George Eliot Quotes

836 Sourced Quotes

Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.

George Eliot
Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love...

George Eliot
That farewell kiss which resembles greeting, that last glance of love which becomes the sharpest pang of sorrow.

George Eliot
It always remains true that if we had been greater, circumstance would have been less strong against us.

George Eliot
He had a sense that the old man meant to be good-natured and neighbourly; but the kindness fell on him as sunshine falls on the wretched — he had no heart to taste it, and felt that it was very far off him.

George Eliot
A medical man likes to make psychological observations, and sometimes in the pursuit of such studies is too easily tempted into momentous prophecy which life and death easily set at nought.

George Eliot
I'll tell you what's the greatest power under heaven, and that is public opinion-the ruling belief in society about what is right and what is wrong, what is honourable and what is shameful. That's the steam that is to work the engines.

George Eliot
Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.

George Eliot
Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy: - in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures.

George Eliot
Wit is a form of force that leaves the limbs at rest.

George Eliot
The poverty of our imagination is no measure of the world's resources. Our posterity will no doubt get fuel in ways that we are unable to devise for them.

George Eliot
It is necessary to me, not simply to be but to utter, and I require utterance of my friends.

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

George Eliot
Howiver, I'm not denyin' the women are foolish: God Almighty made 'em to match the men.

George Eliot
I love words; they are the quoits, the bows, the staves that furnish the gymnasium of the mind.

George Eliot
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.

George Eliot
These gems have life in them: their colors speak, say what words fail of.

George Eliot
A man is seldom ashamed of feeling that he cannot love a woman so well when he sees a certain greatness in her: nature having intended greatness for men.

George Eliot
No eye saw him, while with loving pride
Each voice with each in praise of Jubal vied.
Must he in conscious trance, dumb, helpless lie
While all that ardent kindred passed him by?
His flesh cried out to live with living men,
And join that soul which to the inward ken
Of all the hymning train was present there.

George Eliot
In the schoolroom her quick mind had taken readily that strong starch of unexplained rules and disconnected facts which saves ignorance from any painful sense of limpness.

George Eliot
There was no gleam, no shadow, for the heavens, too, were one still, pale cloud; no sound or motion in anything but the dark river that flowed and moaned like an unresting sorrow.

George Eliot
Enveloped in a common mist, we seem to walk in clearness ourselves, and behold only the mist that enshrouds others.

George Eliot
I began … to watch with peculiar alarm lest what I called my philosophic estimate of the human lot in general, should be a mere prose lyric expressing my own pain and consequent bad temper.

George Eliot
Society never made the preposterous demand that a man should think as much about his own qualifications for making a charming girl happy as he thinks of hers for making himself happy.

George Eliot
We are all of us imaginative in some form or other, for images are the brood of desire.

George Eliot
We hand folks over to God's mercy, and show none ourselves.

George Eliot
That big muscular frame of his held plenty of animal courage, but helped him to no decision when the dangers to be braved were such as could neither be knocked down nor throttled.

George Eliot
We are all apt to believe what the world believes about us.

George Eliot
Not let them want bread, but only require them to eat it with bitter herbs.

George Eliot
It is a wonderful subduer, this need of love-this hunger of the heart-as peremptory as that other hunger by which Nature forces us to submit to the yoke, and change the face of the world.

George Eliot