George Eliot Quotes

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

~ George Eliot

No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.

~ George Eliot

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

~ George Eliot

We all remember epochs in our experience when some dear expectation dies, or some new motive is born.

~ George Eliot

Her anger said, as anger is apt to say, that God was with her— that all heaven, though it were crowded with spirits watching them, must be on her side.

~ George Eliot

Timid people always reek their peevishness on the gentle.

~ George Eliot

When a tender affection has been storing itself in us through many of our years, the idea that we could accept any exchange for it seems to be a cheapening of our lives. And we can set a watch over our affections and our constancy as we can over other treasures.

~ George Eliot

We learn to restrain ourselves as we get older. We keep apart when we have quarrelled, express ourselves in well-bred phrases, and in this way preserve a dignified alienation, showing much firmness on one side, and swallowing much grief on the other. We no longer approximate in our behaviour to the mere impulsiveness of the lower animals, but conduct ourselves in every respect like members of a highly civilised society.

~ George Eliot

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.

~ George Eliot

My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.

~ George Eliot

What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined to strengthen each other, to be at one with each other in silent unspeakable memories

~ George Eliot

If a man has a capacity for great thoughts, he is likely to overtake them before he is decrepit.

~ George Eliot

Ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities.

~ George Eliot

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

~ George Eliot

The prevarication and white lies which a mind that keeps itself ambitiously pure is as uneasy under as a great artist under the false touches that no eye detects but his own, are worn as lightly as mere trimming when once the actions have become a lie.

~ George Eliot

...there's never a garden in all the parish but what there's endless waste in it for want o' somebody as could use everything up. It's what I think to myself sometimes, as there need nobody run short o' victuals if the land was made the most on, and there was never a morsel but what could find it's way to a mouth.

~ George Eliot

Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.

~ George Eliot

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.

~ George Eliot

We are overhasty to speak as if God did not manifest himself by our silent feeling, and make his love felt through ours.

~ George Eliot

Aye, aye, that's the way wi' thee: thee allays makes a peck o' thy own words out o' a pint o' the Bible's

~ George Eliot

Let a prejudice be bequeathed, carried in the air, adopted by hearsay, caught in through the eye,–however it may come, these minds will give it a habitation; it is something to assert strongly and bravely, something to fill up the void of spontaneous ideas, something to impose on others with the authority of conscious right; it is at once a staff and a baton.

~ George Eliot

It is just that I don’t know how I could live without the hope of her. It would be like learning to live with wooden legs.

~ George Eliot

A man carries within him the germ of his most exceptional action; and if we wise people make eminent fools of ourselves on any particular occasion, we must endure the legitimate conclusion that we carry a few grains of folly to our ounce of wisdom.

~ George Eliot

Favourable Chance, I fancy, is the god of all men who follow their own devices instead of obeying a law they believe in. Let even a polished man of these days get into a position he is ashamed to avow, and his mind will be bent on all the possible issues that may deliver him from the calculable results of that position. Let him live outside his income, or shirk the resolute honest work that brings wages, and he will presently find himself dreaming of a possible benefactor, a possible simpleton who may be cajoled into using his interest, a possible state of mind in some possible person not yet forthcoming. Let him neglect the responsibilities of his office, and he will inevitably anchor himself on the chance that the thing left undone may turn out not to be of the supposed importance. Let him betray his friend's confidence, and he will adore that same cunning complexity called Chance, which gives him the hope that his friend will never know. Let him forsake a decent craft that he may pursue the gentilities of a profession to which nature never called him, and his religion will infallibly be the worship of blessed Chance, which he will believe in as the mighty creator of success. The evil principle deprecated in that religion is the orderly sequence by which the seed brings forth a crop after its kind.

~ George Eliot

It is a mere cowardice to seek safety in negations. No character becomes strong in that way. You will be thrown into the world some day and then every rational satisfaction your nature that you deny now will assault like a savage appetite.

~ George Eliot

The secret of our emotions never lies in the bare object, but in its subtle relations to our own past.

~ George Eliot

I don't see how a man is to be good for much unless he has some one woman to love him dearly.

~ George Eliot

A man vows, and yet will not east away the means of breaking his vow. Is it that he distinctly means to break it? Not at all; but the desires which tend to break it are at work in him dimly, and make their way into his imagination, and relax his muscles in the very moments when he is telling himself over again the reasons for his vow.

~ George Eliot

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.

~ George Eliot

Modesty, not temper.

~ George Eliot

Author describes one character's optimism as, that quiet well-being which perhaps you and I have felt on a sunny afternoon when, in our brightest youth and health, life has opened a new vista for us, and long to-morrows of activity have stretched before us like a lovely plain which there was no need for hurrying to look at, because it was all our own.

~ George Eliot

It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.

~ George Eliot

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.

~ George Eliot

He had no ideal world of dead heroes, he knew little of the life of men in the past, he must find the beings to whom he could cling with loving admiration among those who came within speech of him.

~ George Eliot

There is no hour that has not its births of gladness and despair, no morning brightness that does not bring new sickness to desolation as well as new forces to genius and love. There are so many of us, and our lots are so different, what wonder that Nature's mood is often in harsh contrast with the great crisis of our lives?

~ George Eliot

They had entered the thorny wilderness, and the golden gates of their childhood had for ever closed behind them.

~ George Eliot

Pride only helps us to be generous; it never makes us so, any more than vanity makes us witty.

~ George Eliot

One’s self-satisfaction is an untaxed kind of property which it is very unpleasant to find deprecated.

~ George Eliot

It is the favourite stratagem of our passions to sham a retreat, and to turn sharp round upon us at the moment we have made up our minds that the day is our own.

~ George Eliot

It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses, we must plant more roses.

~ George Eliot