George Eliot Quotes
-
It is necessary to me, not simply to be but to utter, and I require utterance of my friends.
-
All things except reason and order are possible with a mob.
-
While the arm is strong to strike and heave, Let soul and arm give shape that will abide...
-
There is hardly any mental misery worse than that of having our own serious phrases, our own rooted beliefs, caricatured by a charlatan or a hireling.
-
Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.
-
Until every good man is brave, we must expect to find many good women timid--too timid even to believe in the correctness of their own best promptings, when these would place them in a minority.
-
People who live at a distance are naturally less faulty than those immediately under our own eyes.
-
Sir Joshua would have been glad to take her portrait; and he would have had an easier task than the historian at least in this, that he would not have had to represent the truth of change - only to give stability to one beautiful moment.
-
It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.
-
But she took her husband's jokes and joviality as patiently as everything else, considering that "men would be so", and viewing the stronger sex in the light of animals whom it had pleased Heaven to make naturally troublesome, like bulls and turkey-cocks.
-
Brothers are so unpleasant.
-
Affection is the broadest basis of a good life.
-
Correct English is the slang of prigs.
-
The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character.
-
Wise books For half the truths they hold are honored tombs.
-
That golden sky, which was the doubly blessed symbol of advancing day and of approaching rest.
-
Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.
-
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.
-
I suppose it was that in courtship everything is regarded as provisional and preliminary, and the smallest sample of virtue or accomplishment is taken to guarantee delightful stores which the broad leisure of marriage will reveal. But the door-sill of marriage once crossed, expectation is concentrated on the present. Having once embarked on your marital voyage, it is impossible not to be aware that you make no way and that the sea is not within sight-that, in fact, you are exploring an enclosed basin.
-
"Heaven help us," said the old religion; the new one, from its very lack of that faith, will teach us all the more to help one another.
-
Our deeds are like children that are born to us; they live and act apart from our own will. Nay, children may be strangled, but deeds never: they have an indestructible life both in and out of our consciousness;
-
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. . . .
-
Well, I aren't like a bird-clapper, forced to make a rattle when the wind blows on me. I can keep my own counsel when there's no good i' speaking.
-
Don't seem to he on the lookout for crows, else you'll set other people watching.