George MacDonald Quotes

Beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and devil are fighting there, and the battlefield is the heart of man.

I've been lucky to have a beautiful wife and children. The idea that something so beautiful can be so horrific at the same time. Beauty is a complex thing.

In order to have your best good guy, you have to be that bad guy.

...beauty is the projection of ugliness and by developing certain monstrosities we obtain the purest ornaments.

I wanted to ask her how the same thing could be so ugly and so glorious, and its words and stories so damning and brilliant.

Evermore in the world is this marvelous balance of beauty and disgust, magnificence and rats.

Accentuated plainness and accentuated vice ought to bring about harmony. Beauty lies in harmony, in style, whether it be the harmony of ugliness or beauty, vice or virtue.

The consequence of this is that I'm always finding humans at their best and worst. I see their ugly and their beauty, and I wonder how the same thing can be both.

Sharp and mild, dull and keen, well known and strange, dirty and clean, where both the fool and wise are seen: All this am I, have ever been, - in me dove, snake and swine convene!

She was a triumph over ugliness, so often more beguiling than real beauty, if only because it contains paradox. In this case, as opposed to the scrupulous method of good taste and scientific grooming, the trick had been worked by exaggerating defects; she'd made them ornamental by admitting them boldly.

Beauty can come from the strangest of places, even the most disgusting of places.

People with the purest souls are capable of the greatest evils.

The world is awful but also the world is beautiful. Human beings are awful, but ultimately human beings are tremendous.

Belgrade is the ugliest city in the world in the most beautiful place in the world.

I'm very bad, but I like to dance.

What distressed me most - more even than my own folly - was the perplexing question - How can beauty and ugliness dwell so near? Even with her altered complexion and face of dislike; disenchanted of the belief that clung around her; known for a living, walking sepulcher, faithless, deluding, traitorous; I felt, notwithstanding all this, that she was beautiful. Upon this I pondered with undiminished perplexity.

Demon, angel, all the same thing if you go back far enough, or cut deep enough.

It showed a kind of obscenity you see only in nature, an obscenity so extreme that it dissolves imperceptibly into beauty.

Twixt devil and deep sea, man hacks his caves; Birth, death; one, many; what is true, and seems; Earth's vast hot iron, cold space's empty waves.

Beautiful. And ugly. The world is always both.

The dividing line forms-fashioned from: Dragon's tears Missed years Overcome fears The fire and ice paradox Seen with True Sight Darkness does not always equate to evil Light does not always bring good

The wrinkled man in the wheelchair with the legs wrapped, the girl with her face punctured deep with the teeth marks of a dog, the mess of the world, and I see - this, all this, is what the French call d'un beau affreux, what the Germans call hubsch-hasslich - the ugly-beautiful. That which is perceived as ugly transfigures into beautiful. What the postimpressionist painter Paul Gauguin expressed as 'Le laid peut etre beau' - The ugly can be beautiful. The dark can give birth to life; suffering can deliver grace.

Real humanity presents a mixture of all that is most sublime and beautiful with all that is vilest and most monstrous in the world.

Ugliness has its own splendor when it houses a soul of beauty.

She was a triumph over ugliness, so often more beguiling than real beauty, if only because it contains paradox.