George Eliot Quotes

836 Sourced Quotes

The right word is always a power and communicates its definiteness to our action.

George Eliot
We all remember epochs in our experience when some dear expectation dies, or some new motive is born.

George Eliot
We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.

George Eliot
Self-confidence is apt to address itself to an imaginary dullness in others; as people who are well off speak in a cajoling tone to the poor.

George Eliot
Upon my word, I think the truth is the hardest missile one can be pelted with.

George Eliot
Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning; but give me the man who has pluck to fight when he's sure of losing. That's my way, sir; and there are many victories worse than a defeat.

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

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

George Eliot
"I like breakfast-time better than any other moment in the day," said Mr. Irwine. "No dust has settled on one's mind then, and it presents a clear mirror to the rays of things".

George Eliot
She thought it was part of the hardship of her life that there was laid upon her the burthen of larger wants than others seemed to feel – that she had to endure this wide hopeless yearning for that something, whatever it was, that was greatest and best on this earth.

George Eliot
Thou'rt a poet, crazed with finding words
May stick to things and seem like qualities.
No pebble is a pebble in thy hands:
'T is a moon out of work, a barren egg,
Or twenty things that no man sees but thee.

George Eliot
Among all the many kinds of first love, that which begins in childish companionship is the strongest and most enduring.

George Eliot
Renunciation remains sorrow, though a sorrow borne willingly.

George Eliot
Life is too precious to be spent in this weaving and unweaving of false impressions, and it is better to live quietly under some degree of misrepresentation than to attempt to remove it by the uncertain process of letter-writing.

George Eliot
It is well known to all experienced minds that our firmest convictions are often dependent on subtle impressions for which words are quite too coarse a medium.

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
That's what a man wants in a wife, mostly; he wants to make sure o' one fool as 'ull tell him he's wise.

George Eliot
Childhood has no forebodings; but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.

George Eliot
So our lives glide on: the river ends we don't know where, and the sea begins, and then there is no more jumping ashore.

George Eliot
It was a pity he couldna be hatched o'er again, an' hatched different.

George Eliot
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
... "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