George Eliot Quotes
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If a man means to be hard, let him keep in his saddle and speak from that height, above the level of pleading eyes, and with the command of a distant horizon.
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Nice distinctions are troublesome. It is so much easier to say that a thing is black, than to discriminate the particular shade of brown, blue, or green, to which it really belongs. It is so much easier to make up your mind that your neighbour is good for nothing, than to enter into all the circumstances that would oblige you to modify that opinion.
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when a man had deserved his good luck, it was the part of his neighbours to wish him joy.
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This is a puzzling world, and Old Harry's got a finger in it.
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People who write finely must not expect to be left in repose; they will be molested with thanks, at least.
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A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar, unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge.
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To an old memory like mine the present days are but as a little water poured on the deep.
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Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.
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The beauty of a lovely woman is like music ... the rounded neck, the dimpled arm, move us by something more than their prettiness--by their close kinship with all we have known of tenderness and peace.
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An ass may bray a good while before he shakes the stars down.
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'An accomplished woman almost always knows more than we men, though her knowledge is of a different sort. I am sure you could teach me a thousand things-as an exquisite bird could teach a bear if there were any common language between them. Happily, there is a common language between women and men, and so the bears can get taught.'
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One gets a bad habit of being unhappy.
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Genius ... is necessarily intolerant of fetters.
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Melodies die out, like the pipe of Pan, with the ears that love them and listen for them.
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It is good to be unselfish and generous; but don't carry that too far. It will not do to give yourself to be melted down for the benefit of the tallow-trade; you must know where to find yourself.
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Better spend an extra hundred or two on your son's education, than leave it him in your will.
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People who love downy peaches are apt not to think of the stone, and sometimes jar their teeth terribly against it.
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... when one's outward lot is perfect, the sense of inward imperfection is the more pressing.
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It is always good to know, if only in passing, charming human beings. It refreshes one like flowers and woods and clear brooks.
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People are almost always better than their neighbors think they are.
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My childhood was full of deep sorrows - colic, whooping-cough, dread of ghosts, hell, Satan, and a Deity in the sky who was angry when I ate too much plumcake.
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It is a wonderful subduer, this need of love-this hunger of the heart-as peremptory as that other hunger by which Nature forces us to submit to the yoke, and change the face of the world.
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No farther will I travel: once again My brethren I will see, and that fair plain Where I and song were born. There fresh-voiced youth Will pour my strains with all the early truth Which now abides not in my voice and hands, But only in the soul, the will that stands Helpless to move. My tribe remembering Will cry, ''Tis he!' and run to greet me, welcoming.
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What a wretched lot of old shrivelled creatures we shall be by-and-by. Never mind - the uglier we get in the eyes of others, the lovelier we shall be to each other; that has always been my firm faith about friendship.