George Eliot Quotes
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It is seldom that the miserable can help regarding their misery as a wrong inflicted by those who are less miserable.
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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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Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which there is much agreement, much disputation, and yet more personal liking.
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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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Life began with waking up and loving my mother's face.
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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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We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into insipid misdoing and shabby achievement.
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A girl of eighteen imagines the feelings behind the face that has moved her with its sympathetic youth as easily as primitive people imagined the humors of the gods in fair weather. What is she to believe in if not in this vision woven from within?
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... the business of life shuts us up within the environs of London and within sight of human advancement, which I should be so very glad to believe in without seeing.
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To have suffered much is like knowing many languages. Thou hast learned to understand all.
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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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If I got places, sir, it was because I made myself fit for 'em. If you want to slip into a round hole, you must make a ball of yourself; that's where it is.
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Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in her hand.
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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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The worst of misery Is when a nature framed for noblest things Condemns itself in youth to petty joys, And, sore athirst for air, breathes scanty life Gasping from out the shallows.
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Nature repairs her ravages,--repairs them with her sunshine and with human labor.
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Mighty is the force of motherhood! It transforms all things by its vital heat.
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A common fallacy: to imagine a measure will be easy because we have private motives for desiring it.
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A suppressed resolve will betray itself in the eyes.
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In the first moments when we come away from the presence of death, every other relation to the living is merged, to our feeling, in the great relation of a common nature and a common destiny.
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High achievements demand some other unusual qualification besides an unusual desire for high prizes.
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The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots.
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It was not that she was out of temper, but that the world was not equal to the demands of her fine organism.
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Life's a vast sea That does its mighty errand without fail, Painting in unchanged strength though waves are changing.