George Eliot Quotes (451 Quotes)

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.

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

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

A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

I've never any pity for conceited people, because I think they carry their comfort about with them.

Strange, that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us.

You may try but you can never imagine what it is to have a man's form of genius in you, and to suffer the slavery of being a girl.

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

... 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.

Our consciousness rarely registers the beginning of a growth within us any more than without us there have been many circulations of the sap before we detect the smallest sign of the bud.

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.

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

It is never too late to be what you might have been.

Ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities.

Mighty is the force of motherhood It transforms all things by its vital heat.

It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibers that knit us to the old.

My childhood was full of deep sorrows -- colic, whooping-cough, dread of ghosts, hell, Satan, and a Deity in the sky who was angry when I ate too much plumcake.

It was a pity he couldna be hatched oer again, an hatched different.

No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence.

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.

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.

Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.

Iteration, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress.

Adventure is not outside man; it is within.

There's no disappointment in memory, and one's exaggerations are always on the good side.

Wrong reasoning sometimes lands poor mortals in right conclusions

Ignorance is not so damnable as humbug, but when it prescribes pills it may happen to do more harm

We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.

How could a man be satisfied with a decision between such alternatives and under such circumstances No more than he can be satisfied with his hat, which he's chosen from among such shapes as the resources of the age offer him....

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.

That plain white-aproned man, who stood at work
Patient and accurate full fourscore years,
Cherished his sight and touch by temperance,
And since keen sense is love of perfectness
Made perfect violins, the needed paths
For inspiration and high mastery.

No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty.

A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards.

Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.

Keep true, never be ashamed of doing right decide on what you think is right, and stick to it.

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.

But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.

I hold it a blasphemy to say that a man ought not to fight against authority there is no great religion and no great freedom that has not done it, in the beginning.

Perfect love has a breath of poetry which can exalt the relation of the least-instructed human beings...

There is hardly any mental misery worse than that of having our own serious phrases, our own rooted beliefs, caricatured by a charlatan or a hireling.

Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.

The only failure one should fear, is not hugging to the purpose they see as best.

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.

. . . his soul was sensitive without being enthusiastic it was too languid to thrill out of self-consciousness into passionate delight it went on fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched, thinking of its wings and never flying.

The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.

Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.

It is possible to have a strong self-love without any self-satisfaction, rather with a self-discontent which is the more intense because one's own little core of egoistic sensibility is a supreme care.