George Eliot Quotes on Joy & Excitement (6 Quotes)

My own experience and development deepen everyday my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.

To be candid, in Middlemarch phraseology, meant, to use an early opportunity of letting your friends know that you did not take a cheerful view of their capacity, their conduct, or their position and a robust candor never waited to be asked for its opinion.

It is in these acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are forever wasted, until men and women look round with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste has made, and say, the earth bears no harvest of sweetness calling their denial knowled

Unlike the gold which needed nothing, and must be worshipped in close-locked solitudewhich was hidden away from the daylight, was deaf to the song of birds, and started to no human tonesEppie was a creature of endless claims and ever-growing desires, seeking and loving sunshine, and living sounds, and living movements making trial of everything, with trust in new joy, and stirring the human kindness in all eyes that looked on her.

We women are always in danger of living too exclusively in the affections and though our affections are perhaps the best gifts we have, we ought also to have our share of the more independent life -- some joy in things for their own sake. It is piteous to see the helplessness of some sweet women when their affections are disappointed -- because all their teaching has been, that they can only delight in study of any kind for the sake of a personal love. They have never contemplated an independent delight in ideas as an experience which they could confess without being laughed at. Yet surely women need this defense against passionate affliction even more than men.

For what is love itself, for the one we love best? An enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.