Top 100 Macdonald Quotes
#1. This region was the centre of the flint industry in Neolithic times. And later, it became famous for rabbits farmed for meat and felt.
Helen Macdonald
#2. There's a point, you know, where treachery is so complete and unashamed that it becomes statesmanship.
George MacDonald Fraser
#3. I was raised on John D. MacDonald's Travis McGee series. Something about this genre - hard-boiled-private-eye-with-heart-of-gold - never failed to take me away from whatever difficulties haunted my daily world to a wonderful land where I was no more than an enthralled spectator.
Alan Furst
#4. Girl: The kid buys a new tie and you curse him like he was Ramsay MacDonald.
Vladimir Mayakovsky
#5. The man who recognizes the truth of any human relation and neglects the duty involved is not a true man.... A man may be aware of the highest truths of many things, and yet not be a true man, inasmuch as the essentials of manhood are not his aim: he has not come into the flower of his own being.
George MacDonald
#6. Consider this, and in our time As the hawk sees it, or the helmeted airman:
Helen Macdonald
#7. There are women who fly their falcons at any game, little birds and all.
George MacDonald
#8. I just hate plugs. It just doesn't seem entertaining to me. I've never plugged anything in my life on a talk show ever. I understand people use that vehicle. It's just not very entertaining.
Norm MacDonald
#9. A church with no conflict is likely a church that is manufacturing peace in a way that prohibits glory.
James MacDonald
#10. Our minds are small because they are faithless,' I said to myself.
'If we had faith in God our hearts would share in His greatness and
peace for we should not then be shut up in ourselves, but would walk
abroad in him
George MacDonald
#11. You've got to save your own soul first, and then the souls of your neighbors if they will let you; and for that reason you must cultivate, not a spirit of criticism, but the talents that attract people to the hearing of the Word.
George MacDonald
#12. In moments of doubt I cry, 'Could God Himself create such lovely things as I dreamed?'
'Whence then came thy dream?' answers Hope.
George MacDonald
#13. When God promises, He's not saying, I'll try. He means, I can and I will.
James MacDonald
#14. There's nothing as cozy as a piece of candy and a book.
Betty MacDonald
#15. I never had any interest in sitcoms or motion pictures or anything like that.
Norm MacDonald
#16. When we understand the outside of things, we think we have them. Yet the Lord puts his things in subdefined, suggestive shapes, yielding no satisfactory meaning to the mere intellect, but unfolding themselves to the conscience and heart.
George MacDonald
#18. A proper disposition of time leaves a man at leisure in the very bustle of affairs; without delaying the attention of his concerns to the last or giving them unnecessary application at first: it affords a season for everything by affording everything its proper season.
Norm MacDonald
#19. A taste of whiskey had changed her mood, as a touch of acid will change the color of blue litmus paper.
Ross Macdonald
#20. In war, God is always on your side, no matter which side you're on. God is invincible, but one side always loses. Nobody seems to see the fallacy in this.
Elliot MacDonald
#21. Having experienced her own disappearance, she is conscious of how important it is for people to be seen, so when she looks at them
even the blind one
she also looks for them, just in case they too have got lost and need finding.
Ann-Marie MacDonald
#22. I have met otherwise educated folks who haven't heard that cooked bones can kill a dog, so perhaps the vets are just being realists.
Carina MacDonald
#23. In the half-light through the drawn curtains she sits on her perch, relaxed, hooded, extraordinary. Formidable talons, wicked, curved black beak, sleek, cafe-au-lait front streaked thickly with cocoa-coloured teardrops, looking for all the world like some cappuccino samurai.
Helen Macdonald
#24. Twilight-kind, oppressing the heart as with a condensed atmosphere of dreamy undefined love and longing.
George MacDonald
#25. He gave me an appealing look, which fell with a thud between us:
Ross Macdonald
#26. While you can't keep fear from visiting, you can slam the door in its face. With God's promise in your hand, that's exactly what you are able to do.
James MacDonald
#27. the austringer, the solitary trainer of goshawks and sparrowhawks, has had a pretty terrible press.
Helen Macdonald
#28. Possessed by the power of the gorgeous night, she seemed at one and the same moment annihilated and glorified.
George MacDonald
#29. I love writing - it's the best. But I really hate collaboration.
Norm MacDonald
#30. The greatest forces lie in the region of the uncomprehended.
George MacDonald
#31. The best preparation for the future is the present well seen to, and the last duty done.
George MacDonald
#32. I need a God; and if there be none how did I come to need one?
George MacDonald
#33. There is a great deal more to be got out of things than is generally got out of them, whether the thing be a chapter of the Bible or a yellow turnip, and the marvel is that those who use the most material should so often be those that show the least result in strength or character.
George MacDonald
#34. It is greed and laziness and selfishness, not hunger or weariness or cold, that take the dignity out of a man, and make him look mean.
George MacDonald
#35. Grave doubts as to whether I was in my place in the church, would keep rising and floating about, like rain-clouds within me.
George MacDonald
#36. We are often less grieved at disappointments than at ourselves for having said much concerning the certainty of our expectations.
Norm MacDonald
#37. Pious people in general seem to regard religion as a necessary accompaniment of life; to Wingfold it was life itself; with him religion must be all, or could be nothing.
George MacDonald
#38. Now it stands to reason, mister, any damn fool stares into the sun long enough, he'll end up seeing exactly what some other damn fool tells him he's going to see.
John D. MacDonald
#39. God chooses that men should be tried, but let a man beware of tempting his neighbor.
George MacDonald
#40. Some men are tempted to violate secrecy from the uneasiness secrecy gives them, and others, merely to impress you with the extent of their confidence.
Norm MacDonald
#41. punishment had not been spared--with best results in patience and purification
George MacDonald
#42. Better to sit at the waters birth,
Than a sea of waves to win;
To live in the love that floweth forth,
Than the love that cometh in.
Be thy a well of love, my child,
Flowing, and free, and sure;
For a cistern of love, though undefiled,
Keeps not the spirit pure.
George MacDonald
#43. When an artist captures a mountain or an ocean on a canvas with color and we wonder where such talent could come from, he or she is declaring His glory.
James MacDonald
#44. If you're watching a comedian on television and he's making a political point, I would say he's gotten too serious.
Norm MacDonald
#47. That man is perfect in faith who can come to God in the utter dearth of his feelings and desires, without a glow or an aspiration, with the weight of low thoughts, failures, neglects, and wandering forgetfulness, and say to Him, "Thou art my refuge.
George MacDonald
#48. Times of refreshing may come from the presence of the Lord (Acts 3:20).
James MacDonald
#49. Immeasurably imperfect it was, but false the impression could not be, for she saw with the eyes made for seeing, and saw indeed what many men are too wise to see.
George MacDonald
#50. Only when we have done all we knew to do can we wait by faith for God to do what only He can do.
James MacDonald
#51. It was to have been a quiet evening at home. Home is the Busted Flush, 52-foot barge-type houseboat, Slip F-18, Bahia Mar, Lauderdale.
John D. MacDonald
#52. The object of a bunker or trap is not only to punish a physical mistake, to punish lack of control, but also to punish pride and egotism.
Charles B. MacDonald
#53. Understanding is the reward of obedience. Obedience is the key to every door. I am perplexed at the stupidity of the ordinary religious being. In the most practical of all matters he will talk and speculate and try to feel, but he will not set himself to do.
George MacDonald
#54. Anything large enough for a wish to light upon, is large enough to hang a prayer upon.
George MacDonald
#55. There are two indiscretions that generally distinguish fools: a readiness to report whatever they hear, and a practice of communicating with secrecy what is commonly understood.
Norm MacDonald
#56. I'm a huge sports fan but have no interest in minutiae. I don't remember who won Super Bowls five years ago or listen to sports talk radio.
Norm MacDonald
#57. When I am in the Scottish Parliament chamber, I often feel the need to sit for the entire debate. It's only courteous to listen to what everyone has to say, although I often find myself desperate to say something but too scared to stand up in case I regret it.
Margo MacDonald
#58. Have you ever watched a deer walking out from cover? They step, stop, and stay, motionless, nose to the air, looking and smelling. A nervous twitch might run down their flanks. And then, reassured that all is safe, they ankle their way out of the brush to graze.
Helen Macdonald
#59. ...that when you wanted to see something very badly,sometimes you had to stay still,stay in the same place, remember how much you wanted to see it,and be patient.If you want to see hawks you have to be patient too.
Helen Macdonald
#60. I am only limited by the amount of life I have left to capture the ideas I am already working on. Another problem is that I am not sure if I would rather create or collect art. Collecting art is another passion of mine.
Richard MacDonald
#61. Few are more unhappy than those who have great ambition, but little energy to urge it into activity.
Norm MacDonald
#62. Whenever you are in a critical temper, it is impossible to enter into communion with God.
James MacDonald
#64. I'm suspicious that what's behind the academic call for doing away with athletic scholarships is a nostalgia for the good old days, which leaves out everyone but white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, ... world's biggest cocktail party.
Scott MacDonald
#65. The heavens and the earth are around us that it may be possible for us to speak of the unseen by the seen, for the outermost husk of creation has correspondence with the deepest things of the Creator.
He is not a God that hides himself, but a God who made all that he might reveal himself.
George MacDonald
#66. When I was in my early 20s, my dream was to write mystery novels. I wanted to do what my favourite crime writer, Ross Macdonald, did - crank out a book a year. The only problem - and it was a considerable one - was that I stank.
Linwood Barclay
#67. The people setting out on these walks weren't seeking to conquer peaks or test themselves against maps and miles. They were looking for a mystical communion with the land; they walked backwards in time to an imagined past suffused with magical, native glamour:
Helen Macdonald
#68. But indeed the business of the universe is to make such a fool of you that you will know yourself for one, and so begin to be wise!
George MacDonald
#69. I remember hating having to cross over the Broadway Bridge again, having to leave the peninsula neighborhood and go back to my apartment in downtown Boston.
Michael Patrick MacDonald
#70. But it is not the rich person only who is under the domination of things; they too are slaves who, having no money, are unhappy from the lack of it.
George MacDonald
#71. One chief cause of the amount of unbelief in the world is tha tthose who have seen something of the glory of Christ set themselves to theorize concerning him rather than to obey him.
George MacDonald
#72. A lot of people think I'm difficult to work with. It's not like I really want to do that much stuff, so it doesn't really matter. I guess I'm somewhat difficult when it comes to comedy.
Norm MacDonald
#73. If the function of the artist is to see, the first duty of the critic is to understand what the artist saw.
J. E. H. MacDonald
#74. Work is not always required. There is such a thing as sacred idleness.
George MacDonald
#75. Every man needs a place to be open and vulnerable with brothers leaning together upon the Lord.
James MacDonald
#76. Envy, like a false mirror, distorts the symmetry of the sweetest form.
Norm MacDonald
#77. People must believe what they can, and those who believe more must not be hard upon those who believe less. I doubt if you would have believed it all yourself if you hadn't seen some of it.
George MacDonald
#78. Teresa blames herself for believing that she was indispensable to Mahmoud. Pride goeth before a fall.
Ann-Marie MacDonald
#79. You would not think any duty small, If you yourself were great.
George MacDonald
#80. Our prayer must be, Father, I'm waiting for You because I know You are good in what You do and in when you do it.
James MacDonald
#81. But there are victories far worse than defeats; and to overcome an angel too gentle to put out all his strength, and ride away in triumph on the back of a devil, is one of the poorest.
George MacDonald
#83. I went into the lunchroom. A stocky young girl in a soiled green jumper sat at a table reading a fan magazine. She got up slowly when the screen door creaked. She had enormous breasts and she looked like Buddy Hackett.
John D. MacDonald
#84. I know my Easts and Tom Brown, you see, and they're never happy unless their morality is being tried in the furnace and they can feel they are doing the right Christian thing and never mind the consequences to anyone else.
George MacDonald Fraser
#85. In terms of merit, sports has mathematical statistics. That's how you know who the best player is.
Norm MacDonald
#87. But there are not a few who would be indignant at having their belief in God questioned, who yet seem greatly to fear imagining Him better than He is.
George MacDonald
#88. Real good-breeding is independent of the forms and refinements of what has assumed to itself the name of society.
George MacDonald
#91. The minister was an honest man so far as he knew himself and honesty, and did not relish this form of submission. But he did not ask himself where was the difference between accepting the word of man and accepting man's explanation of the word of God!
George MacDonald
#92. Be loving in conflict or be loving in frustration or let love command your every interaction because love never fails.
James MacDonald
#93. There are a great many more good things than bad things to do.
George MacDonald
#94. Memory plays tricks. Memory is another word for story, and nothing is more unreliable.
Ann-Marie MacDonald
#95. Piece by piece living is hard to do. It may even feel like the hardest thing. But it has this going for it: you never need to know what it is you're carrying on your shoulders.
Ann-Marie MacDonald
#96. sweeter than joy itself, for the heart of the laugh was love.
George MacDonald
#97. My free hand reached for something to hold on to, and closed on liquid nothing.
Ross Macdonald
#98. God's holiness ... puts everything and everyone in their rightful place.
James MacDonald
#99. When I stepped out of my car the night shot up like a tree and branched wide into blossoming masses of stars. Under their far cold lights I felt weak and little. If a fruit fly lived for one day instead of two, it hardly seemed to matter. Except to another fruit fly.
Ross Macdonald
#100. A condition which of declension would indicate a devil, may of growth indicate a saint.
George MacDonald
