George Eliot Quotes
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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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But a morbid consciousness that others did not give him the place which he had not demonstrably merited-a perpetual suspicious conjecture that the views entertained of him were not to his advantage- a melancholy absence of passion in his efforts at achievement, and a passionate resistance to the confession that he had achieved nothing.
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So much of our early gladness vanishes utterly from our memory: we can never recall the joy with which we laid our heads on our mother's bosom or rode on our father's back in childhood; doubtless that joy is wrought up into our nature, as the sunlight of long-past mornings is wrought up in the soft mellowness of the apricot; but it is gone forever from our imagination, and we can only believe in the joy of childhood.
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... it is one thing to like defiance, and another thing to like its consequences.
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What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self.
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The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots.
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Souls have complexions too: what will suit one will not suit another.
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... the business of life shuts us up within the environs of London and within sight of human advancement, which I should be so very glad to believe in without seeing.
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Conscience is harder than our enemies, Knows more, accuses with more nicety.
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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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I don't mind how many letters I receive from one who interests me as much as you do. The receptive part of correspondence I can carry on with much alacrity. It is writing answers that I groan over.
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We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves.
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Strange, that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us.
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One soweth and another reapeth is a verity that applies to evil as well as good.
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I think cheerfulness is a fortune in itself.
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The impulse to confession almost always requires the presence of a fresh ear and a fresh heart; and in our moments of spiritual need, the man to whom we have no tie but our common nature, seems nearer to us than mother, brother, or friend. Our daily familiar life is but a hiding of ourselves from each other behind a screen of trivial words and deeds, and those who sit with us at the same hearth, are often the farthest off from the deep human soul within us, full of unspoken evil and unacted good.
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All writing seems to me worse in the state of proof than in any other form. In manuscript one's own wisdom is rather remarkable to one, but in proof it has the effect of one's private furniture repeated in the shop windows. And then there is the sense that the worst errors will go to press unnoticed!
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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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Many an irritating fault, many an unlovely oddity, has come of a hard sorrow.
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If you are not proud of your cellar, there is no thrill of satisfaction in seeing your guest hold up his wineglass to the light and look judicial.
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Mighty is the force of motherhood! It transforms all things by its vital heat.
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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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No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence.
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Memory, when duly impregnated with ascertained facts, is sometimes surprisingly fertile.