George Eliot Quotes on Love (18 Quotes)

Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings. Even if we loved someone else better than - than those we were married to, it would be no use. I mean, marriage drinks up all our power of giving or getting any blessedness in that sort of love. I know it may be very dear, but it murders our marriage, and then the marriage stays with us like a murder, and everything else is gone.

Men outlive their love, but they don't outlive the consequences of their recklessness.

Most of us who turn to any subject with love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love.

No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.

She and Stephen were in that stage of courtship which makes the most exquisite moment of youth, the freshest blossom-time of passion,--when each is sure of the other's love, but no formal declaration has been made, and all is mutual divination, exalting the most trivial word, the lightest gesture, into thrills delicate and delicious as wafted jasmine scent.

There is a sort of subjection which is the peculiar heritage of largeness and of love and strength is often only another name for willing bondage to irremediable weakness.

How is it that the poets have said so many fine things about our first love, so few about our later love Are their first poems their best Or are not those the best which come from their fuller thought, their larger experience, their deeper-rooted affections

Love has a way of cheating itself consciously, like a child who plays at solitary hide-and-seek it is pleased with assurances that it all the while disbelieves.

But what we strive to gratify, though we may call it a distant hope, is an immediate desire the future estate for which men drudge up city alleys exists already in their imagination and love.

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.

In the love of a brave and faithful man there is always a strain of maternal tenderness he gives out again those beams of protecting fondness which were shed on him as he lay on his mother's knee

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.

Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.

Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.

Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.

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

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.