George Eliot - Women Quotes

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Women know no perfect love:
Loving the strong, they can forsake the strong;
Man clings because the being whom he loves
Is weak and needs him.

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
She one day asked Mr. Stelling if all astronomers hated women, or whether it was only this particular astronomer. But, forestalling his answer, she said, "I suppose it's all astronomers; because, you know, they live up in high towers, and if the women came there, they might talk and hinder them from looking at the stars."

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
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
We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinnertime.

George Eliot
Howiver, I'm not denyin' the women are foolish: God Almighty made 'em to match the men.

George Eliot
Half the sorrows of women would be averted if they could repress the speech they know to be useless; nay, the speech they have resolved not to make.

George Eliot
There is nothing I should care more to do, if it were possible, than to rouse the imagination of men and women to a vision of human claims in those races of their fellow-men who most differ from them in customs and beliefs.

George Eliot
Plain women he regarded as he did the other severe facts of life, to be faced with philosophy and investigated by science.

George Eliot
Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age.

George Eliot
I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out.

George Eliot
It is in these acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are forever wasted, until men and women look round with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste has made, and say, the earth bears no harvest of sweetness - calling their denial knowledge.

George Eliot
In the ages since Adam's marriage, it has been good for some men to be alone, and for some women also.

George Eliot
You are discontented with the world because you can't get just the small things that suit your pleasure, not because it's a world where myriads of men and women are ground by wrong and misery, and tainted with pollution.

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
Men and women are but children of a larger growth...

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
Confound you handsome young fellows! You think of having it all your own way in the world. You don't understand women. They don't admire you half so much as you admire yourselves.

George Eliot
There is something strangely winning to most women in that offer of the firm arm; the help is not wanted physically at that moment, but the sense of help, the presence of strength that is outside them and yet theirs, meets a continual want of the imagination.

George Eliot
The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

George Eliot
And, of course men know best about everything, except what women know better.

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

George Eliot