George Eliot Quotes
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We cannot reform our forefathers.
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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;
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Don't you meddle with me, and I won't meddle with you.
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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.
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When you see fair hair Be pitiful.
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The tale of the Divine Pity was never yet believed from lips that were not felt to be moved by human pity.
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"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.
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All honour and reverence to the divine beauty of form! Let us cultivate it to the utmost in men, women and children -- in our gardens and in our houses. But let us love that other beauty too, which lies in no secret of proportion but in the secret of deep human sympathy.
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Don't seem to he on the lookout for crows, else you'll set other people watching.
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It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.
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All things except reason and order are possible with a mob.
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no sort of duplicity can long flourish without the help of vocal falsehoods
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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.
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Trouble's made us kin.
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Brothers are so unpleasant.
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Them as ha' never had a cushion don't miss it.
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It was the last weakness he meant to indulge in; and a man never lies with more delicious languor under the influence of a passion than when he has persuaded himself that he shall subdue it to-morrow.
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The thing we look forward to often comes to pass, but never precisely in the way we have imagined to ourselves.
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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.
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It is necessary to me, not simply to be but to utter, and I require utterance of my friends.
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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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Habit is the beneficent harness of routine which enables silly men to live respectfully and unhappy men to live calmly.
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Love supreme defies all sophistry.
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But I think it is hardly an argument against a man's general strength of character, that he should be apt to be mastered by love. A fine constitution doesn't insure one against small-pox or any other of those inevitable diseases. A man may be very firm in other matters, and yet be under a sort of witchery from a woman.