George Eliot Quotes
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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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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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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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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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A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards.
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The pride of the body is a barrier against the gifts that purify the soul.
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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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A serious ape whom none take seriously,Obliged in this fool's world to earn his nutsBy hard buffoonery.
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Sir Joshua would have been glad to take her portrait; and he would have had an easier task than the historian at least in this, that he would not have had to represent the truth of change - only to give stability to one beautiful moment.
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That is the bitterest of all,--to wear the yoke of our own wrong-doing.
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It is painful to be told that anything is very fine and not be able to feel that it is fine--something like being blind, while people talk of the sky.
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Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?
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It is good to be helpful and kindly, but don't give yourself to be melted into candle grease for the benefit of the tallow trade.
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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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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.
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I shall do everything it becomes me to do.
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The usual attitude of Christians towards Jews is - I hardly know whether to say more impious or more stupid, when viewed in the light of their professed principles. ... They hardly know Christ was a Jew. And I find men, educated, supposing that Christ spoke Greek. To my feeling, this deadness to the history which has prepared half our world for us, this inability to find interest in any form of life that is not clad in the same coat-tails and flounces as our own, lies very close to the worst kind of irreligion.
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The years seem to rush by now, and I think of death as a fast approaching end of a journey-double and treble reason for loving as well as working while it is day.
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Women know no perfect love: Loving the strong, they can forsake the strong; Man clings because the being whom he loves Is weak and needs him.
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I think what we call the dullness of things is a disease in ourselves. Else how could anyone find an intense interest in life? And many do.
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Self-consciousness of the manner is the expensive substitute for simplicity.
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Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life──the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within──can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.
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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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Unwonted circumstances may make us all rather unlike ourselves: there are conditions under which the most majestic person is obliged to sneeze, and our emotions are liable to be acted on in the same incongruous manner.