George Eliot Quotes

Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions; they pass no criticisms.

Adventure is not outside man; it is within.

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

Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.

Hold up your head! You were not made for failure, you were made for victory. Go forward with a joyful confidence.

Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.

And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it.

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person; having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but to pour them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, knowing that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then, with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!

Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.

Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.

There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.

The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots.

Those who trust us educate us.

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.

Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.

There 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.

Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.

The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.

It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibers that knit us to the old.

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.

How 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.

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

I'm not denyin' the women are foolish. God Almighty made 'em to match the men.

Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.

Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity.

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.

I've never any pity for conceited people, because I think they carry their comfort about with them.

The strongest principle of growth lies in the human choice.

Little children are still the symbol of the eternal marriage between love and duty.

She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.

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

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.

But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.

Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?

We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.

Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.

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

We hand folks over to God's mercy, and show none ourselves.

People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbors."

He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.

The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another.

Ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities.

A toddling little girl is a centre of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other.

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

Perfect love has a breath of poetry which can exalt the relations of the least-instructed human beings.

It is seldom that the miserable of the world can help regarding their misery as a wrong inflicted by those who are less miserable.

Hatred is like fire, it makes even light rubbish deadly.

It was not that she was out of temper, but that the world was not equal to the demands of her fine organism.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

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

There are many victories worse than a defeat.

The egoism which enters into our theories does not affect their sincerity; rather, the more our egoism is satisfied, the more robust is our belief.

More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.

Errors look so very ugly in persons of small means -one feels they are taking quite a liberty in going astray; whereas people of fortune may naturally indulge in a few delinquencies.

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

Tis God gives skill, but not without men's hand: He could not make Antonio Stradivarius's violins without Antonio.

But most of us are apt to settle within ourselves that the man who blocks our way is odious, and not to mind causing him a little of the disgust which his personality excites in ourselves.

Best friend, my well-spring in the wilderness!

Blows are sarcasms turned stupid.

Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which there is much agreement, much disputation, and yet more personal liking.

Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it: it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker.

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.

It is only a poor sort of happiness that could ever come by caring very much about our own pleasures. We can only have the highest happiness such as goes along with being a great man, by having wide thoughts and much feeling for the rest of the world as well as ourselves.

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

The beginning of an acquaintance whether with persons or things is to get a definite outline of our ignorance.

The first condition of human goodness is something to love; the second, something to reverence.

The scornful nostril and the high head gather not the odors that lie on the track of truth.

There's folks as make bad butter and trusten to the salt t' hide it.

There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.

Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have wrinkles. What do we live for if not to make the world less difficult for each other?

Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.

Our words have wings, but fly not where we would.

The responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision.

Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have wrinkles.

Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.

The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.