George Eliot Quotes
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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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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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Conscience is harder than our enemies, Knows more, accuses with more nicety.
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Our consciousness rarely registers the beginning of a growth within us any more than without us; there have been many circulation of the sap before we detect the smallest sign of the bud.
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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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Justice is like the kingdom of God--it is not without us as a fact, it is within us as a great yearning.
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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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Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down.
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Mighty is the force of motherhood! It transforms all things by its vital heat; it turns timidity into fierce courage, and dreadless defiance into tremulous submission; it turns thoughtlessness into foresight, and yet stills all anxiety into calm content; it makes selfishness become self – denial, and gives even to hard vanity the glance of admiring love.
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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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So deeply inherent is it in this life of ours that men have to suffer for each other's sins, so inevitably diffusive is human suffering, that even justice makes its victims, and we can conceive no retribution that does not spread beyond its mark in pulsations of unmerited pain.
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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.
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Certain winds will make men's temper bad.
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What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.
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To my thinking, it is more pitiable to bore than to be bored.
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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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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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He had a sense that the old man meant to be good-natured and neighbourly; but the kindness fell on him as sunshine falls on the wretched - he had no heart to taste it, and felt that it was very far off him.
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There comes a night when all too late The mind shall long to prompt the achieving hand, The eager thought behind closed portals stand, And the last wishes to the mute lips press Buried ere death in silent helplessness.
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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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I'm proof against that word failure. I've seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.
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We have had an unspeakably delightful journey, one of those journeys which seem to divide one's life in two, by the new ideas they suggest and the new views of interest they open.
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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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I shall never love anybody. I can't love people. I hate them.' 'The time will come, dear, the time will come.