George Eliot Quotes

Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning.

Alas! the scientific conscience had got into the debasing company of money obligation and selfish respects.

There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.

A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

Until every good man is brave, we must expect to find many good women timid--too timid even to believe in the correctness of their own best promptings, when these would place them in a minority.

The first sense of mutual love excludes other feelings; it will have the soul all to itself.

If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new. We are told that the oldest inhabitants in Peru do not cease to be agitated by the earthquakes, but they probably see beyond each shock, and reflect that there are plenty more to come.

Friendship is the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words.

The best augury of a man's success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.

Those bitter sorrows of childhood!-- when sorrow is all new and strange, when hope has not yet got wings to fly beyond the days and weeks, and the space from summer to summer seems measureless.

So deeply inherent is it in this life of ours that men have to suffer for each other's sins, so inevitably diffusive is human suffering, that even justice makes its victims, and we can conceive no retribution that does not spread beyond its mark in pulsations of unmerited pain.

Life is measured by the rapidity of change, the succession of influences that modify the being.

Best friend, my well-spring in the wilderness!

Blows are sarcasms turned stupid.

When a homemaking aunt scolds a niece for following her evangelistic passion instead of domestic pursuits, her reply is interesting. First, she clarifies that God's individual call on her doesn't condemn those in more conventional roles. Then, she says she can no more ignore the cry of the lost than her aunt can the cry of her child.

Memory, when duly impregnated with ascertained facts, is sometimes surprisingly fertile.

He was one of those men, and they are not the commonest, of whom we can know the best only by following them away from the marketplace, the platform, and the pulpit, entering with them into their own homes, hearing the voice with which they speak to the young and aged about their own hearthstone, and witnessing their thoughtful care for the everyday wants of everyday companions, who take all their kindness as a matter of course, and not as a subject for panegyric.

Sympathetic people often don't communicate well, they back reflected images which hide their own depths.

Where Jack isn't safe, Tom's in danger.

The rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families.

In every parting there is an image of death.

We are led on, like little children, by a way we know not.

Childhood has no forebodings; but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.

It's all one web, sir. The prosperity of the country is one web.

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!

We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into insipid misdoing and shabby achievement.

In the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little.

There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire; it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.

When you get me a good man made out of arguments, I will get you a good dinner with reading you the cookery book.

Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing was, than simply to know it; for conjecture soon became more confident than knowledge, and had a more liberal allowance for the incompatible.

It is a wonderful subduer-this need of love, this hunger of the heart.

I shall never love anybody. I can't love people. I hate them.' 'The time will come, dear, the time will come.

Fear was stronger than the calculation of probabilities.

Husbands are an inferior class of men, who require keeping in order.

Receptiveness is a rare and massive power, like fortitude.

Strange, that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us.

How can one ever do anything nobly Christian, living among people with such petty thoughts?

It is in the nature of foolish reasonings to seem good to the foolish reasoner.

It is not true that a man's intellectual power is, like the strength of a timber beam, to be measured by its weakest point.

The worst service, I fancy, that anyone can do for truth, is to set silly people writing on its behalf.

Ignorance is not so damnable as humbug, but when it prescribes pills it may happen to do more harm.

There is no short-cut no patent tram-road, to wisdom. After all the centuries of invention, the soul's path lies through the thorny wilderness which must still be trodden in solitude, with bleeding feet, with sobs for help, as it was trodden by them of old time.

In poor Rosamond's mind there was not room enough for luxuries to look small in.

Does any one suppose that private prayer is necessarily candid--necessarily goes to the roots of action! Private prayer is inaudible speech, and speech is representative: who can represent himself just as he is, even in his own reflections?

Some gentlemen have made an amazing figure in literature by general discontent with the universe as a trap of dulness into which their great souls have fallen by mistake; but the sense of a stupendous self and an insignificant world may have its consolations. Lydgate's discontent was much harder to bear; it was the sense that there was a grand existence in thought and effective action lying around him, while his self was being narrowed into the miserable isolation of egoistic fears, and vulgar anxieties for events that might allay such fears.

O the anguish of the thought that we can never atone to our dead for the stinted affection we gave them.

Try to take hold of your sensibility, and use it as if it were a faculty, like vision.

Perhaps nothing ud be a lesson to us if it didn't come too late. It's well we should feel as life's a reckoning we can't make twice over; there's no real making amends in this world, any more nor you can mend a wrong subtraction by doing your addition right.