George MacDonald Quotes

At different times in my life I met God from a different point of view.

The first real unhappiness I remember to have felt was when some one told me, one day, that I did not love God. I insisted, almost tearfully, that I did; but I was told that if I did truly love Him I should always be good. I knew I was not that, and the feeling of sudden orphanage came over me like a bewildering cloud.

For the majority of mankind, religion is a habit, or, more precisely, tradition is their religion. Though it seems strange, I think that the first step to moral perfection is your liberation from the religion in which you were raised. Not a single person has come to perfection except by following this way.

When a culture has fallen totally away from spiritual pursuits into materialism, one must begin by demonstrating they are each a soul, not a material animal.

Our souls must become expanded by the contemplation of Nature's grandeur, before we can fully comprehend the greatness of man.

Religion is realization; not talk, nor doctrine, nor theories however beautiful they may be. It is being and becoming, not hearing, or acknowledging; it is the whole soul becoming what it believes.

The sufis believe that they can experience something more complete.

God is not found in the soul by adding anything but by a process of subtraction.

The dark night of the soul comes just before revelation.

If a soul is not clothed with the teachings of the Church he cannot merit to have Jesus seated in him.

By religion I mean perfected manhood,--the quickening of the soul by the influence of the Divine Spirit.

God sees with utter clarity who we are. He is undeceived as to our warts and wickedness. But when God looks at us that is not all He sees. He also sees who we are intended to be, who we will one day become.

We believe that every being is divine, is God. Every soul is a sun covered over with clouds of ignorance; the difference between soul and soul is owing to the difference in density of these layers of clouds.

O you proud Christians, wretched souls and small,/ Who by the dim lights of your twisted minds/ Believe you prosper even as you fall,/ Can you not see that we are worms, each one/ Born to become the angelic butterfly/ That flies defenseless to the Judgement Throne?

Teach me, like you, to drink creation whole/ And casting out myself, become a soul.

He who has made great moral progress ceases to pray

That for which Paul lived and died so gloriously; that for which Jesus gave himself to be crucified; the end that animated the thousand martyrs and heroes who have followed his steps, was to redeem us from a formal religion, and teach us to seek our well-being in the formation of the soul.

It is blessed to eat into the very soul of the Bible until the very essence of the Bible flows from you.

If you no longer believe in the God in whom you believed in before, this comes from the fact that there was something wrong with your belief, and you must strive to understand better that which you call God.

If you believe in the soul, do not clutch at sensual sweetness before it is ripe on the slow tree of cause and effect.

I believe the only way we can reach the Kingdom of Heaven is to have the Kingdom of Heaven in our hearts.

The ecstatic beauty and soulful grace of Rumi's poetry inspires human hearts to believe in possibilities beyond the predictably fatal.

You are either losing your mind -- or gaining your soul.

Rejoice that man is hurled, From change to change unceasingly, His soul's wings never furled!