George Eliot Quotes

836 Sourced Quotes

The human soul is hospitable, and will entertain conflicting sentiments and contradictory opinions with much impartiality.

George Eliot
It is a fact perhaps kept a little too much in the background, that mothers have a self larger than their maternity, and that when their sons have become taller than themselves, and are gone from them to college or into the world, there are wide spaces of their time which are not filled with praying for their boys, reading old letters, and envying yet blessing those who are attending to their shirt-buttons.

George Eliot
Quick souls have their intensest life in the first anticipatory sketch of what may or will be, and the pursuit of their wish is the pursuit of that paradisiacal vision which only impelled them, and is left farther and farther behind, vanishing forever even out of hope in the moment which is called success.

George Eliot
There is no sense of ease like the ease we felt in those scenes where we were born.

George Eliot
Oh, sir, the loftiest hopes on earth Draw lots with meaner hopes: heroic breasts, Breathing bad air, run risk of pestilence; Or, lacking lime-juice when they cross the Line, May languish with the scurvy.

George Eliot
Religion can only change when the emotions which fill it are changed; and the religion of personal fear remains nearly at the level of the savage.

George Eliot
Of what use, however, is a general certainty that an insect will not walk with his head hindmost, when what you need to know is the play of inward stimulus that sends him hither and thither in a network of possible paths?

George Eliot
It is always your heaviest bore who is astonished at the tameness of modern celebrities: naturally; for a little of his company has reduced them to a state of flaccid fatigue.

George Eliot
Wine and the sun will make vinegar without any shouting to help them.

George Eliot
Fairy folk a-listening Hear the seed sprout in the spring, And for music to their dance Hear the hedgerows wake from trance, Sap that trembles into buds Sending little rhythmic floods Of fairy sound in fairy ears. Thus all beauty that appears Has birth as sound to finer sense And lighter-clad intelligence.

George Eliot
We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinnertime.

George Eliot
When one is grateful for something too good for common thanks, writing is less unsatisfactory than speech-one does not, at least, hear how inadequate the words are.

George Eliot
They the royal-hearted women are
Who nobly love the noblest, yet have grace
For needy suffering lives in lowliest place,
Carrying a choicer sunlight in their smile,
The heavenliest ray that pitieth the vile.

George Eliot
All who remember their childhood remember the strange vague sense, when some new experience came, that everything else was going to be changed, and that there would be no lapse into the old monotony.

George Eliot
But most of us are apt to settle within ourselves that the man who blocks our way is odious, and not to mind causing him a little of the disgust which his personality excites in ourselves.

George Eliot
A vigorous error vigorously pursued has kept the embroys of truth a-breathing...

George Eliot
To the receptive soul the river of life pauseth not, nor is diminished.

George Eliot
When we are young we think our troubles a mighty business - that the world is spread out expressly as a stage for the particular drama of our lives and that we have a right to rant and foam at the mouth if we are crossed. I have done enough of that in my time.

George Eliot
A human being in this aged nation of ours is a very wonderful hole, the slow creation of long interchanging influences; and charm is a result of two such wholes, the one loving and the one loved.

George Eliot
I might mention all the divine charms of a bright spring day, but if you had never in your life utterly forgotten yourself in straining your eyes after the mounting lark, or in wandering through the still lanes when the fresh-opened blossoms fill them with a sacred silent beauty like that of fretted aisles, where would be the use of my descriptive catalogue?

George Eliot
People are so ridiculous with their illusions, carrying their fool's caps unawares, thinking their own lies opaque while everybody else's are transparent, making themselves exceptions to everything, as if when all the world looked yellow under a lamp they alone are rosy.

George Eliot
The early months of marriage often are times of critical tumult,--whether that of a shrimp pool or of deeper water,--which afterwards subside into cheerful peace.

George Eliot
If people will be censors, let them weigh their words. I mean that the words were unfair by that disproportionateness of the condemnation, which everybody with some conscience must feel to be one of the great difficulties in denouncing a particular person. Every unpleasant dog is only one of many, but we kick him because he comes in our way, and there is always some want of distributive justice in the kicking.

George Eliot
The stars are golden fruit upon a tree All out of reach.

George Eliot
A foreman, if he's got a conscience, and delights in his work, will do his business as well as if he was a partner. I wouldn't give a penny for a man as 'ud drive a nail in slack because he didn't get extra pay for it.

George Eliot
Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future, And time future contained in time past.

George Eliot
There are new eras in one's life that are equivalent to youth-are something better than youth.

George Eliot
Poor dog! I've a strange feeling about the dumb things as if they wanted to speak, and it was a trouble to 'em because they couldn't. I can't help being sorry for the dogs always, though perhaps there's no need. But they may well have more in them than they know how to make us understand, for we can't say half what we feel, with all our words.

George Eliot
Things are achieved when they are well begun. The perfect archer calls the deer his own While yet the shaft is whistling.

George Eliot
No doubt if it had been discovered who wrote the " Vestiges," many an ingenious structure of probabilities would have been spoiled, and some disgust might have been felt for a real author who made comparatively so shabby an appearance of likelihood.

George Eliot