George Eliot Quotes
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When God makes His presence felt through us, we are like the burning bush: Moses never took any heed what sort of bush it was—he only saw the brightness of the Lord.
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Life is like our game at whist ... I don't enjoy the game much, but I like to play my cards well, and see what will be the end of it.
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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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The light can be a curtain as well as the darkness.
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Her little butterfly soul fluttered incessantly between memory and dubious expectation.
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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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No one who has ever known what it is to lose faith in a fellow-man whom he has profoundly loved and reverenced, will lightly say that the shock can leave the faith in the Invisible Goodness unshaken. With the sinking of high human trust, the dignity of life sinks too; we cease to believe in our own better self, since that also is part of the common nature which is degraded in our thought; and all the finer impulses of the soul are dulled.
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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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Don't seem to he on the lookout for crows, else you'll set other people watching.
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There are natures in which, if they love us, we are conscious of having a sort of baptism and consecration.
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Blows are sarcasms turned stupid.
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Our virtues are dearer to us the more we have had to suffer for them. It is the same with our children. All profound affection entertains a sacrifice. Our thoughts are often worse than we are, just as they are often better.
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The human soul is hospitable, and will entertain conflicting sentiments and contradictory opinions with much impartiality.
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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 wrong that rouses our angry passions finds only a medium in us; it passes through us like a vibration, and we inflict what we have suffered.
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But what we strive to gratify, though we may call it a distant hope, is an immediate desire; the future estate for which men drudge up city alleys exists already in their imagination and love.
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We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.
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Women should be protected from anyone's exercise of unrighteous power... but then, so should every other living creature.
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Pride only helps us to be generous; it never makes us so, any more than vanity makes us witty.
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We get a deal o' useless things about us, only because we've got the money to spend.
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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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Steady work turns genius to a loom.
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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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He hated the thought of the past; there was nothing that called out his love and fellowship toward the strangers he had come amongst; and the future was all dark.