George Eliot Quotes
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The human soul is hospitable, and will entertain conflicting sentiments and contradictory opinions with much impartiality.
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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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It is difficult for woman to try to be anything good when she is not believed in.
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Nature has the deep cunning which hides itself under the appearance of openness, so that simple people think they can see through her quite well, and all the while she is secretly preparing a refutation of their confident prophecies.
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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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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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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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Where you have friends you should not go to inns.
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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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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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Her little butterfly soul fluttered incessantly between memory and dubious expectation.
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Often the soul is ripened into fuller goodness while age has spread an ugly film, so that mere glances can never divine the preciousness of the fruit.
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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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Blows are sarcasms turned stupid.
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Steady work turns genius to a loom.
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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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Pride only helps us to be generous; it never makes us so, any more than vanity makes us witty.
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The light can be a curtain as well as the darkness.
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If you deliver an opinion at all, it is mere stupidity not to do it with an air of conviction and well-founded knowledge. You make it your own in uttering it, and naturally get fond of it.
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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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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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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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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 .
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Of what use, however, is a general certainty that an insect will not walk with his head hindmost, when what you need to know is the play of inward stimulus that sends him hither and thither in a network of possible paths?