George Eliot Quotes
-
It is a wonderful subduer-this need of love, this hunger of the heart.
-
There is a mercy which is weakness, and even treason against the common good.
-
Them as ha' never had a cushion don't miss it.
-
What is better than to love and live with the loved? – But that must sometimes bring us to live with the dead; and this too turns at last into a very tranquil and sweet tie, safe from change and injury.
-
Children demand that their heroes should be freckle less, and easily believe them so: perhaps a first discovery to the contrary is less revolutionary shock to a passionate child than the threatened downfall of habitual beliefs which makes the world seem to totter for us in maturer life.
-
There is so much to read and the days are so short! I get more hungry for knowledge every day, and less able to satisfy my hunger.
-
Imagination is a licensed trespasser: it has no fear of dogs, but may climb over walls and peep in at windows with impunity.
-
Pity that consequences are determined not by excuses but by actions!
-
Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.
-
"Abroad," that large home of ruined reputations.
-
It is never too late to become the person you always thought you could be.
-
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.
-
Every man who is not a monster, a mathematician, or a mad philosopher, is the slave of some woman or other.
-
I couldn't live in peace if I put the shadow of a willful sin between myself and God.
-
A man falling into dark waters seeks a momentary footing even on sliding stones.
-
The moment of finding a fellow-creature is often as full of mingled doubt and exultation, as the moment of finding an idea.
-
Our consciences are not all of the same pattern.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions; they pass no criticisms.
-
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.
-
There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.
-
The tale of the Divine Pity was never yet believed from lips that were not felt to be moved by human pity.
-
Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.