George Eliot Quotes (451 Quotes)

If a man has a capacity for great thoughts, he is likely to overtake them before he is decrepit.

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.

The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots.

What can promote innocent mirth, and I may say virtue, more than a good riddle?

To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.

We hand folks over to God's mercy, and show none ourselves.

With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavours and the tinglings of a merited shame.

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

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

Harold, like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas.

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

Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains blends yearning and repulsion and ties us by our heart-strings to the beings that jar us at every movement.

Different taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

There is something strangely winning to most women in that offer of the firm arm the help is not wanted physically at that moment, but the sense of help, the presence of strength that is outside them and yet theirs, meets a continual want of the imagination.

Our passions do not live apart in locked chambers but dress in their small wardrobe of notions, bring their provisions to a common table and mess together, feeding out of the common store according to their appetite.

Hobbies are apt to run away with us, you know; it doesn't do to be run away with. We must keep the reins.

Breed is stronger than pasture.

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

She was always trying to be what her husband wished, and never able to repose on his delight in what she was.

Oh may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions; they pass no criticisms.

The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

Our impartiality is kept for abstract merit and demerit, which none of us ever saw.

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it . . .

Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures.

This is a puzzling world, and Old Harry's got a finger in it.

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

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.

An ass may bray a good while before he shakes the stars down.

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

For there is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and to have recovered hope.

We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.

So to live is heaven:
To make undying music in the world,
Breathing a beauteous order that controls
With growing sway the growing life of man.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in her hand.

We must not sit still and look for miracles; up and doing, and the Lord will be with thee. Prayer and pains, through faith in Christ Jesus, will do anything.

Might, could, would - they are contemptible auxiliaries.

To act with doubleness towards a man whose own conduct was double, was so near an approach to virtue that it deserved to be called by no meaner name than diplomacy.

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.

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

Errors look so very ugly in persons of small means one feels they are taking quite a liberty in going astray whereas people of fortune may naturally indulge in a few delinquencies.

That big muscular frame of his held plenty of animal courage, but helped him to no decision when the dangers to be braved were such as could neither be knocked down nor throttled.

The strongest principle of growth lies in the human choice.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

How unspeakably the lengthening of memories in common endears our old friends.

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.

Formerly, his heart had been as a locked casket with its treasure inside but now the casket was empty, and the lock was broken. Left groping in darkness, with his prop utterly gone, Silas had inevitably a sense, though a dull and half-despairing one, that if any help came to him it must come from without and there was a slight stirring of expectation at the sight of his fellow-men, a faint consciousness of dependence on their goodwill.

In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations.

I tell you there isn't a thing under the sun that needs to be done at all, but what a man can do better than a woman, unless it's bearing children, and they do that in a poor makeshift way it had better have been left to the men.