"We are often unable to tell people what they need to know, because they want to know something else, and would therefore only misunderstand what we said."

"Anything big enough to occupy our minds is big enough to hang a prayer on."

"I watched her departure, as one watches a sunset. She went like a radiance through the dark wood, which was henceforth bright to me, from simply knowing that such a creature was in it."

"We don't have a soul. We are a soul. We have a body." George Macdonald, 1892"

"But we believe – nay, Lord we only hope, That one day we shall thank thee perfectly For pain and hope and all that led or drove Us back into the bosom of thy love."

"I want to help you to grow as beautiful as God meant you to be when He thought of you first."

"...though I cannot promise to take you home," said North Wind, as she sank nearer and nearer to the tops of the houses, "I can promise you it will be all right in the end. You will get home somehow."

"For that great Love speaks in the most wretched and dirty hearts; only the tone of its voice depends on the echoes of the place in which it sounds."

"I tell you, there are more worlds, and more doors to them, than you will think of in many years!"

"She would wonder what had hurt her when she found her face wet with tears, and then would wonder how she could have been hurt without knowing it."

"It is to the man who is trying to live, to the man who is obedient to the word of the Master, that the word of the Master unfolds itself."

"When a feeling was there, they felt as if it would never go; when it was gone, they felt as if it had never been; when it returned, they felt as if it had never gone."

"The best preparation for the future, is the present well seen to, and the last duty done."

"It is the heart that is unsure of its God that is afraid to laugh."

"There is no strength in unbelief. Even the unbelief of what is false is no source of might. It is the truth shining from behind that gives the strength to disbelieve."

"Obedience is the opener of eyes."

"If God were not only to hear our prayers, as he does ever and always, but to answer them as we want them answered, he would not be God our Saviour but the ministering genius of our destruction."

"I saw thee ne'er before; I see thee never more; But love, and help, and pain, beautiful one, Have made thee mine, till all my years are done."

"Therefore all that is not beautiful in the beloved, all that comes between and is not of love's kind, must be destroyed."

"The part of the philanthropist is indeed a dangerous one; and the man who would do his neighbour good must first study how not to do him evil, and must begin by pulling the beam out of his own eye."

"Those are not the tears of repentance!... Self-loathing is not sorrow. Yet it is good, for it marks a step in the way home, and in the father's arms the prodigal forgets the self he abominates."

"God's finger can touch nothing but to mold it into loveliness."

"To cease to wonder is to fall plumb-down from the childlike to the commonplace—the most undivine of all moods intellectual. Our nature can never be at home among things that are not wonderful to us."

"We are dwellers in a divine universe where no desires are in vain - if only they be large enough."

"In moments of doubt I cry, ‘Could God Himself create such lovely things as I dreamed?’ ‘Whence then came thy dream?’ answers Hope."

"You would not think any duty small, If you yourself were great."

"We must do the thing we must Before the thing we may; We are unfit for any trust Till we can and do obey."

"To say on the authority of the Bible that God does a thing no honourable man would do, is to lie against God; to say that it is therefore right, is to lie against the very spirit of God."

"We die daily. Happy those who daily come to life as well."

"I rose as from the death "that" wipes out the sadness of life, and then dies itself in the new morrow."

"I am ready,' I replied. 'How do you know you can do it?' 'Because you require it,' I answered."

"Somehow, I can't say how, it tells me that all is right; that it is coming to swallow up all cries."

"The one principle of hell is – “I am my own"

"Above all things, I delight in listening to stories, and sometimes in telling them."

"It is amazing from what a mere fraction of a fact concerning him a man will dare judge the whole of another man"

""Then what do you see?" asked Irene, who perceived at once that for her not to believe him was at least as bad as for him not to believe her."

"Until a man has love, it is well he should have fear. So long as there are wild beasts about, it is better to be afraid than secure."

"That's all nonsense," said Curdie. "I don't know what you mean." "Then if you don't know what I mean, what right have you to call it nonsense?"

"It is because the young cannot recognize the youth of the aged, and the old will not acknowledge the experience of the young, that they repel each other."

"Wherever there is anything to love, there is beauty in some form."

"But when we are following the light, even its extinction is a guide."

"The only way to come to know where you are is to begin to make yourself at home."

"Bees and butterflies, moths and dragonflies, the flowers and the brooks and the clouds."

"Thou art beautiful because God created thee, but thou art a slave to sin... wickedness has made you ugly."

"A kind of love to the cheerful little stream arose in my heart. It was born in a desert; but it seemed to say to itself, "I will flow, and sing, and lave my banks, till I make my desert a paradise."

"To will not from self, but with the Eternal, is to live."

"The back door of every tomb opens on a hilltop."

"The greatest forces lie in the region of the uncomprehended."

"When a man dreams his own dream, he is the sport of his dream; when Another gives it him, that Other is able to fulfill it."

"Books are but dead bodies to you, and a library nothing but a catacomb!"