George Eliot Quotes
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We want people to feel with us more than to act for us.
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We are all apt to believe what the world believes about us.
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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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I love not to be choked with other men's thoughts.
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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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Character is not cut in marble - it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.
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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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While the arm is strong to strike and heave, Let soul and arm give shape that will abide...
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To the old, sorrow is sorrow; to the young, it is despair.
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Until every good man is brave, we must expect to find many good women timid--too timid even to believe in the correctness of their own best promptings, when these would place them in a minority.
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... one's own faults are always a heavy chain to drag through life and one can't help groaning under the weight now and then.
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To act with doubleness towards a man whose own conduct was double, was so near an approach to virtue that it deserved to be called by no meaner name than diplomacy.
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Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest.
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If troubles were put up to market, I'd sooner buy old than new. It's something to have seen the worst.
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No eye saw him, while with loving pride Each voice with each in praise of Jubal vied. Must he in conscious trance, dumb, helpless lie While all that ardent kindred passed him by? His flesh cried out to live with living men, And join that soul which to the inward ken Of all the hymning train was present there.
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There is nothing I should care more to do, if it were possible, than to rouse the imagination of men and women to a vision of human claims in those races of their fellow-men who most differ from them in customs and beliefs.
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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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No man is matriculated to the art of life till he has been well tempted.
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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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The wit of a family is usually best received among strangers.
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Don't you meddle with me, and I won't meddle with you.
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All our ignorance brings us closer to death.
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It is a sad weakness in us, after all, that the thought of a person's death consecrates him or her anew to us. It is as if life were not sacred too, as if it were comparatively a small thing to fail in love and reverence to the brother or sister who has to climb the whole toilsome mountain with us. It seems as if all our tears and tenderness were due to the one who is spared that hard journey.
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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.