George Eliot Quotes
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What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.
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Consequences are unpitying. Our deeds carry their terrible consequences, quite apart from any fluctuations that went before—consequences that are hardly ever confined to ourselves. And it is best to fix our minds on that certainty, instead of considering what may be the elements of excuse for us.
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Men and women are but children of a larger growth.
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Worldly faces, never look so worldly as at a funeral.
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There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and to have recovered hope.
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As leopard feels at home with leopard.
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She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.
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Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some of them woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.
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Brothers are so unpleasant.
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Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.
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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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That golden sky, which was the doubly blessed symbol of advancing day and of approaching rest.
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Her little butterfly soul fluttered incessantly between memory and dubious expectation.
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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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The wit of a family is usually best received among strangers.
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He was at a starting point which makes many a man's career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose. . . .
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People who live at a distance are naturally less faulty than those immediately under our own eyes.
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Wise books For half the truths they hold are honored tombs.
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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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The last refuge of intolerance is in not tolerating the intolerant.
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Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.
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Children demand that their heroes should be fleckless, and easily believe them so.
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The dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters the desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic.
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Jubal had a frame Fashioned to finer senses, which became A yearning for some hidden soul of things, Some outward touch complete on inner springs That vaguely moving bred a lonely pain, A want that did but stronger grow with gain Of all good else, as spirits might be sad For lack of speech to tell us they are glad.