George Eliot Quotes

It's no trifle at her time at her time of life to part with a doctor who knows her constitution.

No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence.

To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.

I have always been thinking of the different ways in which Christianity is taught, and whenever I find one way that makes it a wider blessing than any other, I cling to that as the truest--I mean that which takes in the most good of all kinds, and brings in the most people as sharers in it. It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much.

It is never too late to be who you want to be.

He who rules must fully humor as much as he commands.

There are new eras in one's life that are equivalent to youth-are something better than youth.

Children demand that their heroes should be fleckless, and easily believe them so .

Harold, like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas.

With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.

College mostly makes people like bladders-just good for nothing but t'hold the stuff as is poured into 'em.

Go forward with joyful confidence.

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

I think cheerfulness is a fortune in itself.

When one is five-and-twenty, one has not chalk-stones at one's finger-ends that the touch of a handsome girl should be entirely indifferent.

I tell you there isn't a thing under the sun that needs to be done at all, but what a man can do better than a woman, unless it's bearing children, and they do that in a poor make-shift way; it had better ha been left to the men.

... it is because sympathy is but a living again through our own past in a new form, that confession often prompts a response of confession.

We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.

Our consciousness rarely registers the beginning of a growth within us any more than without us; there have been many circulation of the sap before we detect the smallest sign of the bud.

To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion--a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.

People are almost always better than their neighbors think they are.

The dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters the desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic.

Uncomfortable thoughts must be got rid of by good intentions for the future.

Souls have complexions too: what will suit one will not suit another

Certainly the determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and novel impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion.

If I got places, sir, it was because I made myself fit for 'em. If you want to slip into a round hole, you must first make a ball of yourself; that's where it is.

Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning.

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.

A perverted moral judgment belongs to the dogmatic system.

An ass may bray a good while before he shakes the stars down.

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

Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.

The dew-bead Gem of earth and sky begotten.

A medical man likes to make psychological observations, and sometimes in the pursuit of such studies is too easily tempted into momentous prophecy which life and death easily set at nought.

I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.

We are contented with our day when we have been able to bear our grief in silence, and act as if we were not suffering.

It is always chilling, in friendly intercourse, to say you have no opinion to give.

Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets.

Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.

She thought it was part of the hardship of her life that there was laid upon her the burthen of larger wants than others seemed to feel – that she had to endure this wide hopeless yearning for that something, whatever it was, that was greatest and best on this earth.

I think I dislike what I don't like more than I like what I like.

I have no courage to write much unless I am written to. I soon begin to think that there are plenty of other correspondents more interesting - so if you all want to hear from me you know the conditions.

... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.

With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader.

Unhappily the habit of being offensive 'without meaning it' leads usually to a way of making amends which the injured person cannot but regard as a being amiable without meaning it.

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.

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

It is never too late to become the person you always thought you could be.