George Eliot Quotes
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Mysterious haunts of echoes old and far, The voice divine of human loyalty.
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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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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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We want people to feel with us more than to act for us.
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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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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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To the old, sorrow is sorrow; to the young, it is despair.
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I love not to be choked with other men's thoughts.
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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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... 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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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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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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Music sweeps by me as a messenger - Carrying a message that is not for me.
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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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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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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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What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.
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No man is matriculated to the art of life till he has been well tempted.
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Miserliness is a capital quality to run in families; it's the safe side for madness to dip on.
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All our ignorance brings us closer to death.
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To have suffered much is like knowing many languages. Thou hast learned to understand all.
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But a morbid consciousness that others did not give him the place which he had not demonstrably merited-a perpetual suspicious conjecture that the views entertained of him were not to his advantage- a melancholy absence of passion in his efforts at achievement, and a passionate resistance to the confession that he had achieved nothing.