George Eliot Quotes
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I would not creep along the coast but steer Out in mid-sea, by guidance of the stars.
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How impossible it is for strong healthy people to understand the way in which bodily malaise and suffering eats at the root of one's life! The philosophy that is true - the religion that is strength to the healthy - is constantly emptiness to one when the head is distracted and every sensation is oppressive.
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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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But very little achievement is required in order to pity another man's shortcomings.
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I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.
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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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What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.
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The dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters the desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic.
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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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Mighty is the force of motherhood! It transforms all things by its vital heat; it turns timidity into fierce courage, and dreadless defiance into tremulous submission; it turns thoughtlessness into foresight, and yet stills all anxiety into calm content; it makes selfishness become self – denial, and gives even to hard vanity the glance of admiring love.
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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.’
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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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In the ages since Adam's marriage, it has been good for some men to be alone, and for some women also.
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Music sweeps by me as a messenger - Carrying a message that is not for me.
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Resolve will melt no rocks. But it can scale them.
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When the animals entered the Ark in pairs, one may imagine that allied species made much private remark on each other, and were tempted to think that so many forms feeding on the same store of fodder were eminently superfluous, as tending to diminish the rations.
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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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Christian ... he felt very much like an uninitiated chess-player who sees that the pieces are in a peculiar position on the board, and might open the way for him to give checkmate, if he only knew how.
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Yes, Isaac Taylor, who has just published 'The World of Mind,' is the Isaac Taylor, author of the 'Natural History of Enthusiasm.' I dare say by this time there is a want of fatty particles in his brain.
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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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What to one man is the virtue which he has sunk below the possibility of aspiring to, is to another the backsliding by which he forfeits his spiritual crown.
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I don't want the world to give me anything for my books except money enough to save me from the temptation to write only for money.
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I love not to be choked with other men's thoughts.
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No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence.