George Eliot Quotes

836 Sourced Quotes

Melodies die out, like the pipe of Pan, with the ears that love them and listen for them.

George Eliot
There is a mercy which is weakness, and even treason against the common good.

George Eliot
It is better - it shall be better with me because I have known you.

George Eliot
The mind that is too ready at contempt and reprobation is, I may say, as a clenched fist that can give blows, but is shut up from receiving and holding ought that is precious.

George Eliot
To men who only aim at escaping felony, nothing short of the prisoner's dock is disgrace.

George Eliot
I'd sooner have one real grief on my mind than twenty false. It's better to know one's robbed than to think one's going to be murdered.

George Eliot
Our selfishness is so robust and many-clutching that, well encouraged, it easily devours all sustenance away from our poor little scruples.

George Eliot
We are overhasty to speak as if God did not manifest himself by our silent feeling, and make his love felt through ours.

George Eliot
Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.

George Eliot
Dark the Night, with breath all flowers,
And tender broken voice that fills
With ravishment the listening hours,--
Whisperings, wooings,
Liquid ripples, and soft ring-dove cooings
In low-toned rhythm that love's aching stills!
Dark the night
Yet is she bright,
For in her dark she brings the mystic star,
Trembling yet strong, as is the voice of love,
From some unknown afar.

George Eliot
It is one thing to like defiance, and another thing to like its consequences.

George Eliot
It is hard to believe long together that anything is "worth while," unless there is some eye to kindle in common with our own, some brief word uttered now and then to imply that what is infinitely precious to us is precious alike to another mind.

George Eliot
Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing was, than simply to know it; for conjecture soon became more confident than knowledge, and had a more liberal allowance for the incompatible.

George Eliot
Fatally powerful as religious systems have been, human nature is stronger and wider, and though dogmas may hamper they cannot absolutely repress its growth.

George Eliot
Goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.

George Eliot
The floods of nonsense printed in the form of critical opinions seem to me a chief curse of the times, a chief obstacle to true culture.

George Eliot
What are a handful of reasonable men against a crowd with stones in their hands?

George Eliot
There is a chill air surrounding those who are down in the world, and people are glad to get away from them, as from a cold room.

George Eliot
Our vanities differ as our noses do: all conceit is not the same conceit, but varies in correspondence with the minutiae of mental make in which one of us differs from another.

George Eliot
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
The purifying influence of public confession springs from the fact, that by it the hope in lies is forever swept away, and the soul recovers the noble attitude of simplicity.

George Eliot
Love at its highest flood rushes beyond its object, and loses itself in the sense of divine mystery.

George Eliot
A fine lady is a squirrel-headed thing, with small airs and small notions; about as applicable to the business of life as a pair of tweezers to the clearing of a forest.

George Eliot
The moment of finding a fellow-creature is often as full of mingled doubt and exultation, as the moment of finding an idea.

George Eliot
When our life is a continuous trial, the moments of respite seem only to substitute the heaviness of dread for the heaviness of actual suffering; the curtain of cloud seems parted an instant only that we may measure all its horror as it hangs low, black, and imminent, in contrast with the transient brightness; the waterdrops that visit the parched lips in the desert bear with them only the keen imagination of thirst.

George Eliot
Life is very difficult. It seems right to me sometimes that we should follow our strongest feelings; but then such feelings continually come across the ties that all our former life has made for us,--the ties that have made others dependent on us,--and would cut them in two.

George Eliot
Mankind is not disposed to look narrowly into the conduct of great victors when their victory is on the right side.

George Eliot