Quotes from Lilith

“A man is as free as he chooses to make himself, never an atom freer.”
― George MacDonald, quote from Lilith

“Whose work is it but your own to open your eyes? But indeed the business of the universe is to make such a fool out of you that you will know yourself for one, and begin to be wise.”
― George MacDonald, quote from Lilith

“You doubt because you love truth.”
― George MacDonald, quote from Lilith

“Doubt may be a poor encouragement to do anything, but it is a bad reason for doing nothing.”
― George MacDonald, quote from Lilith

“there is no harm in being afraid. The only harm is in doing what Fear tells you. Fear is not your master! Laugh in his face and he will run away.”
― George MacDonald, quote from Lilith

“I tell you, there are more worlds, and more doors to them, than you will think of in many years!”
― George MacDonald, quote from Lilith

“There is no slave but the creature that wills against its Creator.”
― George MacDonald, quote from Lilith

“The part of the philanthropist is indeed a dangerous one; and the man who would do his neighbour good must first study how not to do him evil, and must begin by pulling the beam out of his own eye.”
― George MacDonald, quote from Lilith

“But there is a light that goes deeper than the will, a light that lights up the darkness behind it: that light can change your will, can make it truly yours and not another's - not the Shadow's. Into the created can pour itself the creating will, and so redeem it!”
― George MacDonald, quote from Lilith

“The only way to come to know where you are is to begin to make yourself at home.”
― George MacDonald, quote from Lilith

“Those are not the tears of repentance!... Self-loathing is not sorrow. Yet it is good, for it marks a step in the way home, and in the father's arms the prodigal forgets the self he abominates.”
― George MacDonald, quote from Lilith

“I am ready,' I replied.
'How do you know you can do it?'
'Because you require it,' I answered.”
― George MacDonald, quote from Lilith

“Thou art beautiful because God created thee, but thou art a slave to sin... wickedness has made you ugly.”
― George MacDonald, quote from Lilith

“I looked, and saw: before her, cast from an unseen heavenly mirror, stood the reflection of herself, and beside it a form of splendent beauty. She trembled, and sank again on the floor helpless. She knew the one that God had intended her to be, the other that she had made herself.”
― George MacDonald, quote from Lilith

“Books are but dead bodies to you, and a library nothing but a catacomb!”
― George MacDonald, quote from Lilith

“When a man dreams his own dream, he is the sport of his dream; when Another gives it him, that Other is able to fulfill it.”
― George MacDonald, quote from Lilith

“...I am still librarian in your house, for I never was dismissed, and never gave up the office. Now I am librarian here as well.'

'But you have just told me you were sexton here!'

'So I am. It is much the same profession. Except you are a true sexton, books are but dead bodies to you, and a library nothing but a catacomb!”
― George MacDonald, quote from Lilith

“I had chosen the dead rather than the living, the thing thought rather than the thing thinking.”
― George MacDonald, quote from Lilith

“Yes,' he answered; 'and you will be dead, so long as you refuse to die.”
― George MacDonald, quote from Lilith

“No one can say he is himself, until first he knows that he is, and then what himself is. In fact, nobody is himself, and himself is nobody.”
― George MacDonald, quote from Lilith

“All the days of my appointed time will I wait till my change come.”
― George MacDonald, quote from Lilith

“The man who grounds his action on another's cowardice, is essentially a coward himself.”
― George MacDonald, quote from Lilith

“Nobody knows what anything is; a man can only learn what a thing means!”
― George MacDonald, quote from Lilith

“It opened a little way, and a face came into the opening. It was Lona's. It's eyes were closed, but the face itself was upon me, and seemed to see me. It was as white as Eve's, white as Mara's, but did not shine like their faces. She spoke, and her voice was like a sleepy night-wind in the grass.

"Are you coming, king?" it said. "I cannot rest until you are with me, gliding down the river to the great sea, and the beautiful dream-land. The sleepiness is full of lovely things: come and see them.”
― George MacDonald, quote from Lilith

“You allowed me existence, which is the sum of what one can demand of his fellow-beings”
― George MacDonald, quote from Lilith

“If you know you are yourself, you know that you are not somebody else; but do you know that you are yourself? Are”
― George MacDonald, quote from Lilith

“Strange dim memories, which will not abide identification, often, through misty windows of the past, look out upon me in the broad daylight, but I never dream now. It may be, notwithstanding, that, when most awake, I am only dreaming the more! But when I wake at last into that life which as a mother her child, carries life in its bosom, I shall know that I wake, and shall doubt no more. I wait; asleep or awake, I wait.”
― George MacDonald, quote from Lilith

“Every one, as you ought to know, has a beast-self—and a bird-self, and a stupid fish-self, ay, and a creeping serpent-self too—which it takes a deal of crushing to kill! In truth he has also a tree-self and a crystal-self, and I don’t know how many selves more—all to get into harmony. You can tell what sort a man is by his creature that comes oftenest to the front.”
― George MacDonald, quote from Lilith

“Oblige me by telling me where I am."
"That is impossible. You know nothing about whereness. The only way to come to know where you are is to begin to make yourself at home.”
― George MacDonald, quote from Lilith

“No man knows it when he is making an idiot of himself.”
― George MacDonald, quote from Lilith

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Popular quotes

“We read the Scriptures in vain if we fail to discover that the actions of men, evil men as well as good, are governed by the Lord God.”
― Arthur W. Pink, quote from The Sovereignty of God

“What separates experts from the rest of us is that they tend to engage in a very directed, highly focused routine, which Ericsson has labeled “deliberate practice.”
― Joshua Foer, quote from Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

“We can begin the restructuring of thought by declaring legitimate what we have denied for so long. Lets us declare Nature to be legitimate. The notion of illegal plants is obnoxious and ridiculous in the first place.”
― Terence McKenna, quote from Food of the Gods: The Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge

“I’m scared because I love you so much sometimes it’s hard to breathe.”
― quote from A Beautiful Lie

“Perhaps I don't know enough yet to find the right words for it, but I think I can describe it. It happened again just a moment ago. I don't know how to put it except by saying that I see things in two different ways-everything, ideas included. If I make an effort to find any difference in them, each of them is the same today as it was yesterday, but as soon as I shut my eyes they're suddenly transformed, in a different light. Perhaps I went wrong about the imaginary numbers. If I get to them by going straight along inside mathematics, so to speak, they seem quite natural. It's only if I look at them directly, in all their strangeness, that they seem impossible. But of course I may be all wrong about this, I know too little about it. But I wasn't wrong about Basini. I wasn't wrong when I couldn't turn my ear away from the faint trickling sound in the high wall or my eye from the silent, swirling dust going up in the beam of light from a lamp. No, I wasn't wrong when I talked about things having a second, secret life that nobody takes any notice of! I-I don't mean it literally-it's not that things are alive, it's not that Basini seemed to have two faces-it was more as if I had a sort of second sight and saw all this not with the eyes of reason. Just as I can feel an idea coming to life in my mind, in the same way I feel something alive in me when I look at things and stop thinking. There's something dark in me, deep under all my thoughts, something I can't measure out with thoughts, a sort of life that can't be expressed in words and which is my life, all the same.

“That silent life oppressed me, harassed me. Something kept on making me stare at it. I was tormented by the fear that our whole life might be like that and that I was only finding it out here and there, in bits and pieces. . . . Oh, I was dreadfully afraid! I was out of my mind.. .”

These words and these figures of speech, which were far beyond what was appropriate to Törless's age, flowed easily and naturally from his lips in this state of vast excitement he was in, in this moment of almost poetic inspiration. Then he lowered his voice and, as though moved by his own suffering, he added:

“Now it's all over. I know now I was wrong after all. I'm not afraid of anything any more. I know that things are just things and will probably always be so. And I shall probably go on for ever seeing them sometimes this way and sometimes that, sometimes with the eyes of reason, and sometimes with those other eyes. . . . And I shan't ever try again to compare one with the other. .”
― Robert Musil, quote from The Confusions of Young Törless

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About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.