George Eliot Quotes
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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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Affection is the broadest basis of a good life.
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'Twas easy following where invention trod - All eyes can see when light flows out from God. And thus did Jubal to his race reveal Music their larger soul, where woe and weal Filling the resonant chords, the song, the dance, Moved with a wider-winged utterance.
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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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Memory, when duly impregnated with ascertained facts, is sometimes surprisingly fertile.
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Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love - that makes life and nature harmonise. The birds are consulting about their migrations, the trees are putting on the hectic or the pallid hues of decay, and begin to strew the ground, that one's very footsteps may not disturb the repose of earth and air, while they give us a scent that is a perfect anodyne to the restless spirit. Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.
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Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans - which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.
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The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots.
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A toddling little girl is a centre of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other.
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If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new. We are told that the oldest inhabitants in Peru do not cease to be agitated by the earthquakes, but they probably see beyond each shock, and reflect that there are plenty more to come.
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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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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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We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into insipid misdoing and shabby achievement.
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But how little we know what would make paradise for our neighbours! We judge from our own desires, and our neighbours themselves are not always open enough even to throw out a hint of theirs.
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It was not that she was out of temper, but that the world was not equal to the demands of her fine organism.
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It was a still afternoon - the golden light was lingering languidly among the upper boughs, only glancing down here and there on the purple pathway and its edge of faintly sprinkled moss: an afternoon in which destiny disguises her cold awful face behind a hazy radiant veil, encloses us in warm downy wings, and poisons us with violet-scented breath.
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Ah! but the moods lie in his nature, my boy, just as much as his reflections did, and more. A man can never do anything at variance with his own nature. He carries within him the germ of his most exceptional action; and if we wise people make eminent fools of ourselves on any particular occasion, we must endure the legitimate conclusion that we carry a few grains of folly to our ounce of wisdom.
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The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another.
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O the anguish of the thought that we can never atone to our dead for the stinted affection we gave them.
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... it is one thing to like defiance, and another thing to like its consequences.
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I had some ambition. I meant everything to be different with me. I thought I had more strength and mastery. But the most terrible obstacles are such as nobody can see except oneself.
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Alas! the scientific conscience had got into the debasing company of money obligation and selfish respects.
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Some people are born to make life pretty, and others to grumble that it is not pretty enough.
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Doesn't this quote just call up feelings of comfort and home? Comparing friendship to the nest a bird lives in and builds with loving determination reminds me that having a solid relationship takes work and dedication. And yet, when you succeed in crafting a friendship, you can rest in the comfort it provides.