George Eliot Quotes on Life (31 Quotes)


    Certainly the determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and novel impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion.



    The Squire's life was quite as idle as his sons', but it was a fiction kept up by himself and his contemporaries in Raveloe that youth was exclusively the period of folly, and that their aged wisdom was constantly in a state of endurance mitigated by sarcasm.

    There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.


    No man is matriculated to the art of life till he has been well tempted.

    The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.

    These fellow-mortals, every one, must be accepted as they are you can neither straighten their noses, nor brighten their wit, nor rectify their dispositions and it is these people--amongst whom your life is passed--that it is needful you should tolerate, pity, and love it is these more or less ugly, stupid, inconsistent people whose movements of goodness you should be able to admire--for whom you should cherish all possible hopes, all possible patience.

    Life is too precious to be spent in this weaving and unweaving of false impressions, and it is better to live quietly under some degree of misrepresentation than to attempt to remove it by the uncertain process of letter-writing.

    But the mother's yearning, that completest type of the life in another life which is the essence of real human love, feels the presence of the cherished child even in the debased, degraded man.

    May every soul that touches mine Be it the slightest contact Get therefrom some good Some little grace one kindly thought One aspiration yet unfelt One bit of courage For the darkening sky One gleam of faith To brave the thickening ills of life One glimpse of brighter skies Beyond the gathering mists To make this life worth while.

    If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

    ... for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

    A supreme love, a motive that gives a sublime rhythm to a woman's life, and exalts habit into partnership with the soul's highest needs, is not to be had where and how she wills.

    One couldn't carry on life comfortably without a little blindness to the fact that everything has been said better than we can put it ourselves.

    Boots and shoes are the greatest trouble of my life. Everything else one can turn and turn about, and make old look like new but there's no coaxing boots and shoes to look better than they are.

    For what we call illusions are often, in truth, a wider vision of past and present realities a willing movement of a man's soul with the larger sweep of the world's forces a movement towards a more assured end than the chances of a single life.

    Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour's buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.

    There is no private life which is not determined by a wider public life.

    There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.

    Life began with waking up and loving my mother's face.

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

    It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self--never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardor of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted.

    It's no trifle at her time of life to part with a doctor who knows her constitution

    The most solid comfort one can fall back upon is the thought that the business of one's life is to help in some small way to reduce the sum of ignorance, degradation and misery on the face of this beautiful earth.

    The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.

    If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

    I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.

    What quarrel, what harshness, what unbelief in each other can subsist in the presence of a great calamity, when all the artificial vesture of our life is gone, and we are all one with each other in primitive mortal needs.

    Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

    Life is measured by the rapidity of change, the succession of influences that modify the being.


    More George Eliot Quotations (Based on Topics)


    Man - Life - World - Love - Mind - Woman - Wisdom & Knowledge - People - Sense & Perception - Soul - Friendship - Emotions - Imagination & Visualization - Beauty - Hope - Sadness - Truth - Nature - Thought & Thinking - View All George Eliot Quotations

    More George Eliot Quotations (By Book Titles)


    - Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life
    - Silas Marner

    Related Authors


    Zig Ziglar - Tony Robbins - Upton Sinclair - Suze Orman - Lu Xun - Lewis Carroll - Jules Verne - Jane Roberts - Horatio Alger - Frederick Forsyth


Authors (by First Name)

A - B - C - D - E - F - G - H - I - J - K - L - M
N - O - P - Q - R - S - T - U - V - W - X - Y - Z

Other Inspiring Sections