George Eliot Quotes
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The memory has as many moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery like a diorama.
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How can one ever do anything nobly Christian, living among people with such petty thoughts?
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Tis a petty kind of fame At best, that comes of making violins; And saves no masses, either. Thou wilt go To purgatory none the less.
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Steady work turns genius to a loom.
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I easily sink into mere absorption of what other minds have done, and should like a whole life for that alone.
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A proud heart and a lofty mountain are never fruitful.
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It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees.
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Decide on what you think is right, and stick to it.
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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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Hold up your head! You were not made for failure, you were made for victory. Go forward with a joyful confidence.
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Her little butterfly soul fluttered incessantly between memory and dubious expectation.
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Might, could, would - they are contemptible auxiliaries.
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How is it that the poets have said so many fine things about our first love, so few about our later love? Are their first poems their best? or are not those the best which come from their fuller thought, their larger experience, their deeper-rooted affections? The boy's flute-like voice has its own spring charm; but the man should yield a richer, deeper music.
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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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There is no short-cut no patent tram-road, to wisdom. After all the centuries of invention, the soul's path lies through the thorny wilderness which must still be trodden in solitude, with bleeding feet, with sobs for help, as it was trodden by them of old time.
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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?
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He was of an impressible nature, and lived a great deal in other people's opinions and feelings concerning himself.
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Try to take hold of your sensibility, and use it as if it were a faculty, like vision.
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Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions; they pass no criticisms.
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Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses.
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It is in these acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are forever wasted, until men and women look round with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste has made, and say, the earth bears no harvest of sweetness-calling their denial knowledge.
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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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Even those who call themselves 'intimate' know very little about each other - hardly ever know just how a sorrow is felt, and hurt each other by their very attempts at sympathy or consolation. We can bear no hand on our bruises.
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It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.