George Eliot Quotes
Author and Novelist
Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.
It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees.
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.
The strongest principle of growth lies in the human choice.
Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions; they pass no criticisms.
What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?
It is never too late to be what you might have been.
Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have wrinkles.
Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.
What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other?
What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined - to strengthen each other - to be at one with each other in silent unspeakable memories.
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.
Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.
The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.
Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.
Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.
Life began with waking up and loving my mother's face.
Adventure is not outside man; it is within.
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.
It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.
The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.
Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.
I'm not denyin' the women are foolish. God Almighty made 'em to match the men.
The world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities.
Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.
One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!
Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.
Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.
It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.
Little children are still the symbol of the eternal marriage between love and duty.
Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.
All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.
Our words have wings, but fly not where we would.
Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.
There are many victories worse than a defeat.
No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.
An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.
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.
I like not only to be loved, but also to be told I am loved.
We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.
Breed is stronger than pasture.
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.
There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire; it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.
But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.
The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.
Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.
What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.
The responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision.
When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.
Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity.
Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.
Rome - the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.
The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another.
When death comes it is never our tenderness that we repent from, but our severity.
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.
Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.
Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through.
Death is the king of this world: 'Tis his park where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music for his banquet.
Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest.
There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.
I desire no future that will break the ties with the past.
Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which there is much agreement, much disputation, and yet more personal liking.
Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.
All the learnin' my father paid for was a bit o' birch at one end and an alphabet at the other.
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.
The beginning of an acquaintance whether with persons or things is to get a definite outline of our ignorance.
Might, could, would - they are contemptible auxiliaries.
Conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course.
No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty.
The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.
Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life.
Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.
The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.
We hand folks over to God's mercy, and show none ourselves.
I like trying to get pregnant. I'm not so sure about childbirth.
Falsehood is easy, truth so difficult.
The egoism which enters into our theories does not affect their sincerity; rather, the more our egoism is satisfied, the more robust is our belief.
There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.
In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause.
The only failure one should fear, is not hugging to the purpose they see as best.
Different taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.
Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.
I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.
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.
No compliment can be eloquent, except as an expression of indifference.
The best augury of a man's success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.
There are some cases in which the sense of injury breeds not the will to inflict injuries and climb over them as a ladder, but a hatred of all injury.
No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.
Consequences are unpitying.
And when a woman's will is as strong as the man's who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment.
People who can't be witty exert themselves to be devout and affectionate.
That's what a man wants in a wife, mostly; he wants to make sure one fool tells him he's wise.
We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.
Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster.
More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.
Whether happiness may come or not, one should try and prepare one's self to do without it.
For what is love itself, for the one we love best? An enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.
Hobbies are apt to run away with us, you know; it doesn't do to be run away with. We must keep the reins.
A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.
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.