George Eliot Quotes

This is a puzzling world, and Old Harry's got a finger in it.

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.

When the soul is just liberated from the wretched giant's bed of dogmas on which it has been racked and stretched ever since it began to think, there is a feeling of exultation and strong hope.

The best travel is that which one can take by one's own fireside. In memory or imagination.

Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through.

I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same mind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.

The last refuge of intolerance is in not tolerating the intolerant.

Power of generalizing gives men so much the superiority in mistake over the dumb animals.

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

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

... there is a lightness about the feminine mind--a touch and go--music, the fine arts, that kind of thing--they should study those up to a certain point, women should; but in a light way, you know.

Would not love see returning penitence afar off, and fall on its neck and kiss it?

The desire to conquer is itself a sort of subjection.

Those only can thoroughly feel the meaning of death who know what is perfect love.

Many an irritating fault, many an unlovely oddity, has come of a hard sorrow.

Correct English is the slang of prigs.

All the learnin' my father ever paid for was a bit o' birch at one end and the alphabet at th ' other.

It is very hard to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings – much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.

Character is not cut in marble - it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.

The beginning of an acquaintance whether with persons or things is to get a definite outline of our ignorance.

It is as useless to fight against the interpretations of ignorance as to whip the fog.

What people do who go into politics I can't think; it drives me almost mad to see mismanagement over only a few hundred acres.

You are a good young man," she said. "But I do not like husbands. I will never have another.

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

It's them as take advantage that get advantage I' this world, I think: folks have to wait long enough afore it's brought to 'em.

Expenditure--like ugliness and errors--becomes a totally new thing when we attach our own personality to it, and measure it by that wide difference which is manifest (in our own sensations) between ourselves and others.

The very truth hath a colour from the disposition of the utterer.

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

I have a knack of hoping, which is as good as an estate.

I would not creep along the coast but steer Out in mid-sea, by guidance of the stars.

I not only want to be loved, I want to be told that I'm loved.

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

Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest.

Beauty is part of the finished language by which goodness speaks.

There are answers which, in turning away wrath, only send it to the other end of the room.

'Character," says Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms - character is destiny'.

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

One couldn't carry on life comfortably without a little blindness to the fact that everything has been said better than we can put it ourselves.

Particular lies may speak a general truth.

Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses.

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

Self-confidence is apt to address itself to an imaginary dullness in others; as people who are well off speak in a cajoling tone to the poor.

After all, the true seeing is within.

For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.

Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans - which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.

A girl of eighteen imagines the feelings behind the face that has moved her with its sympathetic youth as easily as primitive people imagined the humors of the gods in fair weather. What is she to believe in if not in this vision woven from within?

What deep and worthy love is so, whether of woman or child, or art or music. Our caresses, our tender words, our still rapture under the influence of autumn sunsets, or pillared vistas, or calm majestic statues, or Beethoven symphonies all bring with them the consciousness that they are mere waves and ripples in an unfathomable ocean of love and beauty; our emotion in its keenest moment passes from expression into silence, our love at its highest flood rushes beyond its object and loses itself in the sense of divine mystery.

We have all got to exert ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same names as other people call them by.