George Eliot Quotes
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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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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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There is a mercy which is weakness, and even treason against the common good.
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What a different result one gets by changing the metaphor!
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Life is like our game at whist ... I don't enjoy the game much, but I like to play my cards well, and see what will be the end of it.
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"Abroad," that large home of ruined reputations.
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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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Surely there was something taught her by this experience of great need; and she must be learning a secret of human tenderness and long-suffering, that the less erring could hardly know?
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Things are achieved when they are well begun.
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There are various orders of beauty, causing men to make fools of themselves in various styles.
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I shall do everything it becomes me to do.
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Every man who is not a monster, a mathematician, or a mad philosopher, is the slave of some woman or other.
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Do we not all agree to call rapid thought and noble impulse by the name of inspiration?
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It was one of those dangerous moments when speech is at once sincere and deceptive - when feeling, rising high above its average depth, leaves flood-marks which are never reached again.
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Imagination is a licensed trespasser: it has no fear of dogs, but may climb over walls and peep in at windows with impunity.
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Self-consciousness of the manner is the expensive substitute for simplicity.
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Education was almost entirely a matter of luck — usually of ill-luck — in those distant days.
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We are led on, like little children, by a way we know not.
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No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.
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There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.
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More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.
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Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions; they pass no criticisms.
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One of the tortures of jealousy is, that it can never turn away its eyes from the thing that pains it.
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He was of an impressible nature, and lived a great deal in other people's opinions and feelings concerning himself.