1
How kind you are, North Wind! ''I am only just. All kindness is but justice. We owe it.George MacDonald
2
It is a hard thing for a rich man to grow poor; but it is an awful thing for him to grow dishonest, and some kinds of speculation lead a man deep into dishonesty before he thinks what he is about. Poverty will not make a man worthless–he may be of worth a great deal more when he is poor than he was when he was rich; but dishonesty goes very far indeed to make a man of no value–a thing to be thrown out in the dust-hole of the creation, like a bit of broken basin, or dirty rag.George MacDonald
3
But I never just quite liked that ryhme.'' Why not, child?'' Because it seems to say one's as good as another, or two new ones are better than one that's lost.. .. Somehow, when once you've looked into anybody's eyes, right deep down into them, I mean, nobody will do for that one any more. Nobody, ever so beautiful or so good, will make up for that one going out of sight.George MacDonald
4
The church grew very lonely about him, and he began to feel like a child whose mother has forsaken it. Only he knew that to be left alone is not always to be forsaken.George MacDonald
5
I am always hearing. the sound of a far off song. I do not exactly know where it is, or what it means; and I don't hear much of it, only the odour of its music, as it were, flitting across the great billows of the ocean outside this air in which I make such a storm; but what I do hear, is quite enough to make me able to bear the cry from the drowning ship. So it would you if you could hear it.'' No it wouldn't, ' returned Diamond stoutly. 'For they wouldn't hear the music of the far-away song; and if they did, it wouldn't do them any good. You see you and I are not going to be drowned, and so we might enjoy it.'' But you have never heard the psalm, and you don't know what it is like. Somehow, I can't say how, it tells me that all is right; that it is coming to swallow up all the cries. It wouldn't be the song it seems if it did not swallow up all their fear and pain too, and set them singing it themselves with all the rest. .George MacDonald
6
That's a poet.'' I thought you said it was a bo-at.'' Stupid pet! Don't you know what a poet it?'' Why, a thing to sail on the water in.'' Well, perhaps you're not so far wrong. Some poets do carry people over the sea....'...' A poet is a man who is glad of something, and tries to make other people glad of it too.George MacDonald
7
He was dimly angry with himself, he did not know why. It was that he had struck his wife. He had forgotten it, but was miserable about it, notwithstanding. And this misery was the voice of the great Love that had made him and his wife and the baby and Diamond, speaking in his heart, and telling him to be good. 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. On Mount Sinai, it was thunder; in the cabman's heart it was misery; in the soul of St John it was perfect blessedness.George MacDonald