George Eliot Quotes
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If we use common words on a great occasion, they are the more striking, because they are felt at once to have a particular meaning, like old banners, or everyday clothes, hung up in a sacred place.
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To have suffered much is like knowing many languages. Thou hast learned to understand all.
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Where you have friends you should not go to inns.
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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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Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.
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The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots.
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One soweth and another reapeth is a verity that applies to evil as well as good.
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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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It was one of those dangerous moments when speech is at once sincere and deceptive - when feeling, rising high above its average depth, leaves flood-marks which are never reached again.
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A suppressed resolve will betray itself in the eyes.
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High achievements demand some other unusual qualification besides an unusual desire for high prizes.
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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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It cuts one sadly to see the grief of old people; they've no way o' working it off; and the new spring brings no new shoots out on the withered tree.
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I don't see how a man is to be good for much unless he has some one woman to love him dearly.
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I'm not one of those that can see the cat in the dairy and wonder what she's there for.
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Those only can thoroughly feel the meaning of death who know what is perfect love.
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If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.
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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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We have no right to come forward and urge wider changes for good, until we have tried to alter the evils which lie under our own hands.
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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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Best friend, my well-spring in the wilderness!
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How unspeakably the lengthening of memories in common endears our old friends!
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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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The desire to conquer is itself a sort of subjection.