George Eliot Quotes
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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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Worldly faces, never look so worldly as at a funeral.
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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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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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Each thought is a nail that is driven In structures that cannot decay; And the mansion at last will be given To us as we build it each day.
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It so often happens that others are measuring us by our past self while we are looking back on that self with a mixture of disgust and sorrow.
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It is difficult for woman to try to be anything good when she is not believed in.
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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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There are men whose presence infuses trust and reverence.
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College mostly makes people like bladders-just good for nothing but t'hold the stuff as is poured into 'em.
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The human soul is hospitable, and will entertain conflicting sentiments and contradictory opinions with much impartiality.
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Can anything be more disgusting than to hear people called 'educated' making small jokes about eating ham, and showing themselves empty of any real knowledge as to the relation of their own social and religious life to the history of the people they think themselves witty in insulting? The best thing that can be said of it is, that it is a sign of the intellectual narrowness—in plain English, the stupidity which is still the average mark of our culture.
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We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.
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When you see fair hair Be pitiful.
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The wit of a family is usually best received among strangers.
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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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We cannot reform our forefathers.
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Say "I love you" to those you love. The eternal silence is long enough to be silent in, and that awaits us all.
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Fine old Christmas, with the snowy hair and ruddy face, had done his duty that year in the noblest fashion, and had set off his rich gifts of warmth and color with all the heightening contrast of frost and snow.
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There is heroism even in the circles of hell for fellow-sinners who cling to each other in the fiery whirlwind and never recriminate.
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But if Maggie had been that young lady, you would probably have known nothing about her: her life would have had so few vicissitudes that it could hardly have been written; for the happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.
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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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One couldn't carry on life comfortably without a little blindness to the fact that everything has been said better than we can put it ourselves.
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When we are dead : it is the living only who cannot be forgiven the living only from whom men's indulgence and reverence are held off, like the rain by the hard east wind .