will allow the overstatement.

If we examine our thoughts, we shall find them always occupied with the past and the future.

I bring spiritual books with me while travelling. I like books about thoughts and how you see the world.

I think we're all very curious about our own minds, but we just may not have the tools to channel that.

The first step toward finding God, Who is Truth, is to discover the truth about myself: and if I have been in error, this first step to truth is the discovery of my error.

Every one should find some suitable time, day or night, to sink into his depths, each according to his own fashion. Not every one is able to engage in contemplative prayer.

Occasionally, you might enjoy the luxury of an unexpressed thought.

Pondering, which means to weigh mentally, to deliberate, to meditate, can achieve the opening of the spiritual eyes of one's understanding.

I wonder about silence. Also about darkness. I love the idea that city lights are a "conspiracy" against higher thoughts.

We are not social workers. We are contemplatives in the heart of the world.

After a time I found that I could almost listen to the silence, which had a dimension all of its own. I started to attend to its strange and beautiful texture, which of course, it was impossible to express in words. I discovered that I felt at home and alive in the silence, which compelled me to enter my interior world and around there. Without the distraction of constant conversation, the words on the page began to speak directly to my inner self. They were no long expressing ideas that were simply interesting intellectually, but were talking directly to my own yearning and perplexity.

In solitude, where we are least alone.

The observations and encounters of a devotee of solitude and silence are at once less distinct and more penetrating than those of the sociable man; his thoughts are weightier, stranger, and never without a tinge of sadness. Images and perceptions which might otherwise be easily dispelled by a glance, a laugh, an exchange of comments, concern him unduly, they sink into mute depths, take on significance, become experiences, adventures, emotions.

He had been (Thinking? Praying?) It was all the same thing.

To dream magnificently is not a gift given to all men, and even for those who possess it, it runs a strong risk of being progressively diminished by the ever-growing dissipation of modern life and by the restlessness engendered by material progress. The ability to dream is a divine and mysterious ability; because it is through dreams that man communicates with the shadowy world which surrounds him. But this power needs solitude to develop freely; the more one concentrates, the more one is likely to dream fully, deeply.

In the uttermost meaning of the words, thought is devout, and devotion is thought. Deep calls unto deep.

Through aisles of long-drawn centuries my spirit walks in thought.

If the desert is holy, it is because it is a forgotten place that allows us to remember the sacred. Perhaps that is why every pilgrimage to the desert is a pilgrimage to the self. There is no place to hide and so we are found.

Sannyas is only a declaration. The work is meditation. In one single word, my religion is complete, and that is meditation.

We just sat there quiet for a long time, which was fine, and I was thinking about way back in the very beginning in the Literal Heart of Jesus.

I daydream a lot - that's how I get my ideas. If I'm sitting in a café, I'm not on my phone because I want to hear my mind. I think that those periods of small solitude that we are really losing are so important.

I break up through the skin of awareness a thousand times a day, as dolphins burst through seas, and dive again, and rise, and dive.