George Eliot Quotes
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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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Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.
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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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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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There are various orders of beauty, causing men to make fools of themselves in various styles, from the desperate to the sheepish; but there is one order of beauty which seems made to turn the heads not only of men, but of all intelligent mammals, even of women. It is a beauty like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle and to engage in conscious mischief — a beauty with which you can never be angry, but that you feel ready to crush for inability to comprehend the state of mind into which it throws you.
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Boots and shoes are the greatest trouble of my life. Everything else one can turn and turn about, and make old look like new; but there's no coaxing boots and shoes to look better than they are.
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Eros has degenerated; he began by introducing order and harmony, and now he brings back chaos.
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I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out.
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But she took her husband's jokes and joviality as patiently as everything else, considering that "men would be so", and viewing the stronger sex in the light of animals whom it had pleased Heaven to make naturally troublesome, like bulls and turkey-cocks.
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Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions; they pass no criticisms.
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I shall do everything it becomes me to do.
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How is it that the poets have said so many fine things about our first love, so few about our later love? Are their first poems their best? or are not those the best which come from their fuller thought, their larger experience, their deeper-rooted affections? The boy's flute-like voice has its own spring charm; but the man should yield a richer, deeper music.
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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 impossible, to me at least, to be poetical in cold weather.
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It is never too late to become the person you always thought you could be.
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I'll tell you what's the greatest power under heaven, and that is public opinion-the ruling belief in society about what is right and what is wrong, what is honourable and what is shameful. That's the steam that is to work the engines.
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There is nothing that will kill a man so soon as having nobody to find fault with but himself.
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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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Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have wrinkles.
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Duty has a trick of behaving unexpectedly -- something like a heavy friend whom we have amiably asked to visit us, and who breaks his leg within our gates.
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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 Press has no band of critics who go the round of the churches and chapels, and are on the watch for a slip or defect in the preacher, to make a 'feature' in their article: the clergy are, practically, the most irresponsible of all talkers.
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Perfect love has a breath of poetry which can exalt the relations of the least-instructed human beings.
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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.