George Eliot Quotes
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What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?
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We are all apt to believe what the world believes about us.
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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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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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Sympathetic people often don't communicate well, they back reflected images which hide their own depths.
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For my part I am very sorry for him. It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self--never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardour of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dimsighted.
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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 think I dislike what I don't like more than I like what I like.
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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 am not resigned: I am not sure life is long enough to learn that lesson.
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Fate has carried me 'Mid the thick arrows: I will keep my stand Not shrink and let the shaft pass by my breast To pierce another.
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A blush is no language; only a dubious flag - signal which may mean either of two contradictories.
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They the royal – hearted women are Who nobly love the noblest, yet have grace For needy suffering lives in lowliest place, Carrying a choicer sunlight in their smile, The heavenliest ray that pitieth the vile.
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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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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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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.
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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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There's folks 'ud hold a sieve under the pump and expect to carry away the water.
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Can any man or woman choose duties? No more than they can choose their birthplace or their father and mother.
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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? We are children of a large family, and must learn, as such children do, not to expect that our hurts will be made much of - to be content with little nurture and caressing, and help each other the more.
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In bed our yesterdays are too oppressive: if a man can only get up, though it be but to whistle or to smoke, he has a present which offers some resistance to the past—sensations which assert themselves against tyrannous memories.
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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.
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Quick souls have their intensest life in the first anticipatory sketch of what may or will be, and the pursuit of their wish is the pursuit of that paradisiacal vision which only impelled them, and is left farther and farther behind, vanishing forever even out of hope in the moment which is called success.
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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.