George Eliot - Love Quotes

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Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love...

George Eliot
It is the moment when our resolution seems about to become irrevocable--when the fatal iron gates are about to close upon us--that tests our strength. Then, after hours of clear reasoning and firm conviction, we snatch at any sophistry that will nullify our long struggles, and bring us the defeat that we love better than victory.

George Eliot
There is a sort of subjection which is the peculiar heritage of largeness and of love; and strength is often only another name for willing bondage to irremediable weakness.

George Eliot
All honour and reverence to the divine beauty of form! Let us cultivate it to the utmost in men, women and children — in our gardens and in our houses. But let us love that other beauty too, which lies in no secret of proportion but in the secret of deep human sympathy.

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
The select natures who pant after the ideal, and find nothing in pantaloons or petticoats great enough to command their reverence and love, are curiously in unison with the narrowest and pettiest.

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

George Eliot
But is it what we love, or how we love,
That makes true good?

George Eliot
Men outlive their love, but they don't outlive the consequences of their recklessness.

George Eliot
The first condition of human goodness is something to love; the second, something to reverence.

George Eliot
Love has a way of cheating itself consciously, like a child who plays at solitary hide-and-seek; it is pleased with assurances that it all the while disbelieves.

George Eliot
We look at the one little woman's face we love, as we look at the face of our mother earth, and see all sorts of answers to our own yearnings.

George Eliot
Poor fellow! I think he is in love with you.' I am not aware of it. And to me it is one of the most odious things in a girl's life, that there must always be some supposition of falling in love coming between her and any man who is kind to her... I have no ground for the nonsensical vanity of fancying everybody who comes near me is in love with me.

George Eliot
The first sense of mutual love excludes other feelings; it will have the soul all to itself.

George Eliot
The embitterment of hatred is often as unaccountable to onlookers as the growth of devoted love, and it not only seems but is really out of direct relation with any outward causes to be alleged.

George Eliot
I don't see how a man is to be good for much unless he has some one woman to love him dearly.

George Eliot
Knightly love is blent with reverence
As heavenly air is blent with heavenly blue.

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
But what we strive to gratify, though we may call it a distant hope, is an immediate desire; the future estate for which men drudge up city alleys exists already in their imagination and love.

George Eliot
It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibres that knit us to the old.

George Eliot
The saints were cowards who stood by to see Christ crucified: they should have flung themselves Upon the Roman spears, and died in vain-- The grandest death, to die in vain--for love Greater than sways the forces of the world!

George Eliot
But I think it is hardly an argument against a man's general strength of character, that he should be apt to be mastered by love. A fine constitution doesn't insure one against small-pox or any other of those inevitable diseases. A man may be very firm in other matters, and yet be under a sort of witchery from a woman.

George Eliot
There is no sorrow I have thought more about than that — to love what is great, and try to reach it, and yet to fail.

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

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