Life is very difficult. It seems right to me sometimes that we should follow our strongest feelings; but then such feelings continually come across the ties that all our former life has made for us,--the ties that have made others dependent on us,--and would cut them in two.
George EliotThe poverty of our imagination is no measure of say the world's resources. Our posterity will no doubt get fuel in ways that we are unable to devise for them.
George EliotOne way of getting an idea of our fellow-countrymen's miseries is to go and look at their pleasures.
George EliotThere is one order of beauty which seems made to turn heads. It is a beauty like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle.
George EliotIf we need a true conception of the popular character to guide our sympathies rightly, we need it equally to check our theories, and direct us in their application.
George EliotLet my body dwell in poverty, and my hands be as the hands of the toiler; but let my soul be as a temple of remembrance where the treasures of knowledge enter and the inner sanctuary is hope.
George EliotI have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offense. ... Everyone who contributes to the 'too much' of literature is doing grave social injury.
George EliotThat golden sky, which was the doubly blessed symbol of advancing day and of approaching rest.
George Eliotautobiography at least saves a man or woman that the world is curious about from the publication of a string of mistakes called 'Memoirs.
George EliotPeople who write finely must not expect to be left in repose; they will be molested with thanks, at least.
George EliotHuman feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty — it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it.
George EliotThere is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.
George EliotWe mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinnertime.
George EliotMost of us who turn to any subject we love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love.
George EliotWhat quarrel, what harshness, what unbelief in each other can subsist in the presence of a great calamity, when all the artificial vesture of our life is gone, and we are all one with each other in primitive mortal needs?
George EliotThe tread Of coming footsteps cheats the midnight watcher Who holds her heart and waits to hear them pause, And hears them never pause, but pass and die.
George EliotHow is it that the poets have said so many fine things about our first love, so few about our later love? Are their first poems their best? or are not those the best which come from their fuller thought, their larger experience, their deeper-rooted affections? The boy's flute-like voice has its own spring charm; but the man should yield a richer, deeper music.
George EliotHe had the superficial kindness of a good-humored, self-satisfied nature, that fears no rivalry, and has encountered no contrarieties.
George EliotI don't mind how many letters I receive from one who interests me as much as you do. The receptive part of correspondence I can carry on with much alacrity. It is writing answers that I groan over.
George EliotYou must love your work, and not be always looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin. And the other is, you must not be ashamed of your work, and think it would be more honorable to you to be doing something else. You must have a pride in your own work and in learning to do it well.
George EliotUnwonted circumstances may make us all rather unlike ourselves: there are conditions under which the most majestic person is obliged to sneeze, and our emotions are liable to be acted on in the same incongruous manner.
George EliotGreat feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion.
George EliotA peasant can no more help believing in a traditional superstition than a horse can help trembling when be sees a camel.
George EliotI 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 EliotHer future, she thought, was likely to be worse than her past, for after her years of contented renunciation, she had slipped back into desire and longing; she found joyless days of distasteful occupation harder and harder; she found the image of the intense and varied life she yearned for, and despaired of, becoming more and more importunate.
George Eliot... in no part of the world is genteel visiting founded on esteem, in the absence of suitable furniture and complete dinner-service.
George EliotBetter spend an extra hundred or two on your son's education, than leave it him in your will.
George EliotIn Rome it seems as if there were so many things which are more wanted in the world than pictures.
George EliotThat by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil -- widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.
George Eliot