George Eliot Quotes
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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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Our selfishness is so robust and many-clutching that, well encouraged, it easily devours all sustenance away from our poor little scruples.
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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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Men and women are but children of a larger growth.
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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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All things except reason and order are possible with a mob.
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Memory, when duly impregnated with ascertained facts, is sometimes surprisingly fertile.
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If a woman's young and pretty, I think you can see her good looks all the better for her being plainly dressed.
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Those only can thoroughly feel the meaning of death who know what is perfect love.
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Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which there is much agreement, much disputation, and yet more personal liking.
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Ah! but the moods lie in his nature, my boy, just as much as his reflections did, and more. A man can never do anything at variance with his own nature. He carries within him the germ of his most exceptional action; and if we wise people make eminent fools of ourselves on any particular occasion, we must endure the legitimate conclusion that we carry a few grains of folly to our ounce of wisdom.
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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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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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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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No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence.
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Love supreme defies all sophistry.
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Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love - that makes life and nature harmonise. The birds are consulting about their migrations, the trees are putting on the hectic or the pallid hues of decay, and begin to strew the ground, that one's very footsteps may not disturb the repose of earth and air, while they give us a scent that is a perfect anodyne to the restless spirit. Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.
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Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear.
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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 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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Grant folly's prayers that hinder folly's wish, And serve the ends of wisdom.
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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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There's folks 'ud stand on their heads and then say the fault was i' their boots.
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How unspeakably the lengthening of memories in common endears our old friends!