George Eliot Quotes
-
May I reach That purest heaven - be to other souls The cup of strength in some great agony; Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love, Beget the smiles that have no cruelty. Be the sweet presence of a good diffused, And in the diffusion ever more intense! So shall I join the choir invisible Whose music is the gladness of the world.
-
We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.
-
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;
-
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.
-
Trouble's made us kin.
-
Might, could, would - they are contemptible auxiliaries.
-
The pride of the body is a barrier against the gifts that purify the soul.
-
Correct English is the slang of prigs.
-
How can one ever do anything nobly Christian, living among people with such petty thoughts?
-
You are a good young man," she said. "But I do not like husbands. I will never have another.
-
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.
-
One can begin so many things with a new person! - even begin to be a better man.
-
The light can be a curtain as well as the darkness.
-
A proud heart and a lofty mountain are never fruitful.
-
I found it better for my soul to be humble before the mysteries o' God's dealings, and not be making a clatter about what I could never understand.
-
The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character.
-
The intensest form of hatred is that rooted in fear.
-
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.
-
The poverty of our imagination is no measure of say the world's resources. Our posterity will no doubt get fuel in ways that we are unable to devise for them.
-
We judge other according to results; how else?--not knowing the process by which results are arrived at.
-
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 .
-
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.
-
If we only look far enough off for the consequence of our actions, we can always find some point in the combination of results by which those actions can be justified: by adopting the point of view of a Providence who arranges results, or of a philosopher who traces them, we shall find it possible to obtain perfect complacency in choosing to do what is most agreeable to us in the present moment.
-
There is heroism even in the circles of hell for fellow-sinners who cling to each other in the fiery whirlwind and never recriminate.