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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Men and women are but children of a larger growth.
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It's a father's duty to give his sons a fine chance.
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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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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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We have all got to exert ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same names as other people call them by.
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The beauty of a lovely woman is like music.
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The first sense of mutual love excludes other feelings; it will have the soul all to itself.
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Our impartiality is kept for abstract merit and demerit, which none of us ever saw.
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A man falling into dark waters seeks a momentary footing even on sliding stones.
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Might, could, would - they are contemptible auxiliaries.
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But let the wise be warned against too great readiness to explanation: it multiplies the sources of mistake, lengthening the sum for reckoners sure to go wrong.
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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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Human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty - it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it.
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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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Blows are sarcasms turned stupid.
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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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Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have wrinkles.
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Some gentlemen have made an amazing figure in literature by general discontent with the universe as a trap of dulness into which their great souls have fallen by mistake; but the sense of a stupendous self and an insignificant world may have its consolations. Lydgate's discontent was much harder to bear; it was the sense that there was a grand existence in thought and effective action lying around him, while his self was being narrowed into the miserable isolation of egoistic fears, and vulgar anxieties for events that might allay such fears.
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Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.
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It’s rather a strong check to one’s self-complacency to find how much of one’s right doing depends on not being in want of money.
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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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We learn words by rote, but not their meaning; that must be paid for with our life-blood, and printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves.
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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.