George MacDonald Quotes

For Berkeley (normal) vision is a language whereby God tells us about the tangible world. But prior to having experience of the tangible world, the visual language would be as meaningless as an utterly alien language. It would convey no meaning to the sighted mind.

The cause of Sense, is the External Body, or Object, which presseth the organ proper to each Sense, either immediately, as in theTaste and Touch; or mediately, as in Seeing, Hearing, and Smelling: which pressure, by the mediation of Nerves, and other strings, and membranes of the body, continued inwards to the Brain, and Heart, causeth there a resistance, or counter- pressure, or endeavor of the heart, to deliver it self: which endeavor because Outward, seemeth to be some matter without.

People assume that they perceive reality as it is, that our senses accurately record the outside world. Yet the science suggests that, in important ways, people experience reality not as it is, but as they expect it to be.

We think when God speaks to us, there's going to be a boom out of Heaven or we're going to get some chill bumps, but I really believe God's talking to us all the time. He's talking to us right in here. I call it our heart, our conscience, but it's the Holy Spirit talking to us.

Our ability to perceive the world around us seems so effortless that we tend to take it for granted.

I am a man for whom the outside world exists.

Nothing can be found in the intellect if previously has not been found in the senses.

Music is the mediator between the spiritual and the sensual life.

I will only observe, that that ethereal sense - sight, and touch, which is at the other extremity of the scale, have from time acquired a very remarkable additional power.

At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action.

Everyone makes sexy sounds; relatively few, sexy sights.

We don't want to merely obey God: we need to catch His heart. It is then we will glimpse the wisdom behind His directives, and not just see them as laws.

Things seen are mightier than things heard.

The most important lesson we can learn is how to pray. Prayers do not die, prayers live before God, and God's heart is set on them.

Poetry and music are the best at the highest level of the human mind. Out of poetry, out of their need for poetry, human beings have developed the idea of God. And so when we sing, when we dance, when we speak poetry we are speaking out of God's mouth, each other out of the music from God's heart.

I collect my tools: sight, smell, touch, taste, hearing, intellect. Night has fallen.

The eye likes novelty, but the ear craves familiarity.

All people see fires, storms, explosions, or landscapes; but how many feel the flames, the lightnings, the whirlwinds, or the harmony? How many have an inner beauty that tinges their melancholy?

The eye sees more than the heart knows.

Only the prayer which comes from our heart can get to God's heart.

Sight is by much the noblest of the senses. We receive our notices from the other four, through the organs of sensation only. We hear, we feel, we smell, we taste, by touch. But sight rises infinitely higher. It is refined above matter, and equals the faculty of spirit.

The heart lies and the head plays tricks on us, but the eyes see true. Look with your eyes. Hear with your ears. Taste with your mouth. Smell with your nose. Feel with your skin. Then comes the thinking, afterward, and in a way knowing the truth.

There is in the blind as in the seeing an Absolute which gives truth to what we know to be true, order to what is orderly, beauty to the beautiful, touchableness to what is tangible.

It is strange that the tactile sense, which is so infinitely less precious to men than sight, becomes at critical moments our main, if not only, handle to reality.

If you stand right fronting and face to face to a fact, you will see the sun glimmer on both its surfaces, as if it were a cimeter, and feel its sweet edge dividing you through the heart and marrow, and so you will happily conclude your mortal career. Be it life or death, we crave only reality. If we are really dying, let us hear the rattle in our throats and feel cold in the extremities; if we are alive, let us go about our business.