Top 100 George Eliot Quotes
#2. Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.
George Eliot
#3. I think I am quite wicked with roses. I like to gather them, and smell them till they have no scent left.
George Eliot
#4. I am not quite sure whether clever men ever dance.
George Eliot
#5. My books don't seem to belong to me after I have once written them; and I find myself delivering opinions about them as if I had nothing to do with them.
George Eliot
#6. Nature has the deep cunning which hides itself under the appearance of openness, so that simple people think they can see through her quite well, and all the while she is secretly preparing a refutation of their confident prophecies.
George Eliot
#7. It is not true that love makes all things easy, it makes us chose things that are difficult.
George Eliot
#8. Each thought is a nail that is driven In structures that cannot decay; And the mansion at last will be given To us as we build it each day.
George Eliot
#9. It is because sympathy is but a living again through our own past in a new form, that confession often prompts a response of confession.
George Eliot
#10. The mind that is too ready at contempt and reprobation is, I may say, as a clenched fist that can give blows, but is shut up from receiving and holding ought that is precious.
George Eliot
#11. I carry my unwritten poems in cipher on my face!
George Eliot
#12. Pride only helps us to be generous; it never makes us so, any more than vanity makes us witty.
George Eliot
#13. We are apt to think it the finest era of the world when America was beginning to be discovered, when a bold sailor, even if he were wrecked, might alight on a new kingdom ...
George Eliot
#14. Our consiousness rarely registers the beginning of a growth within us anymore than without us: there have been many circulations of the sap before we detect the smallest sign of the bud.
George Eliot
#15. I think there are stores laid up in our human nature that our understandings can make no complete inventory of.
George Eliot
#16. Instead of wondering at this result of misery in Mr. Casaubon, I think it quite ordinary. Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self. And
George Eliot
#17. One's own faults are always a heavy chain to drag through life and one can't help groaning under the weight now and then.
George Eliot
#18. The early months of marriage often are times of critical tumult,
whether that of a shrimp pool or of deeper water,
which afterwards subside into cheerful peace.
George Eliot
#19. Receptiveness is a rare and massive power, like fortitude.
George Eliot
#20. Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled egg; and when it takes to cackling will have nothing to announce but that addled delusion.
George Eliot
#21. By George Eliot Let thy chief terror be of thine own soul: There, 'mid the throng of hurrying desires That trample on the dead to seize their spoil, Lurks vengeance, footless, irresistible As exhalations laden with slow death, And o'er the fairest troop of captured joys Breathes pallid pestilence.
George Eliot
#22. Hetty did not understand how anybody could be very fond of middle-aged people. And
George Eliot
#23. Our deeds are like children that are born to us; they live and act apart from our own will. Nay, children may be strangled, but deeds never: they have an indestructible life both in and out of our consciousness.
George Eliot
#24. Still - it could not be fairly called wooing a woman to tell her that he would never woo her. It must be admitted to be a ghostly kind of wooing.
George Eliot
#25. Let even an affectionate Goliath get himself tied to a small tender thing, dreading to hurt it by pulling, and dreading still more to snap the cord, and which of the two, pray, will be master?
George Eliot
#26. The religion of personal fear remains nearly at the level of the savage.
George Eliot
#27. But if she can marry blood, beauty, and bravery - the sooner the better.
George Eliot
#28. Our growing thought Makes growing revelation.
George Eliot
#29. I shall never forget you. I have never forgotten anyone whom I once knew. My life has never been crowded, and seems not likely to be so.
George Eliot
#30. Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.
George Eliot
#31. Yes, young people are usually blind to everything but their own wishes, and seldom imagine how much those wishes cost others,
George Eliot
#32. (connected, I may say, with such activity of the affections as even the preoccupations of a work too special to be abdicated could not uninterruptedly dissimulate);
George Eliot
#33. But we are frightened at much that is not strictly conceivable.
George Eliot
#34. The Jews are among the aristocracy of every land; if a literature is called rich in the possession of a few classic tragedies, what shall we say to a national tragedy lasting for fifteen hundred years, in which the poets and the actors were also the heroes.
George Eliot
#35. She felt that she enjoyed it [horseback riding] in a pagan, sensuous way, and always looked forward to renouncing it.
George Eliot
#36. If you put him a-horseback on politics, I warn you of the consequences. It was all very well to ride on sticks at home and call them ideas.
George Eliot
#37. As to people saying a few idle words about us, we must not mind that, any more than the old church steeple minds the rooks cawing about it.
George Eliot
#38. If I have read religious history aright, faith, hope, and charity have not always been found in a direct ratio with a sensibility to the three concords; and it is possible, thank heaven! to have very erroneous theories and very sublime feelings.
George Eliot
#39. There's folks as make bad butter and trusten to the salt t' hide it.
George Eliot
#40. It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.
George Eliot
#41. In the first moments when we come away from the presence of death, every other relation to the living is merged, to our feeling, in the great relation of a common nature and a common destiny.
George Eliot
#42. the devil will be having his finger in what we call our duties as well as our sins. Mayhap
George Eliot
#43. (Every nerve and muscle in Rosamond was adjusted to the consciousness that she was being looked at. She was by nature an actress of parts that entered into her physique: she even acted her own character, and so well, that she did not know it to be precisely her own.)
George Eliot
#44. There is no feeling, perhaps, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music,
that does not make a man sing or play the better.
George Eliot
#45. Justice is like the kingdom of God
it is not without us as a fact, it is within us as a great yearning.
George Eliot
#46. I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music.
George Eliot
#47. A child, more than all other gifts That earth can offer to declining man, Brings hope with it, and forward-looking thoughts. - WORDSWORTH.
George Eliot
#48. If boys and men are to be welded together in the glow of transient feeling, they must be made of metal that will mix, else they inevitably fall asunder when the heat dies out.
George Eliot
#49. Lisbeth, though disposed always to take the negative side in her conversations with Seth, had a vague sense that there was some comfort and safety in the fact of his piety, and that it somehow relieved her from the trouble of any spiritual transactions on her own behalf.
George Eliot
#50. It's a father's duty to give his sons a fine chance.
George Eliot
#51. sympathy is but a living again through our own past in a new form,
George Eliot
#52. The best fire doesna flare up the soonest.
George Eliot
#53. A man falling into dark waters seeks a momentary footing even on sliding stones.
George Eliot
#54. Fred at six years old thought her the nicest girl in the world, making her his wife with a brass ring which he had cut from an umbrella.
George Eliot
#55. No man is matriculated to the art of life till he has been well tempted.
George Eliot
#56. The sweetest of all success is that which one wins by hard exertion ...
George Eliot
#57. There's nothing kills a man so soon as having nobody to find fault with but himself.
George Eliot
#58. I should never like scolding any one else so well; and that is a point to be thought of in a husband.
George Eliot
#59. The beginning of an acquaintance whether with persons or things is to get a definite outline of our ignorance.
George Eliot
#60. Blameless people are always the most exasperating.
George Eliot
#61. The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another.
George Eliot
#62. Ignorance is not so damnable as humbug; but when it prescribes pills it may happen to do more harm.
George Eliot
#63. The responsibility of tolerance lies in those who have the wider vision.
George Eliot
#64. In the ages since Adam's marriage, it has been good for some men to be alone, and for some women also.
George Eliot
#65. But oppositions have the illimitable range of objections at command, which need never stop short at the boundary of knowledge, but can draw forever on the vasts of ignorance.
George Eliot
#66. To an old memory like mine the present days are but as a little water poured on the deep.
George Eliot
#67. The Press has no band of critics who go the round of the churches and chapels, and are on the watch for a slip or defect in the preacher, to make a 'feature' in their article: the clergy are, practically, the most irresponsible of all talkers.
George Eliot
#68. If you could make a pudding wi' thinking o' the batter, it 'ud be easy getting dinner.
George Eliot
#69. He has got no good red blood in his body," said Sir James.
"No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses," said Mrs. Cadwallader.
George Eliot
#70. It is a common enough case, that of a man being suddenly captivated by a woman nearly the opposite of his ideal.
George Eliot
#71. He rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families ...
George Eliot
#72. Sympathetic people often don't communicate well, they back reflected images which hide their own depths.
George Eliot
#73. You have such strong words at command, that they make the smallest argument seem formidable.
George Eliot
#74. 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.
George Eliot
#75. I shall be glad of a cup of coffee as soon as possible.
George Eliot
#76. I am not sure that the greatest man of his age, if ever that solitary superlative existed, could escape these unfavourable reflections of himself in various small mirrors; and even Milton, looking for his portrait in a spoon, must submit to have the facial angle of a bumpkin.
George Eliot
#77. So to live is heaven; to make undying music in the world.
George Eliot
#78. Mrs. Tulliver, as we have seen, was not without influence over her husband. No woman is; she can always incline him to do either what she wishes, or the reverse ...
George Eliot
#79. We are poor plants buoyed up by the air-vessels of our own conceit: alas for us, if we get a few pinches that empty us of that windy self-subsistence.
George Eliot
#80. Satan was a blunderer ... who made a stupendous failure. If he had succeeded, we should all have been worshipping him, and his portrait would have been more flattering.
George Eliot
#81. He once called her his basil plant; and when she asked for an explanation, said that basil was a plant which had flourished wonderfully on a murdered man's brains.
George Eliot
#82. No retrospect will take us to the true beginning
George Eliot
#83. Wise books For half the truths they hold are honored tombs.
George Eliot
#85. I don't make myself disagreeable; it is you who find me so. Disagreeable is a word that describes your feelings and not my actions.
George Eliot
#86. Hobbies are apt to run away with us, you know; it doesn't do to be run away with. We must keep the reins.
George Eliot
#87. We look at the one little woman's face we love, as we look at the face of our mother earth, and see all sorts of answers to our own yearnings.
George Eliot
#88. There was no keenness in the eyes; they seemed rather to be shedding love than making observations; they had the liquid look which tells that the mind is full of what it has to give out, rather than impressed by external objects.
George Eliot
#89. There's no work so tirin' as danglin' about an' starin' an' not rightly knowin' what you're goin' to do next; and keepin' your face i' smilin' order like a grocer o' market-day for fear people shouldna think you civil enough.
George Eliot
#90. And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it.
George Eliot
#91. I found it better for my soul to be humble before the mysteries o' God's dealings, and not be making a clatter about what I could never understand.
George Eliot
#92. Let any lady who is inclined to be hard on Mrs. Cadwallader inquire into the comprehensiveness of her own beautiful views, and be quite sure that they afford accommodation for all the lives which have the honor to coexist with hers. With
George Eliot
#93. Adam went to bed comforted, having woven for himself an ingenious web of probabilities - the surest screen a wise man can place between himself and the truth. His
George Eliot
#94. That's what a man wants in a wife, mostly; he wants to make sure one fool tells him he's wise.
George Eliot
#95. There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.
George Eliot
#96. Our words have wings, but fly not where we would.
George Eliot
#97. Trouble comes to us all in this life: we set our hearts on things which it isn't God's will for us to have, and then we go sorrowing.
George Eliot
#98. Joy and sorrow are both my perpetual companions, but the joy is called Past and the sorrow Present.
George Eliot
#99. 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.
George Eliot
#100. It was one of those dangerous moments when speech is at once sincere and deceptive - when feeling, rising high above its average depth, leaves flood-marks which are never reached again.
George Eliot
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