George Eliot Quotes
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Shepperton Church was a very different looking building five-and-twenty years ago. To be sure, its substantial stone tower looks at you through its intelligent eye, the clock, with the friendly expression of former days; but in everything else what changes!
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But what is opportunity to the man who can't use it?
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Life is measured by the rapidity of change, the succession of influences that modify the being.
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Tis a petty kind of fame At best, that comes of making violins; And saves no masses, either. Thou wilt go To purgatory none the less.
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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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You have such strong words at command, that they make the smallest argument seem formidable.
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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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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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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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Trouble always seems heavier when it is only one's thought and not one's bodily activity that is employed about it.
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There are various orders of beauty, causing men to make fools of themselves in various styles.
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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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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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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.
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I shall do everything it becomes me to do.
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We must not inquire too curiously into motives. they are apt to become feeble in the utterance: the aroma is mixed with the grosser air. We must keep the germinating grain away from the light.
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Upon my word, I think the truth is the hardest missile one can be pelted with.
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Love is frightened at the intervals of insensibility and callousness that encroach by little and little on the domain of grief, and it makes efforts to recall the keenness of the first anguish.
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I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offense. ... Everyone who contributes to the 'too much' of literature is doing grave social injury.
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Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.
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Perhaps nothing ud be a lesson to us if it didn't come too late. It's well we should feel as life's a reckoning we can't make twice over; there's no real making amends in this world, any more nor you can mend a wrong subtraction by doing your addition right.
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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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... learning to love any one is like an increase of property, – it increases care, and brings many new fears lest precious things should come to harm.
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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.