George Eliot - Love Quotes

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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

Perfect love has a breath of poetry which can exalt the relations of the least-instructed human beings.

George Eliot

What is better than to love and live with the loved? — But that must sometimes bring us to live with the dead; and this too turns at last into a very tranquil and sweet tie, safe from change and injury.

George Eliot

And 'tis a strange truth that only in the agony of parting we look into the depths of love.

George Eliot

I shall never love anybody. I can't love people. I hate them.' 'The time will come, dear, the time will come.

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

Where women love each other, men learn to smother their mutual dislike.

George Eliot

I see a face of love,
Fair as sweet music when my heart was strong:
Yea — art thou come again to me, great Song?
The face bent over him like silver night
In long-remembered summers; that calm light
Of days which shine in firmaments of thought,
That past unchangeable, from change still wrought.

George Eliot

There are natures in which, if they love us, we are conscious of having a sort of baptism and consecration.

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

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

Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return...

George Eliot

It is hardly an argument against a man's general strength of character that he should be mastered by love. A fine constitution doesn't insure one against smallpox.

George Eliot

Surely it is not true blessedness to be free from sorrow, while there is sorrow and sin in the world; sorrow is then a part of love, and love does not seek to throw it off.

George Eliot

Little children are still the symbol of the eternal marriage between love and duty.

George Eliot

She and Stephen were in that stage of courtship which makes the most exquisite moment of youth, the freshest blossom-time of passion, — when each is sure of the other's love, but no formal declaration has been made, and all is mutual divination, exalting the most trivial word, the lightest gesture, into thrills delicate and delicious as wafted jasmine scent.

George Eliot

He hated the thought of the past; there was nothing that called out his love and fellowship toward the strangers he had come amongst; and the future was all dark.

George Eliot

This is life to come, —
Which martyred men have made more glorious
For us who strive to follow. May I reach
That purest heaven, — be to other souls
The cup of strength in some great agony,
Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love,
Beget the smiles that have no cruelty,
Be the sweet presence of a good diffused,
And in diffusion ever more intense!
So shall I join the choir invisible
Whose music is the gladness of the world.

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

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

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

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

There are few prophets in the world; few sublimely beautiful women; few heroes. I can't afford to give all my love and reverence to such rarities: I want a great deal of those feelings for my every-day fellow-men, especially for the few in the foreground of the great multitude, whose faces I know, whose hands I touch for whom I have to make way with kindly courtesy.

George Eliot

Men and women make sad mistakes about their own symptoms, taking their vague uneasy longings, sometimes for genius, sometimes for religion, and oftener still for a mighty love.

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

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

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

Then, as the metal shapes more various grew,
And, hurled upon each other, resonance drew,
Each gave new tones, the revelations dim
Of some external soul that spoke for him:
The hollow vessel's clang, the clash, the boom,
Like light that makes wide spiritual room
And skyey spaces in the spaceless thought,
To Jubal such enlarged passion brought,
That love, hope, rage, and all experience,
Were fused in vaster being, fetching thence
Concords and discords, cadences and cries
That seemed from some world-shrouded soul-to rise,
Some rapture more intense, some mightier rage,
Some living sea that burst the bounds of man's brief age.

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

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

George Eliot