George Eliot - Man Quotes

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The idea of duty, that recognition of something to be lived for beyond the mere satisfaction of self, is to the moral life what the addition of a great central ganglion is to animal life. No man can begin to mould himself on a faith or an idea without rising to a higher order of experience: a principle of subordination, of self-mastery, has been introduced into his nature; he is no longer a mere bundle of impressions, desires, and impulses.

George Eliot
Every man who is not a monster, a mathematician, or a mad philosopher, is the slave of some woman or other.

George Eliot
One can begin so many things with a new person! - even begin to be a better man.

George Eliot
You may try but you can never imagine what it is to have a man's form of genius in you, and to suffer the slavery of being a girl.

George Eliot
Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.

George Eliot
It is not true that a man's intellectual power is, like the strength of a timber beam, to be measured by its weakest point.

George Eliot
But most of us are apt to settle within ourselves that the man who blocks our way is odious, and not to mind causing him a little of the disgust which his personality excites in ourselves.

George Eliot
A man falling into dark waters seeks a momentary footing even on sliding stones.

George Eliot
When a man had deserved his good luck, it was the part of his neighbours to wish him joy.

George Eliot
Human longings are perversely obstinate; and to the man whose mouth is watering for a peach, it is of no use to offer the largest vegetable marrow.

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
An ingenious web of probabilities is the surest screen a wise man can place between himself and the truth.

George Eliot
What is opportunity to the man who can't use it? An unfecundated egg, which the waves of time wash away into nonentity.

George Eliot
It was the last weakness he meant to indulge in; and a man never lies with more delicious languor under the influence of a passion than when he has persuaded himself that he shall subdue it tomorrow.

George Eliot
If a man means to be hard, let him keep in his saddle and speak from that height, above the level of pleading eyes, and with the command of a distant horizon.

George Eliot
When you get me a good man made out of arguments, I will get you a good dinner with reading you the cookery book.

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
In bed our yesterdays are too oppressive: if a man can only get up, though it be but to whistle or to smoke, he has a present which offers some resistance to the past—sensations which assert themselves against tyrannous memories.

George Eliot
I'm proof against that word failure. I've seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.

George Eliot
A man's a man. But when you see a king, you see the work of many thousand men.

George Eliot
I can't abide to see men throw away their tools i' that way, the minute the clock begins to strike, as if they took no pleasure i' their work, and was afraid o' doing a stroke too much.... I hate to see a man's arms drop down as if he was shot, before the clock's fairly struck, just as if he'd never a bit o' pride and delight in's work. The very grindstone 'ull go on turning a bit after you loose it.

George Eliot
No man is matriculated to the art of life till he has been well tempted.

George Eliot
The commonest man, who has his ounce of sense and feeling, is conscious of the difference between a lovely, delicate woman and a coarse one. Even a dog feels a difference in her presence.

George Eliot
He seemed to weave, like the spider, from pure impulse, without reflection. Every man's work, pursued steadily, tends in this way to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life.

George Eliot
It is the glory of the heritage
Thy life has left, that makes thy outcast age:
Thy limbs shall lie dark, tombless on this sod,
Because thou shinest in man's soul, a god,
Who found and gave new passion and new joy
That nought but Earth's destruction can destroy.
Thy gifts to give was thine of men alone:
'Twas but in giving that thou couldst atone
For too much wealth amid their poverty.

George Eliot
And when a woman's will is as strong as the man's who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment.

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 lapse of time during which a given event has not happened, is, in this logic of habit, constantly alleged as a reason why the event should never happen, even when the lapse of time is precisely the added condition which makes the event imminent. A man will tell you that he has worked in a mine for forty years unhurt by an accident as a reason why he should apprehend no danger, though the roof is beginning to sink...

George Eliot
A man deep-wounded may feel too much pain To feel much anger.

George Eliot
If a man goes a little too far along a new road, it is usually himself that he harms more than any one else.

George Eliot