George Eliot Quotes
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... it is one thing to like defiance, and another thing to like its consequences.
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How lovely the little river is, with its dark changing wavelets! It seems to me like a living companion while I wander along the bank, and listen to its low, placid voice . . .
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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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Few things hold the perception more thoroughly captive than anxiety about what we have got to say.
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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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Of new acquaintances one can never be sure because one likes them one day that it will be so the next. Of old friends one is sure that it will be the same yesterday, today, and forever.
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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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Many an irritating fault, many an unlovely oddity, has come of a hard sorrow.
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Sad as a wasted passion.
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Love supreme defies all sophistry.
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The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another.
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All things except reason and order are possible with a mob.
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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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A girl of eighteen imagines the feelings behind the face that has moved her with its sympathetic youth as easily as primitive people imagined the humors of the gods in fair weather. What is she to believe in if not in this vision woven from within?
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I've been turning it over in after-dinner speeches, but it looks awkward-it's not what people are used to-it wants a good deal of Latin to make it go down.
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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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Miserliness is a capital quality to run in families; it's the safe side for madness to dip on.
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Nature repairs her ravages,--repairs them with her sunshine and with human labor.
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If a woman's young and pretty, I think you can see her good looks all the better for her being plainly dressed.
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While the arm is strong to strike and heave, Let soul and arm give shape that will abide...
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The darkest night that ever fell upon the earth never hid the light, never put out the stars. It only made the stars more keenly, kindly glancing, as if in protest against the darkness.
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Until every good man is brave, we must expect to find many good women timid--too timid even to believe in the correctness of their own best promptings, when these would place them in a minority.
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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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Mighty is the force of motherhood! It transforms all things by its vital heat.