Life & Mortality Quote by George MacDonald

MacDonald turns mortality into a schedule, a repeating appointment you can either dread or use. "We die daily" lands first as blunt spiritual realism: not the dramatic end, but the quiet erosion of self that happens in compromises, disappointments, habits, and the small surrenders we barely notice. Then he pivots with a beat of earned optimism: "Happy those who daily come to life as well". The force of the line is its symmetry. If diminishment is routine, renewal can be routine too. He refuses the romantic fantasy of one grand conversion and instead argues for a lived practice: you can be undone in inches, and remade in inches.

The subtext is moral, but not scolding. MacDonald was a Christian novelist steeped in Victorian anxieties about industrial sameness, respectability, and the deadening grind of duty. In that world, "daily death" is what happens when you let external expectations calcify into identity. His "daily life" is not mere cheerfulness; it's an interior uprising - the choice to stay porous, repentant, imaginative, responsive. Coming to life means recovering appetite for truth, tenderness, and wonder after the day has tried to sand them down.

Intent matters here: MacDonald is trying to reframe spiritual growth as an ongoing metabolism, not a trophy. Happiness, for him, isn't comfort; it's the exhilaration of repeated resurrection, the courage to begin again on an ordinary Tuesday.