George Eliot Quotes
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We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.
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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.
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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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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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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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There is a sort of subjection which is the peculiar heritage of largeness and of love; and strength is often only another name for willing bondage to irremediable weakness.
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The intensest form of hatred is that rooted in fear.
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Steady work turns genius to a loom.
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Power of generalizing gives men so much the superiority in mistake over the dumb animals.
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Decide on what you think is right, and stick to it.
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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.
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A proud heart and a lofty mountain are never fruitful.
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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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Confound you handsome young fellows! You think of having it all your own way in the world. You don't understand women. They don't admire you half so much as you admire yourselves.
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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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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.
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I desire no future that will break the ties of the past.
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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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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.
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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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Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses.
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You are a good young man," she said. "But I do not like husbands. I will never have another.
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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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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.