George Eliot Quotes

How can one ever do anything nobly Christian, living among people with such petty thoughts?

The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another.

One can say everything best over a meal.

What courage and patience are wanted for every life that aims to produce anything!

As leopard feels at home with leopard.

Steady work turns genius to a loom.

We are rather apt to consider an act wrong because it is unpleasant to us.

All the learnin' my father paid for was a bit o' birch at one end and an alphabet at the other.

Might, could, would - they are contemptible auxiliaries.

In no part of the world is genteel visiting founded on esteem, in the absence of suitable furniture and complete dinner-service.

We are poor plants buoyed up by the air-vessels of our own conceit: alas for us, if we get a few pinches that empty us of that windy self-subsistence.

But at present this caution against a too hasty judgment interests me more in relation to Mr. Casaubon than to his young cousin. If

Do we not all agree to call rapid thought and noble impulse by the name of inspiration?

Only in another sort of pinfold than that from which she had been released. Lydgate's advice

Has any one ever pinched into its pilulous smallness the cobweb of pre-matrimonial acquaintanceship?

Rosamond being one of those women who live much in the idea that each man they meet would have preferred them if the preference had not been hopeless.

Solomon's Proverbs, I think, have omitted to say, that as the sore palate findeth grit, so an uneasy consciousness heareth innuendos.

Delicious Autumn!

i am always bored." (gwendolen harleth)

Miserliness is a capital quality to run in families; it's the safe side for madness to dip on.

Music sweeps by me as a messenger - Carrying a message that is not for me

We all remember epochs in our experience when some dear expectation dies, or some new motive is born.

It is a sad weakness in us, after all, that the thought of a man's death hallows him anew to us; as if life were not sacred too.

Childhood has no forebodings; but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.

All passion becomes strength when it has an outlet.

Even success needs its consolations.

A bachelor's children are always young: they're immortal children - always lisping, waddling, helpless, and with a chance of turning out good.

Still, I repeat, there was a general impression that Lydgate was something rather more uncommon than any general practitioner in Middlemarch. And

A man never lies with more delicious languor under the influence of a passion than when he has persuaded himself that he shall subdue it to-morrow.

Probabilities - the surest screen a wise man can place between himself and the truth.

A blush is no language; only a dubious flag - signal which may mean either of two contradictories

Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.

My life is too short, and God's work is too great for me to think of making a home for myself in this world.

He rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families ...

It's well known there's always two sides, if no more.

Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life.

There are some cases in which the sense of injury breeds not the will to inflict injuries and climb over them as a ladder, but a hatred of all injury.

Melodies die out, like the pipe of Pan, with the ears that love them and listen for them.

The yoke a man creates for himself by wrong-doing will breed hate in the kindliest nature.

But we are frightened at much that is not strictly conceivable.

Human experience is usually paradoxical, if that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.

Notions and scruples were like spilt needles, making one afraid of treading, or sitting down, or even eating.

That imagined 'otherwise' which is our practical heaven.

There are moments when our passions speak and decide for us ... like a fire kindled within our being to which everything else in us is mere fuel.

We want people to feel with us more than to act for us.

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.

No man can begin to mould himself on a faith or an idea without rising to a higher order of experience.

The last refuge of intolerance is in not tolerating the intolerant ...

To the receptive soul the river of life pauseth not, nor is diminished.

Our selfishness is so robust and many-clutching that, well encouraged, it easily devours all sustenance away from our poor little scruples.

I not only want to be loved, I want to be told that I'm loved.

Hostesses who entertain much must make up their parties as ministers make up their cabinets, on grounds other than personal liking.

Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.

the devil will be having his finger in what we call our duties as well as our sins. Mayhap

Where women love each other, men learn to smother their mutual dislike.

In this stupid world, most people never consider that a thing is good to be done unless it is done by their own set.

In every parting there is an image of death.

I shall never forget you. I have never forgotten anyone whom I once knew. My life has never been crowded, and seems not likely to be so.

I shall be glad of a cup of coffee as soon as possible.

Few things hold the perception more thoroughly captive than anxiety about what we have got to say

Teach love, for that is what you are.

Genius ... is necessarily intolerant of fetters ...

sympathy is but a living again through our own past in a new form,

One way of getting an idea of our fellow-countrymen's miseries is to go and look at their pleasures.

Fine art, poetry, that kind of thing, elevates a nation ...

Her little butterfly soul fluttered incessantly between memory and dubious expectation.

Stone Court were scenting the air quite impartially, as if Mr. Raffles

It's no use filling your pocket with money if you have got a hole in the corner.

We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves

Those old stories of visions and dreams guiding men have their truth; we are saved by making the future present to ourselves.

It is better - it shall be better with me because I have known you.

People talk about evidence as if it could really be weighed in scales by a blind Justice.

I love not to be choked with other men's thoughts.

Even in 1831 Lowick was at peace, not more agitated by Reform than by the solemn tenor of the Sunday sermon. The

I should never like scolding any one else so well; and that is a point to be thought of in a husband.

That golden sky, which was the doubly blessed symbol of advancing day and of approaching rest.

If you could make a pudding wi' thinking o' the batter, it 'ud be easy getting dinner.

One has to spend many years in learning how to be happy.

It is seldom that the miserable can help regarding their misery as a wrong inflicted by those who are less miserable

Miss Brooke's large eyes seemed, like her religion, too unusual and striking.

A woman may get to love by degrees - the best fire does not flare up the soonest.

Happily she never attempted to joke, and this perhaps was the most decisive mark of her cleverness

There is no sorrow I have thought about more than that - to love what is great, and try to reach it, and yet to fail.

Our good depends on the quality and breadth of our emotions.

Brothers are so unpleasant.

Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it: it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker.

Wit is a form of force that leaves the limbs at rest.

We are not apt to fear for the fearless, when we are companions in their danger.

In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause.

Adventure is not outside man; it is within.

The sweetest of all success is that which one wins by hard exertion ...

The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory.

A child, more than all other gifts That earth can offer to declining man, Brings hope with it, and forward-looking thoughts. - WORDSWORTH.

I cannot imagine myself without some opinion, but I wish to have good reasons for them.

People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbors.

I protest against any absolute conclusion.

Little children are still the symbol of the eternal marriage between love and duty.

To know intense joy without a strong bodily frame, one must have an enthusiastic soul.

Giants have an immemorial right to stupidity and insolent abuse.

The wit of a family is usually best received among strangers.