Top 100 Eliot George Quotes
#1. In the man whose childhood has known caresses and kindness, there is always a fiber of memory that can be touched to gentle issues.
George Eliot
#2. when the people have made up their mind as they are making it up now, they don't want a man - they only want a vote.
George Eliot
#3. A woman's rank
Lies in the fulness of her womanhood:
Therein alone she is royal.
George Eliot
#4. Her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible, - or from one of our elder poets, - in a paragraph of to-day's newspaper.
George Eliot
#5. I am not quite sure whether clever men ever dance.
George Eliot
#6. Not at all," said Dorothea, with the most open kindness. "I like you very much."
Will was not quite contented, thinking that he would apparently have been of more importance if he had been disliked. He said nothing, but looked dull, not to say sulky.
George Eliot
#7. We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.
George Eliot
#9. Honest folks, born and bred in a visible manner, were mostly not overwise or clever _ at least, not beyond such a matter as knowing the signs of the weather; and the process by which rapidity and dexterity of any kind were acquired was so wholly hidden, that they partook of the nature of conjuring.
George Eliot
#10. She says, he is a great soul. - A great bladder for dried peas to rattle in! said Mrs. Cadwallader.
George Eliot
#11. The vainest woman is never thoroughly conscious of her beauty till she is loved by the man who sets her own passion vibrating in return.
George Eliot
#12. I am open to conviction on all points except dinner and debts. I hold that the one must be eaten and the other paid.
George Eliot
#13. Having made this rather lofty comparison I am less uneasy in calling attention to the existence of low people by whose interference, however little we may like it, the course of the world is very much determined. It
George Eliot
#14. We are angered even by the full acceptance of our humiliating confessions - how much more by hearing in hard distinct syllables from the lips of a near observer, those confused murmurs which we try to call morbid, and strive against as if they were the oncoming of numbness!
George Eliot
#16. We hand folks over to God's mercy, and show none ourselves.
George Eliot
#17. What people do who go into politics I can't think; it drives me almost mad to see mismanagement over only a few hundred acres.
George Eliot
#18. But we all know the wag's definition of a philanthropist: a man whose charity increases directly as the square of the distance.
George Eliot
#19. I never had any preference for her, any more than I have a preference for breathing.
George Eliot
#20. We learn words by rote, but not their meaning; that must be paid for with our life-blood, and printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves.
George Eliot
#21. That was an evil terror
an ugly inmate to have found a nestling-place in Godfrey's kindly disposition; but no disposition is a security from evil wishes to a man whose happiness hangs on duplicity.
George Eliot
#22. Men outlive their love, but they don't outlive the consequences of their recklessness.
George Eliot
#23. He was unique to her among men because he's impressed her as being not her admirer her superior. In some mysterious way he was becoming a part of her conscience as one woman who's nature is an object of reverential belief may become a new conscience to a man.
George Eliot
#24. 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 make-shift way; it had better ha been left to the men.
George Eliot
#25. It always seemed to me a sort of clever stupidity only to have one sort of talent - like a carrier pigeon.
George Eliot
#26. It is pleasant to have a kind word now and then when one is not near enough to have a kind glance or a hearty shake by the hand.
George Eliot
#27. 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
#28. Things are achieved when they are well begun.
George Eliot
#29. Dorothea, he said to himself, was for ever enthroned in his soul: no other woman could sit higher than her footstool ...
George Eliot
#30. A husband would not let you have your plans.
George Eliot
#31. A man deep-wounded may feel too much pain To feel much anger.
George Eliot
#32. It is in these acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are forever wasted until men and women look round with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste has made and say the earth bears no harvest of sweetness - calling their denial knowledge.
George Eliot
#33. How oft review; each finding, like a friend, Something to blame, and something to commend.
George Eliot
#34. I am not a pessimist but a pejorist (as George Eliot said she was not an optimist but a meliorist); and that philosophy is founded on my observation of the world, not on anything so trivial and irrelevant as personal history.
A.E. Housman
#35. All honour and reverence to the divine beauty of form! Let us cultivate it to the utmost in men, women and children
in our gardens and in our houses. But let us love that other beauty too, which lies in no secret of proportion but in the secret of deep human sympathy.
George Eliot
#36. A deistical prater, fit to sit in the chimney-corner of a pot-house, and make blasphemous comments on the one greasy newspaper fingered by beer-swilling tinkers.
George Eliot
#37. That quiet mutual gaze of a trusting husband and wife is like the first moment of rest or refuge from a great weariness or a great danger - not to be interfered with by speech or action which would distract the sensations from the fresh enjoyment of repose.
George Eliot
#38. Notions and scruples were like spilt needles, making one afraid of treading, or sitting down, or even eating.
George Eliot
#39. when a man's said what he means, he'd better stop, for th' ale 'ull be none the better for stannin'. An
George Eliot
#40. Dorothea was not only his wife: she was a personification of that shallow world which surrounds the appreciated or desponding author.
George Eliot
#41. A map was a fine thing to study when you were disposed to think of something else, being made up of names that would turn into a chime if you went back upon them.
George Eliot
#42. In bed our yesterdays are too oppressive: if a man can only get up, though it be but to whistle or to smoke, he has a present which offers some resistance to the past - sensations which assert themselves against tyrannous memories.
George Eliot
#43. What business has an old bachelor like that to marry?' said Sir James. 'He has one foot in the grave.'
'He means to draw it out again, I suppose.
George Eliot
#44. Human experience is usually paradoxical, if that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.
George Eliot
#45. People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbors.
George Eliot
#46. People talk of their motives in a cut and dried way. Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster. I am not a monster but I have not felt exactly what other women feel, or say they feel, for fear of being thought unlike others.
George Eliot
#47. Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets.
George Eliot
#48. 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.
George Eliot
#49. What a wretched lot of old shrivelled creatures we shall be by-and-by. Never mind - the uglier we get in the eyes of others, the lovelier we shall be to each other; that has always been my firm faith about friendship.
George Eliot
#50. The dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters the desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic.
George Eliot
#51. Things look dim to old folks: they'd need have some young eyes about 'em, to let 'em know the world's the same as it used to be.
George Eliot
#52. It is the way with half the truth amidst which we live, that it only haunts us and makes dull pulsations that are never born into sound.
George Eliot
#53. Leisure is gone,
gone where the spinning-wheels are gone, and the pack-horses, and the slow wagons, and the peddlers, who brought bargains to the door on sunny afternoons.
George Eliot
#54. What we call the 'just possible' is sometimes true and the thing we find it easier to believe is grossly false.
George Eliot
#55. Was never true love loved in vain, For truest love is highest gain.
George Eliot
#56. The wrong that rouses our angry passions finds only a medium in us; it passes through us like a vibration, and we inflict what we have suffered.
George Eliot
#57. Even in 1831 Lowick was at peace, not more agitated by Reform than by the solemn tenor of the Sunday sermon. The
George Eliot
#58. Few things hold the perception more thoroughly captive than anxiety about what we have got to say
George Eliot
#59. Better a wrong will than a wavering; better a steadfast enemy than an uncertain friend; better a false belief than no belief at all.
George Eliot
#60. Life is like a game of whist. I don't enjoy the game much; but I like to play my cards well, and see what will be the end of it.
George Eliot
#61. But, for the point of wisdom, I would choose / To know the mind that stirs between the wings / Of bees ...
George Eliot
#62. a certain consciousness of our entire past and our imagined future blends itself with all our moments of keen sensibility. And
George Eliot
#64. But certain winds will make men's temper bad.
George Eliot
#66. He bore the same sort of resemblance to his mother that our loving memory of a friend's face often bears to the face itself: the lines were all more generous, the smile brighter, the expression heartier. If
George Eliot
#67. Surely there was something taught her by this experience of great need; and she must be learning a secret of human tenderness and long-suffering, that the less erring could hardly know?
George Eliot
#68. No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.
George Eliot
#70. It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses, we must plant more roses.
George Eliot
#71. Fatally powerful as religious systems have been, human nature is stronger and wider, and though dogmas may hamper they cannot absolutely repress its growth.
George Eliot
#72. It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are still alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger for them.
George Eliot
#73. We have all got to exert ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same names as other people call them by.
George Eliot
#74. The days of chivalry are not gone, notwithstanding Burke's grand dirge over them; they live still in that far-off worship paid by many a youth and man to the woman of whom he never dreams that he shall touch so much as her little finger or the hem of her robe.
George Eliot
#75. Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.
George Eliot
#76. One morning, some weeks after her arrival at Lowick, Dorothea - but why always Dorothea? Was her point of view the only possible one with regard to this marriage?
George Eliot
#78. When we are suddenly released from an acute absorbing bodily pain, our heart and senses leap out in new freedom; we think even the noise of streets harmonious, and are ready to hug the tradesman who is wrapping up our change.
George Eliot
#79. how hard it is to walk always in fear of hurting another who is tied to us.
George Eliot
#80. I think I am quite wicked with roses. I like to gather them, and smell them till they have no scent left.
George Eliot
#81. I wish always to be quoted as George Eliot.
George Eliot
#82. I fear that in this thing many rich people deceive themselves. They go on accumulating the means but never using them; making bricks, but never building.
George Eliot
#83. Have never seen that her religion made any difference in her dress.
George Eliot
#84. Self-confidence is apt to address itself to an imaginary dullness in others; as people who are well off speak in a cajoling tone to the poor.
George Eliot
#85. 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.
George Eliot
#86. Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.
George Eliot
#87. I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same mind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.
George Eliot
#88. Women know no perfect love:
Loving the strong, they can forsake the strong;
Man clings because the being whom he loves
Is weak and needs him.
George Eliot
#89. I do gravitate toward 19th century writers, and I never mind being compared with some of the most memorable writers from that era. I mean, George Eliot is my absolute heroine.
Julia Glass
#90. We cannot speak a loyal word and be meanly silent, we cannot kill and not kill in the same moment; but a moment is room wide enough for the loyal and mean desire, for the outlash of a murderous thought and the sharp bakcward stroke of repetance.
George Eliot
#91. People who write finely must not expect to be left in repose; they will be molested with thanks, at least.
George Eliot
#92. It is well known to all experienced minds that our firmest convictions are often dependent on subtle impressions for which words are quite too coarse a medium.
George Eliot
#93. Instead of getting a soft fence against the cold, shadowy, unapplausive audience of his life, had he only given it a more substantial presence?
George Eliot
#94. Dear Friends all, A thousand Christmas pleasures and blessings to you
good resolutions and bright hopes for the New Year! Amen. People who can't be witty exert themselves to be pious or affectionate.
George Eliot
#95. Speculative truth begins to appear but a shadow of individual minds, agreement between intellects seems unattainable, and we turn to the truth of feeling as the only universal bond of union.
George Eliot
#96. People who live at a distance are naturally less faulty than those immediately under our own eyes ...
George Eliot
#97. In poor Rosamond's mind there was not room enough for luxuries to look small in.
George Eliot
#98. There are always people who can't forgive an able man for differing from them.
George Eliot
#99. In Rome it seems as if there were so many things which are more wanted in the world than pictures.
George Eliot
#100. Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.
George Eliot
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