George Eliot Quotes
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What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.
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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.
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Trouble comes to us all in this life: we set our hearts on things which it isn't God's will for us to have, and then we go sorrowing.
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There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.
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Fine old Christmas, with the snowy hair and ruddy face, had done his duty that year in the noblest fashion, and had set off his rich gifts of warmth and color with all the heightening contrast of frost and snow.
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I think cheerfulness is a fortune in itself.
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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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If boys and men are to be welded together in the glow of transient feeling, they must be made of metal that will mix, else they inevitably fall asunder when the heat dies out.
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I am open to conviction on all points except dinner and debts. I hold that the one must be eaten and the other paid.
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It cuts one sadly to see the grief of old people; they've no way o' working it off; and the new spring brings no new shoots out on the withered tree.
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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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Love supreme defies all sophistry.
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One's self-satisfaction is an untaxed kind of property which it is very unpleasant to find deprecated.
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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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The bow always strung ... will not do.
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But indefinite visions of ambition are weak against the ease of doing what is habitual or beguilingly agreeable; and we all know the difficulty of carrying out a resolve when we secretly long that it may turn out to be unnecessary. In such states of mind the most incredulous person has a private leaning towards miracle: impossible to conceive how our wish could be fulfilled, still - very wonderful things have happened!
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Each thought is a nail that is driven In structures that cannot decay; And the mansion at last will be given To us as we build it each day.
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Conscience is harder than our enemies, Knows more, accuses with more nicety.
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High achievements demand some other unusual qualification besides an unusual desire for high prizes.
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I love not to be choked with other men's thoughts.
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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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Affection is the broadest basis of a good life.
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Souls have complexions too: what will suit one will not suit another.
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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.’