Author

MacDonald

Scottish · 1824-1905 · 10 quotes

10

Quotes

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MacDonald

Scottish · 1824–1905

10 quotes in our collection

MacDonald (1824-1905) was a Scottish novelist, poet, minister, and Christian fantasist best known for works that influenced modern fantasy and religious imagination. His major books include Phantastes, Lilith, At the Back of the North Wind, The Princess and the Goblin, The Princess and Curdie, and the realistic Scottish novels David Elginbrod and Robert Falconer. MacDonald matters because he joined moral seriousness, fairy tale, theology, and emotional tenderness in stories that shaped later writers, including C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. His fiction treats love, forgiveness, trust, death, education, and divine goodness as imaginative realities rather than abstract doctrines. The quotes attributed to MacDonald often sound devotional and relational, emphasizing trust, forgiveness, unrest, and love as the bond that gives life its meaning. His influence persists wherever fantasy is asked to carry spiritual and moral depth.

Common Themes

love4 wisdom4 faith3 knowledge2 nature2

friendship2

mankind2

forgiveness2

Collected Quotes

All quotes by MacDonald

Love is the one bond of the universe, the heart of God, the life of his children: if animals can be loved, they are loveable; if they can love, they are yet more plainly loveable: love is eternal; how then should its object perish?

Source: The Hope of the Gospel (1871)

Love is the life out of which are fashioned all the natural feelings, every emotion of man.

Source: The Hope of the Gospel (1871)

In every burning heart, in everything that hopes and fears and is, Love is the creative presence, the centre, the source of life, yea Life itself; yea, God himself!

Source: Salted With Fire (1897)

Forgiveness is the giving, and so the receiving, of life

Few delights can equal the presence of one whom we trust utterly.

To be trusted is a greater compliment than being loved.

The only thing worth a man's care is the will of God, and that will is the same whether in this world or in the next.

Source: Warlock o' Glenwarlock (1867)

For repose is not the end of education; its end is a noble unrest, an ever renewed awaking from the dead, a ceaseless questioning of the past for the interpretation of the future, an urging on of the motions of life, which had better far be accelerated into fever, than retarded into lethargy.

Source: A Dish of Orts (1882)

What God hath made, into that let man inquire.

Source: A Dish of Orts (1882)

Friendships, like marriages, are dependent on avoiding the unforgivable