George Eliot Quotes
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I am not resigned: I am not sure life is long enough to learn that lesson.
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Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled egg; and when it takes to cackling will have nothing to announce but that addled delusion.
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There is no sort of wrong deed of which a man can bear the punishment alone; you can't isolate yourself and say that the evil that is in you shall not spread. Men's lives are as thoroughly blended with each other as the air they breathe; evil spreads as necessarily as disease.
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Sympathetic people often don't communicate well, they back reflected images which hide their own depths.
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Minds fettered by this doctrine no longer inquire concerning a proposition whether it is attested by sufficient evidence, but whether it accords with Scripture; they do not search for facts as such, but for facts that will bear out their doctrine. It is easy to see that this mental habit blunts not only the perception of truth, but the sense of truthfulness, and that the man whose faith drives him into fallacies treads close upon the precipice of falsehood.
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For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.
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What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?
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It is always your heaviest bore who is astonished at the tameness of modern celebrities: naturally; for a little of his company has reduced them to a state of flaccid fatigue.
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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.
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I have no courage to write much unless I am written to. I soon begin to think that there are plenty of other correspondents more interesting - so if you all want to hear from me you know the conditions.
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I don't remember ever being see-saw, when I'd made my mind up that a thing was wrong. It takes the taste out o' my mouth for things, when I know I should have a heavy conscience after 'em. I've seen pretty clear, ever since I could cast up a sum, as you can never do what's wrong without breeding sin and trouble more than you can ever see. It's like a bit o' bad workmanship--you never see th' end o' the mischief it'll do. And it's a poor look-out to come into the world to make your fellow creatures worse off instead o' better.
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Conscience is harder than our enemies, Knows more, accuses with more nicety.
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The natur o' things doesn't change, though it seems as if one's own life was nothing but change. The square o' four is sixteen, and you must lengthen your lever in proportion to your weight, is as true when a man's miserable as when he's happy; and the best o' working is, it gives you a grip hold o' things outside your own lot'.
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You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.
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There's no disappointment in memory, and one's exaggerations are always on the good side.
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Men and women make sad mistakes about their own symptoms, taking their vague uneasy longings, sometimes for genius, sometimes for religion, and oftener still for a mighty love.
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There's no pleasure i' living if you're to be corked up for ever, and only dribble your mind out by the sly, like a leaky barrel.
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Leisure is gone,--gone where the spinning-wheels are gone, and the pack-horses, and the slow wagons, and the peddlers, who brought bargains to the door on sunny afternoons.
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Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down.
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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.
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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.
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There's folks 'ud hold a sieve under the pump and expect to carry away the water.
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A woman's rank Lies in the fulness of her womanhood: Therein alone she is royal.
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I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.