-
With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.
George Eliot -
My childhood was full of deep sorrows - colic, whooping-cough, dread of ghosts, hell, Satan, and a Deity in the sky who was angry when I ate too much plumcake.
George Eliot
-
'An accomplished woman almost always knows more than we men, though her knowledge is of a different sort. I am sure you could teach me a thousand things-as an exquisite bird could teach a bear if there were any common language between them. Happily, there is a common language between women and men, and so the bears can get taught.'
George Eliot -
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.
George Eliot -
That 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 -
The strength of the donkey mind lies in adopting a course inversely as the arguments urged, which, well considered, requires as great a mental force as the direct sequence.
George Eliot -
Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them: they can be injured by us, they can be wounded; they know all our penitence, all our aching sense that their place is empty, all the kisses we bestow on the smallest relic of their presence.
George Eliot -
When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.
George Eliot
-
Perhaps the windWails so in winter for the summers dead,And all sad sounds are nature's funeral criesFor what has been and is not.
George Eliot -
An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.
George Eliot -
It is not true that love makes all things easy; it makes us choose what is difficult.
George Eliot -
The human heart finds nowhere shelter but in human kind.
George Eliot -
The responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision.
George Eliot -
An ass may bray a good while before he shakes the stars down.
George Eliot
-
A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar, unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge.
George Eliot -
Husbands are an inferior class of men, who require keeping in order.
George Eliot -
Who can proveWit to be witty when with deeper groundDulness intuitive declares wit dull?
George Eliot -
Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds ...
George Eliot -
Childhood has no forebodings; but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.
George Eliot -
May every soul that touches mine - be it the slightest contact - get there from some good; some little grace; one kindly thought; one aspiration yet unfelt; one bit of courage for the darkening sky; one gleam of faith to brave the thickening ills of life; one glimpse of brighter skies beyond the gathering mists - to make this life worthwhile.
George Eliot
-
So shall I join the choir invisible Whose music is the gladness of the world.
George Eliot -
Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.
George Eliot -
If you are to rule men, you must rule them through their own ideas.
George Eliot -
Among all the many kinds of first love, that which begins in childish companionship is the strongest and most enduring: when passion comes to unite its force to long affection, love is at its spring-tide.
George Eliot