George Eliot Quotes
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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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But very little achievement is required in order to pity another man's shortcomings.
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The first sense of mutual love excludes other feelings; it will have the soul all to itself.
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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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Life began with waking up and loving my mother's face.
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Grant folly's prayers that hinder folly's wish, And serve the ends of wisdom.
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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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If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new. We are told that the oldest inhabitants in Peru do not cease to be agitated by the earthquakes, but they probably see beyond each shock, and reflect that there are plenty more to come.
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Society never made the preposterous demand that a man should think as much about his own qualifications for making a charming girl happy as he thinks of hers for making himself happy.
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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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To the old, sorrow is sorrow; to the young, it is despair.
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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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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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Conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course.
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Love supreme defies all sophistry.
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Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing was, than simply to know it; for conjecture soon became more confident than knowledge, and had a more liberal allowance for the incompatible.
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It was the last weakness he meant to indulge in; and a man never lies with more delicious languor under the influence of a passion than when he has persuaded himself that he shall subdue it to-morrow.
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Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear.
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Mighty is the force of motherhood! It transforms all things by its vital heat.
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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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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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Sad as a wasted passion.
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Conscience is harder than our enemies, Knows more, accuses with more nicety.
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Affection is the broadest basis of a good life.