George Eliot Quotes

I don't feel sure about doing good in any way now; everything seems like going on a mission to a people whose language I don't know.

You must love your work and not always be looking over the edge of it wanting your play to begin.

I like trying to get pregnant. I'm not so sure about childbirth.

If I could only fancy myself clever, it would be better, but to be a failure of Nature and to know it is not a comfortable lot. It is the last lesson one learns, to be contented with one's inferiority -- but it must be learned.

It is very difficult to be learned; it seems as if people were worn out on the way to great thoughts, and can never enjoy them because they are too tired.

Steady work turns genius to a loom.

It is a common sentence that knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what ignorance in an hour pulls down.

Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.

These gems have life in them: their colors speak, say what words fail of.

It's easy finding reasons why other folks should be patient.

To fear the examination of any proposition apears to me an intellectual and a moral palsy that will ever hinder the firm grasping of any substance whatever.

It is a sad weakness in us, after all, that the thought of a man's death hallows him anew to us; as if life were not sacred too.

Affection is the broadest basis of a good life.

I would rather not be engaged. When people are engaged, they begin to think of being married soon, and I should like everything to go on for a long while just as it is.

Anger seek it prey,-- Something to tear with sharp-edged tooth and claw, Like not to go off hungry, leaving Love To feast on milk and honeycomb at will.

You may try — but you can never imagine what it is to have a man's force of genius in you, and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl.

Don't you meddle with me, and I won't meddle with you.

There are robberies that leave man or woman forever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer.

Time, like money, is measured by our needs.

In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause.

The wrong that rouses our angry passions finds only a medium in us; it passes through us like a vibration, and we inflict what we have suffered.

A good horse makes short miles.

Fine art, poetry, that kind of thing, elevates a nation.

What business has an old bachelor like that to marry?' said Sir James. 'He has one foot in the grave.' 'He means to draw it out again, I suppose.

... indefinite visions of ambition are weak against the ease of doing what is habitual or beguilingly agreeable.

The most powerful movement of feeling with a liturgy is the prayer which seeks for nothing special, but is a yearning to escape from the limitations of our own weakness and an invocation of all Good to enter and abide with us.

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music.

Appearances have very little to do with happiness.

It was one of those dangerous moments when speech is at once sincere and deceptive - when feeling, rising high above its average depth, leaves flood-marks which are never reached again.

Under every guilty secret there is hidden a brood of guilty wishes, whose unwholesome infecting life is cherished by the darkness.

Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.

the usual attitude of Christians towards Jews is - I hardly know whether to say more impious or more stupid, when viewed in the light of their professed principles. ... They hardly know Christ was a Jew. And I find men, educated, supposing that Christ spoke Greek. To my feeling, this deadness to the history which has prepared half our world for us, this inability to find interest in any form of life that is not clad in the same coat-tails and flounces as our own, lies very close to the worst kind of irreligion.

It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.

No man is matriculated to the art of life till he has been well tempted.

What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known, and loved because it is known?

Man may content himself with the applause of the world and the homage paid to his intellect, but woman's heart has holier idols.

I used to come from the village with all that dirt and coarse ugliness like a pain within me, and the simpering pictures in the drawing-room seemed to me like a wicked attempt to find delight in what is false, while we don't mind how hard the truth is for the neighbors outside our walls. I think we have no right to come forward and urge wider changes for good, until we have tried to alter the evils which lie under our own hands.

Her little butterfly soul fluttered incessantly between memory and dubious expectation.

A common fallacy: to imagine a measure will be easy because we have private motives for desiring it.

I am open to conviction on all points except dinner and debts. I hold that the one must be eaten and the other paid.

It always seemed to me a sort of clever stupidity only to have one sort of talent - like a carrier pigeon.

A prig is a fellow who is always making you a present of his opinions.

For pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion.

Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion; and ties us by our heart-strings to the beings that jar us at every movement.

How impossible it is for strong healthy people to understand the way in which bodily malaise and suffering eats at the root of one's life! The philosophy that is true - the religion that is strength to the healthy - is constantly emptiness to one when the head is distracted and every sensation is oppressive.

Starting a long way off the true point, and proceeding by loops and zigzags , we now and then arrive just where we ought to be.

Upon my word, I think the truth is the hardest missile one can be pelted with.

It so often happens that others are measuring us by our past self while we are looking back on that self with a mixture of disgust and sorrow.