George Eliot Quotes

Childhood is only the beautiful and happy time in contemplation and retrospect: to the child it is full of deep sorrows, the meaning of which is unknown.

... the true seeing is within; and painting stares at you with an insistent imperfection.

I've always felt that your belongings have never been on a level with you.

To an old memory like mine the present days are but as a little water poured on the deep.

I am influenced at the present time by far higher considerations and by a nobler idea of duty than I ever was when I held the Evangelical belief.

Duty has a trick of behaving unexpectedly -- something like a heavy friend whom we have amiably asked to visit us, and who breaks his leg within our gates.

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

The bow always strung ... will not do.

It is better - it shall be better with me because I have known you.

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had no childhood in it if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass . . .

All our ignorance brings us closer to death.

Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour's buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.

Perhaps his might be one of the natures where a wise estimate of consequences is fused in the fires of that passionate belief which determines the consequences it believes in.

For years after Lydgate remembered the impression produced in him by this involuntary appeal-this cry from soul to soul, without other consciousness than their moving with kindred natures in the same embroiled medium, the same troublous fitfully-illuminated life.

The intense happiness of our union is derived in a high degree from the perfect freedom with which we each follow and declare our own impressions.

I don't want the world to give me anything for my books except money enough to save me from the temptation to write only for money.

Oh may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence.

Can anything be more disgusting than to hear people called 'educated' making small jokes about eating ham, and showing themselves empty of any real knowledge as to the relation of their own social and religious life to the history of the people they think themselves witty in insulting? [...] The best thing that can be said of it is, that it is a sign of the intellectual narrowness—in plain English, the stupidity which is still the average mark of our culture.

I wish always to be quoted as George Eliot.

but very little achievement is required in order to pity another man's shortcomings.

Don't judge a book by its cover

The words of genius have a wider meaning than the thought that prompted them.

The right to rebellion is the right to seek a higher rule, and not to wander in mere lawlessness.

Rome - the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

The pride of the body is a barrier against the gifts that purify the soul.

My childhood was full of deep sorrows - colic, whooping-cough, dread of ghosts, hell, Satan, and a Deity in the sky who was angry when I ate too much plumcake.

It's no use filling your pocket with money if you have got a hole in the corner.

The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.

I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.

Hostesses who entertain much must make up their parties as ministers make up their cabinets, on grounds other than personal liking.

What should I do—how should I act now, this very day . . . What she would resolve to do that day did not yet seem quite clear, but something that she could achieve stirred her as with an approaching murmur which would soon gather distinctness.

My books don't seem to belong to me after I have once written them; and I find myself delivering opinions about them as if I had nothing to do with them.

A child, more than all other gifts That earth can offer to declining man, Brings hope with it, and forward-looking thoughts." —WORDSWORTH.

The impulse to confession almost always requires the presence of a fresh ear and a fresh heart; and in our moments of spiritual need, the man to whom we have no tie but our common nature, seems nearer to us than mother, brother, or friend. Our daily familiar life is but a hiding of ourselves from each other behind a screen of trivial words and deeds, and those who sit with us at the same hearth, are often the farthest off from the deep human soul within us, full of unspoken evil and unacted good.

Those who trust us educate us.

Mighty is the force of motherhood! It transforms all things by its vital heat; it turns timidity into fierce courage, and dreadless defiance into tremulous submission; it turns thoughtlessness into foresight, and yet stills all anxiety into calm content; it makes selfishness become self-denial, and gives even to hard vanity the glance of admiring love.

It's but little good you'll do a-watering the last year's crops

There is hardly any mental misery worse than that of having our own serious phrases, our own rooted beliefs, caricatured by a charlatan or a hireling.

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Few things hold the perception more thoroughly captive than anxiety about what we have got to say

It is one thing to see your road, another to cut it.

Jews are not fit for Heaven, but on earth they are most useful.

Leisure is gone,--gone where the spinning-wheels are gone, and the pack-horses, and the slow wagons, and the peddlers, who brought bargains to the door on sunny afternoons.

There are glances of hatred that stab, and raise no cry of murder.

Scepticismcan never be thoroughly applied, else life would come to a standstill.

It's never too late to be who you were meant to be.

Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.

When we are young we think our troubles a mighty business - that the world is spread out expressly as a stage for the particular drama of our lives and that we have a right to rant and foam at the mouth if we are crossed. I have done enough of that in my time.