George Eliot Quotes

836 Sourced Quotes

Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings — much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.

George Eliot
You are a good young man," she said. "But I do not like husbands. I will never have another.

George Eliot
We do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind.

George Eliot
But veracity is a plant of paradise, and the seeds have never flourished beyond the walls.

George Eliot
We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it...

George Eliot
Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.

George Eliot
Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral. They have the same effect of grating incongruity as the sound of a coarse voice breaking the solemn silence of night.

George Eliot
It is one thing to see your road, another to cut it.

George Eliot
Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?

George Eliot
Nice distinctions are troublesome. It is so much easier to say that a thing is black, than to discriminate the particular shade of brown, blue, or green, to which it really belongs. It is so much easier to make up your mind that your neighbour is good for nothing, than to enter into all the circumstances that would oblige you to modify that opinion.

George Eliot
Blameless people are always the most exasperating.

George Eliot
Of a truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what may be; whereas Ignorance is a blind giant who, let him but wax unbound, would make it a sport to seize the pillars that hold up the long-wrought fabric of human good, and turn all the places of joy as dark as a buried Babylon.

George Eliot
It's all one web, sir. The prosperity of the country is one web.

George Eliot
Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings. Even if we loved someone else better than - than those we were married to, it would be no use. I mean, marriage drinks up all our power of giving or getting any blessedness in that sort of love. I know it may be very dear, but it murders our marriage, and then the marriage stays with us like a murder, and everything else is gone.

George Eliot
Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age.

George Eliot
The first sense of mutual love excludes other feelings; it will have the soul all to itself.

George Eliot
... "there's allays two 'pinions; there's the 'pinion a man has of himsen, and there's the 'pinion other folks have on him. There'd be two 'pinions about a cracked bell, if the bell could hear itself."

George Eliot
Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses.

George Eliot
Having once embarked on your marital voyage, it is impossible not to be aware that you make no way and that the sea is not within sight—that in fact, you are exploring a closed basin.

George Eliot
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
I think I dislike what I don't like more than I like what I like.

George Eliot
If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

George Eliot
Wouldst thou have asked aught else from any god
Whether with gleaming feet on earth he trod
Or thundered through the skies — aught else for share
Of mortal good, than in thy soul to bear
The growth of song, and feel the sweet unrest
Of the world's spring-tide in thy conscious breast?
No, thou hadst grasped thy lot with all its pain,
Nor loosed it any painless lot to gain
Where music's voice was silent; for thy fate
Was human music's self incorporate:
Thy senses' keenness and thy passionate strife
Were flesh of her flesh and her womb of Life.

George Eliot
I will try to make life less bitter for a few within my reach.

George Eliot
When the animals entered the Ark in pairs, one may imagine that allied species made much private remark on each other, and were tempted to think that so many forms feeding on the same store of fodder were eminently superfluous, as tending to diminish the rations.

George Eliot
The beginning of hardship is like the first taste of bitter food—it seems for a moment unbearable; yet, if there is nothing else to satisfy our hunger, we take another bite and find it possible to go on.

George Eliot
There's many a good bit o' work done with a sad heart.

George Eliot
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.

George Eliot
To manage men one ought to have a sharp mind in a velvet sheath.

George Eliot
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