Top 100 Quotes About George Eliot
#1. 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
#2. I wish always to be quoted as George Eliot.
George Eliot
#3. 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
#4. We are not immune to the lure of wonder and mystery and awe: we have music and art and literature, and find that the serious ethical dilemmas are better handled by Shakespeare and Tolstoy and Schiller and Dostoyevsky and George Eliot than in the mythical morality tales of the holy books.
Christopher Hitchens
#5. (On George Eliot's narrative strategy)
It also forfeits the great game of the omniscient narrator, which is to know secrets which none of the characters involved will ever learn, ironically taking their unhappy ignorance to the grave.
Fredric Jameson
#6. There's life for you. Spend the best years of your life studying penmanship and rhetoric and syntax and Beowulf and George Eliot, and then somebody steals your pencil.
Dorothy Parker
#7. here George Eliot had progressed through the bookshelves. Roland saw her black silk skirts, her velvet trains, sweeping compressed between the Fathers of the Church, and heard her firm foot ring on metal among the German poets. Here
A.S. Byatt
#8. 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
#9. George Eliot tenderly carried in her heart the burdens of our race. She looked through pity's tears upon the faults and frailties of mankind.
Robert Green Ingersoll
#10. My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes.
Joyce Carol Oates
#11. Here Carlyle had come, here George Eliot had progressed through the bookshelves. Roland could see her black silk skirts, her velvet trains, sweeping compressed between the Fathers of the Church, and heard her firm foot ring on metal among the German poets.
A.S. Byatt
#12. George Eliot is my only steady girlfriend. We go to bed together every night.
Peter O'Toole
#13. The novel at its nineteenth-century pinnacle was a Judaized novel: George Eliot and Dickens and Tolstoy were all touched by the Jewish covenant: they wrote of conduct and of the consequences of conduct: they were concerned with a society of will and commandment.
Cynthia Ozick
#14. My professional and human obsession is the nature of language, and my best relationships are with other writers. In many ways, I know George Eliot better than I know my husband.
A.S. Byatt
#15. So is fighting incompleteness the source of artistic neurosis? I doubt it. At most, this would apply to artists who deal with particular kinds of problems. I don't think we should think of Haydn or Mozart or Dickens or George Eliot in these terms.
Philip Kitcher
#16. It's never too late to be the person you might have been. ~George Eliot
A.J. Warner
#17. George Eliot has the heart of Sappho; but the face, with the long proboscis, the protruding teeth of the Apocalyptic horse, betrayed animality.
George Meredith
#18. At university, one of my areas of study was Victorian literature, so I decided to see if I could write a novel as carefully planned and constructed as those of George Eliot, but with the narrative energy of Dickens.
Michel Faber
#19. The angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone. - George Eliot
Ann Brashares
#20. England opened up the world of literature for me. Not really having a world of my own, I made up for my disinheritance by absorbing the world of others ... I loved them: George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, Charles Dickens ... I adopted them passionately.
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
#21. Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.
George Eliot
#22. 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
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses, we must plant more roses.
George Eliot
#28. No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.
George Eliot
#29. 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
#30. 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
#32. 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
#34. a certain consciousness of our entire past and our imagined future blends itself with all our moments of keen sensibility. And
George Eliot
#35. But, for the point of wisdom, I would choose / To know the mind that stirs between the wings / Of bees ...
George Eliot
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. Few things hold the perception more thoroughly captive than anxiety about what we have got to say
George Eliot
#39. Even in 1831 Lowick was at peace, not more agitated by Reform than by the solemn tenor of the Sunday sermon. The
George Eliot
#40. 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
#41. Was never true love loved in vain, For truest love is highest gain.
George Eliot
#42. What we call the 'just possible' is sometimes true and the thing we find it easier to believe is grossly false.
George Eliot
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. But certain winds will make men's temper bad.
George Eliot
#46. 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
#47. In Rome it seems as if there were so many things which are more wanted in the world than pictures.
George Eliot
#48. There are always people who can't forgive an able man for differing from them.
George Eliot
#49. In poor Rosamond's mind there was not room enough for luxuries to look small in.
George Eliot
#50. People who live at a distance are naturally less faulty than those immediately under our own eyes ...
George Eliot
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. People who write finely must not expect to be left in repose; they will be molested with thanks, at least.
George Eliot
#56. 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
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.
George Eliot
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. Have never seen that her religion made any difference in her dress.
George Eliot
#64. 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
#65. I think I am quite wicked with roses. I like to gather them, and smell them till they have no scent left.
George Eliot
#66. how hard it is to walk always in fear of hurting another who is tied to us.
George Eliot
#67. 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
#69. 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
#70. It always seemed to me a sort of clever stupidity only to have one sort of talent - like a carrier pigeon.
George Eliot
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. Men outlive their love, but they don't outlive the consequences of their recklessness.
George Eliot
#74. 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
#75. 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
#76. I never had any preference for her, any more than I have a preference for breathing.
George Eliot
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. We hand folks over to God's mercy, and show none ourselves.
George Eliot
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. She says, he is a great soul. - A great bladder for dried peas to rattle in! said Mrs. Cadwallader.
George Eliot
#86. 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
#88. We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.
George Eliot
#89. 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
#90. I am not quite sure whether clever men ever dance.
George Eliot
#91. 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
#92. A woman's rank
Lies in the fulness of her womanhood:
Therein alone she is royal.
George Eliot
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets.
George Eliot
#99. 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
#100. People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbors.
George Eliot
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