George Eliot Quotes
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Worldly faces, never look so worldly as at a funeral.
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Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest.
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No one who has ever known what it is to lose faith in a fellow-man whom he has profoundly loved and reverenced, will lightly say that the shock can leave the faith in the Invisible Goodness unshaken. With the sinking of high human trust, the dignity of life sinks too; we cease to believe in our own better self, since that also is part of the common nature which is degraded in our thought; and all the finer impulses of the soul are dulled.
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Love has a way of cheating itself consciously, like a child who plays at solitary hide-and-seek; it is pleased with assurances that it all the while disbelieves.
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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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Often the soul is ripened into fuller goodness while age has spread an ugly film, so that mere glances can never divine the preciousness of the fruit.
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Nature has the deep cunning which hides itself under the appearance of openness, so that simple people think they can see through her quite well, and all the while she is secretly preparing a refutation of their confident prophecies.
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Children demand that their heroes should be fleckless, and easily believe them so.
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Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in her hand.
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The last refuge of intolerance is in not tolerating the intolerant.
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The desire to conquer is itself a sort of subjection.
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Men and women are but children of a larger growth.
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Whatever may be the success of my stories, I shall be resolute in preserving my incognito, having observed that a nom de plume secures all the advantages without the disagreeables of reputation.
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O the anguish of the thought that we can never atone to our dead for the stinted affection we gave them.
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The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.
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A suppressed resolve will betray itself in the eyes.
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If you are not proud of your cellar, there is no thrill of satisfaction in seeing your guest hold up his wineglass to the light and look judicial.
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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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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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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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Those only can thoroughly feel the meaning of death who know what is perfect love.
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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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Mysterious haunts of echoes old and far, The voice divine of human loyalty.
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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.