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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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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The best augury of a man's success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.
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We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.
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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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I like to read about Moses best, in th' Old Testament. He carried a hard business well through, and died when other folks were going to reap the fruits; a man must have courage to look after his life so, and think what'll come f it after he's dead and gone.
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We are all apt to believe what the world believes about us.
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The mother's love is at first an absorbing delight, blunting all other sensibilities; it is an expansion of the animal existence; it enlarges the imagined range for self to move in: but in after years it can only continue to be joy on the same terms as other long-lived love--that is, by much suppression of self, and power of living in the experience of another.
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Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life.
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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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If I could only fancy myself clever, it would be better, but to be a failure of Nature and to know it is not a comfortable lot. It is the last lesson one learns, to be contented with one's inferiority -- but it must be learned.
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The difficulty is, to decide how far resolution should set in the direction of activity rather than in the acceptance of a more negative state.
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Our vanities differ as our noses do: all conceit is not the same conceit, but varies in correspondence with the minutiae of mental make in which one of us differs from another.
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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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Come in, Adam, and rest; it has been a hard day for thee.
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You youngsters nowadays think you're to begin with living well and working easy; you've no notion of running afoot before you get on horseback.
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It is the way with half the truth amidst which we live, that it only haunts us and makes dull pulsations that are never born into sound.
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‘I suppose a woman is never in love with any one she has always known- ever since she can remember; as a man often is. It is always some new fellow who strikes a girl.’
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Surely it is not true blessedness to be free of sorrow while there is sorrow and sin in the world. Sorrow is a part of love and love does not seek to throw it off.
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Satan was a blunderer ... who made a stupendous failure. If he had succeeded, we should all have been worshipping him, and his portrait would have been more flattering.
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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.
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It is as useless to fight against the interpretations of ignorance as to whip the fog.
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Enveloped in a common mist, we seem to walk in clearness ourselves, and behold only the mist that enshrouds others.
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Death is the only physician, the shadow of his valley the only journeying that will cure us of age and the gathering fatigue of years.