George Eliot Quotes
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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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Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life.
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Human experience is usually paradoxical.
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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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There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and to have recovered hope.
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All our ignorance brings us closer to death.
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When a man has seen the woman whom he would have chosen if he had intended to marry speedily, his remaining a bachelor will usually depend on her resolution rather than on his.
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There are men whose presence infuses trust and reverence.
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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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It is well known to all experienced minds that our firmest convictions are often dependent on subtle impressions for which words are quite too coarse a medium.
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The light can be a curtain as well as the darkness.
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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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I easily sink into mere absorption of what other minds have done, and should like a whole life for that alone.
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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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My own experience and development deepen everyday my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.
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'Tis God gives skill, but not without men's hand: He could not make Antonio Stradivarius's violins without Antonio.
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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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People are so ridiculous with their illusions, carrying their fool's caps unawares, thinking their own lies opaque while everybody else's are transparent, making themselves exceptions to everything, as if when all the world looked yellow under a lamp they alone are rosy.
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Trouble's made us kin.
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Resolve will melt no rocks. But it can scale them.
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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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Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.
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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.
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As soon as we lay ourselves entirely at His feet, we have enough light given us to guide our own steps; as the foot-soldier who hears nothing of the councils that determine the course of the great battle he is in, hears plainly enough the word of command that they must themselves obey.