George Eliot Quotes

836 Sourced Quotes

Deeds are the pulse of Time, his beating life, And righteous or unrighteous, being done, Must throb in after-throbs till Time itself Be laid in stillness, and the universe Quiver and breathe upon no mirror more.

George Eliot
Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance!

George Eliot
Until every good man is brave, we must expect to find many good women timid--too timid even to believe in the correctness of their own best promptings, when these would place them in a minority.

George Eliot
I don't feel sure about doing good in any way now; everything seems like going on a mission to a people whose language I don't know.

George Eliot
History, we know, is apt to repeat itself, and to foist very old incidents upon us with only a slight change of costume.

George Eliot
It is painful to be told that anything is very fine and not be able to feel that it is fine--something like being blind, while people talk of the sky.

George Eliot
We are most of us brought up in the notion that the highest motive for not doing a wrong is something irrespective of the beings who would suffer the wrong.

George Eliot
Sir Joshua would have been glad to take her portrait; and he would have had an easier task than the historian at least in this, that he would not have had to represent the truth of change - only to give stability to one beautiful moment.

George Eliot
How will you find good? It is not a thing of choice; it is a river that flows from the foot of the Invisible Throne and flows by the path of obedience.

George Eliot
Still there is a possibility — even a probability — the other way.

George Eliot
Who can know how much of his most inward life is made up of the thoughts he believes other men to have about him, until that fabric of opinion is threatened with ruin?

George Eliot
A girl of eighteen imagines the feelings behind the face that has moved her with its sympathetic youth as easily as primitive people imagined the humors of the gods in fair weather. What is she to believe in if not in this vision woven from within?

George Eliot
Great Love has many attributes, and shrines For varied worshippers, but his force divine Shows most its many-named fulness in the man Whose nature multitudinously mixed-- Each ardent impulse grappling with a thought-- Resists all easy gladness, all content Save mystic rapture, where the questioning soul Flooded with consciousness of good that is Finds life one bounteous answer.

George Eliot
Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning. Even Science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start with a make-believe unit, and must fix on a point in the stars' unceasing journey when his sidereal clock shall pretend that time is Nought.

George Eliot
After all, people may really have in them some vocation which is not quite plain to themselves, may they not? They may seem idle and weak because they are growing. We should be very patient with each other, I think.

George Eliot
Approximate truth is the only truth attainable, but at least one must strive for that, and not wade off into arbitrary falsehood.

George Eliot
Fate has carried me 'Mid the thick arrows: I will keep my stand Not shrink and let the shaft pass by my breast To pierce another.

George Eliot
She one day asked Mr. Stelling if all astronomers hated women, or whether it was only this particular astronomer. But, forestalling his answer, she said, "I suppose it's all astronomers; because, you know, they live up in high towers, and if the women came there, they might talk and hinder them from looking at the stars."

George Eliot
There is a sort of human paste that when it comes near the fire of enthusiasm is only baked into harder shape.

George Eliot
A woman's rank
Lies in the fulness of her womanhood:
Therein alone she is royal.

George Eliot
What furniture can give such finish to a room as a tender woman's face? And is there any harmony of tints that has such stirring of delight as the sweet modulation of her voice?

George Eliot
When I married Humphrey I made up my mind to like sermons, and I set out by liking the end very much. That soon spread to the middle and the beginning, because I couldn't have the end without them.

George Eliot
But with regard to critical occasions, it often happens that all moments seem comfortably remote until the last.

George Eliot
When you've been used to doing things, and they've been taken away from you, it's as if your hands had been cut off, and you felt the fingers as are of no use to you.

George Eliot
This is a puzzling world, and Old Harry's got a finger in it.

George Eliot
The best part of a woman's love is worship; but it is hard to her to be sent away with her precious spikenard rejected, and her long tresses, too, that were let fall, ready to soothe the wearied feet.

George Eliot
He was of an impressible nature, and lived a great deal in other people's opinions and feelings concerning himself...

George Eliot
Your dunce who can't do his sums always has a taste for the infinite.

George Eliot
Life is so complicated a game that the devices of skill are liable to be defeated at every turn by air-blown chances, incalculable as the descent of thistle-down.

George Eliot
To think of the part one little woman can play in the life of a man, so that to renounce her may be a very good imitation of heroism, and to win her may be a discipline.

George Eliot