George Eliot Quotes

836 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

George Eliot
A picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment.

George Eliot
Death is the only physician, the shadow of his valley the only journeying that will cure us of age and the gathering fatigue of years.

George Eliot
How could a man be satisfied with a decision between such alternatives and under such circumstances No more than he can be satisfied with his hat, which he's chosen from among such shapes as the resources of the age offer him....

George Eliot
There's truth in wine, and there may be some in gin and muddy beer; but whether it's truth worth my knowing, is another question.

George Eliot
Folks as have no mind to be o' use have allays the luck to be out o' the road when there's anything to be done.

George Eliot
Among the blessings of love there is hardly one more exquisite than the sense that in uniting the beloved life to ours we can watch over its happiness, bring comfort where hardship was, and over memories of privation and suffering open the sweetest fountains of joy.

George Eliot
Those who have been indulged by fortune and have always thought of calamity as what happens to others, feel a blind incredulous rage at the reversal of their lot, and half believe that their wild cries will alter the course of the storm.

George Eliot