George MacDonald Quotes

There is nothing evil save that which perverts the mind and shackles the conscience.

It is not I who die, when I die, but my sin and misery.

It is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong, because you can remain the friend of the sufferer; who would want to be the friend of and have to live together with a murderer? Not even another murderer.

Sin is bad in the eye, worse in the tongue, worse still in the heart, but worst of all in the life.

There is more evil in the least sin than in the greatest affliction.

The word "salvation" denotes rescue. Rescue? What from? Well, of course, ultimately death. And since it is sin that colludes with the forces of evil and decay, sin leads to death. So we are rescued from sin and death.

If you have to do with one who is unquestionably a slanderer, do not excuse him by calling him frank and free-spoken; do not call one who is notoriously vain, liberal and elegant; do not call dangerous levities mere simplicity; do not screen disobedience under the name of zeal; or arrogance, of frankness; or evil intimacy, of friendship. No, my friends, we must never, in our wish to shun slander, foster or flatter vice in others: but we must call evil evil, and sin sin, and so doing we shall serve God's glory.

The devil makes many disciples by preaching against sin. He convinces them that the great evil of sin, induces a crisis of guilt by which “God is satisfied," and after that he lets them spend the rest of their lives meditating on the intense sinfulness and evident reprobation of other men.

Allow the purity of evil to guide you.

Everything is reduced to what's physical in the end, because it's the filth inside people's minds that creates all the evil. What is a body, anyway? I suppose you've got to abuse your body to understand it. If you're not prepared to humiliate yourself in order to give somebody else a moment's pleasure, I don't believe that you've actually lived.

Only saints can save the world. And only our own sins can stop us from being saints.

We should take heed of pride; it is a sin that turned angels into devils.

Those who have more power are liable to sin more; no theorem in geometry is more certain than this.

The Devil may also make use of morality.

We are insane. That is what sin is. Sanctity is identitical with sanity. It means living the truth, living in reality. Sin always substitutes unreality for reality.

A good man prefers to suffer rather than overcome injustice with evil.

I see the necessity of preaching a full and present salvation from all sin.

Poverty, disease, sorrow, imprisonment and other evils are the fruits borne by the tree of one's own sins.

You will say these are very small sins... [But] it does not matter how small the sins are provided that their cumulative effect is to edge the man away from the Light and out into the Nothing. Murder is no better than cards if cards can do the trick. Indeed, the safest road to Hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts

Every soul confined in a prison of sin, guilt, or perversion has a key to the gate. The key is labeled “repentance.” If you know how to use this key, the adversary cannot hold you.

By oneself the evil is done, and it is oneself who suffers: by oneself the evil is not done, and by one's Self one becomes pure.