Anybody with leisure can do that who is willing to begin where everything ought to be begun--that is, at the beginning. Nothing worth calling good can or ever will be started full grown. The essential of any good is life, and the very body of created life, and essential to it, being its self operant, is growth. The larger start you make, the less room you leave for life to extend itself. You fill with the dead matter of your construction the places where assimilation ought to have its perfect work, building by a life-process, self-extending, and subserving the whole. Small beginnings with slow growings have time to root themselves thoroughly-- I do not mean in place nor yet in social regard, but in wisdom. Such even prosper by failures, for their failures are not too great to be rectified without injury to the original idea. . George MacDonald
About This Quote

The author of this quote is William Ellery Channing. The full quote reads: "Anybody with leisure can do that who is willing to begin where everything ought to be begun--that is, at the beginning. Nothing worth calling good can or ever will be started full grown. The essential of any good is life, and the very body of created life, and essential to it, being its self operant, is growth.

The larger start you make, the less room you leave for life to extend itself. You fill with the dead matter of your construction the places where assimilation ought to have its perfect work, building by a life-process, self-extending, and subserving the whole."

Source: Weighed And Wanting

Some Similar Quotes
  1. When we love, we always strive to become better than we are. When we strive to become better than we are, everything around us becomes better too. - Paulo Coelho
  2. What's meant to be will always find a way - Trisha Yearwood
  3. It is good to love many things, for therein lies the true strength, and whosoever loves much performs much, and can accomplish much, and what is done in love is well done. - Vincent Van Gogh
  4. The reason it hurts so much to separate is because our souls are connected. Maybe they always have been and will be. Maybe we've lived a thousand lives before this one and in each of them we've found each other. And maybe each time, we've... - Nicholas Sparks
  5. More smiling, less worrying. More compassion, less judgment. More blessed, less stressed. More love, less hate. - Roy T. Bennett
More Quotes By George MacDonald
  1. All that is not God is death.
  2. I want to help you to grow as beautiful as God meant you to be when He thought of you first.
  3. 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.
  4. One of my greatest difficulties in consenting to think of religion was that I thought I should have to give up my beautiful thoughts and my love for the things God has made. But I find that the happiness springing from all things not in...
  5. Love loves unto purity. Love has ever in view the absolute loveliness of that which it beholds. Therefore all that is not beautiful in the beloved, all that comes between and is not of love's kind, must be destroyed. And our God is a consuming...
Related Topics