Skip to content

A genuine work of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will mean.

— George MacDonald The Fantastic Imagination (1893)

Another quote →

Topics

Art

More quotes by George MacDonald

Trust to God to weave your little thread into the great web, though the pattern shows it not yet.

Never be discouraged because good things get on so slowly here; and never fail daily to do that good which lies next to your hand.

One difference between God's work and man's is, that, while God's work cannot mean more than he meant, man's must mean more than he meant.

The Fantastic Imagination (1893)

To be trusted is a greater compliment than to be loved.

The Marquis of Lossie (1877)

God hides nothing. His very work from the beginning is revelation, — a casting aside of veil after veil, a showing unto men of truth after truth.

Paul Faber, Surgeon (1879)

All George MacDonald quotes →

You may also like

All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree. All these aspirations are directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence and leading the individual towards freedom.

Albert Einstein Moral Decay (1937)

The great artists are the ones who dare to entitle to beauty things so natural that when they're seen afterward, people say: Why did I never realize before that this too was beautiful?

André Gide The Immoralist (1902)

Were art to redeem man, it could do so only by saving him from the seriousness of life and restoring him to an unexpected boyishness.

José Ortega y Gasset The Dehumanization of Art and Ideas about the Novel (1925)

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

Simone Weil

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: George MacDonald (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.