George Eliot Quotes
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We reap what we sow, but nature has love over and above that justice, and gives us shadow and blossom and fruit, that spring from no planting of ours.
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For pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion.
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It is impossible, to me at least, to be poetical in cold weather.
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It is very difficult to be learned; it seems as if people were worn out on the way to great thoughts, and can never enjoy them because they are too tired.
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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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There is no sorrow I have thought more about than that-to love what is great, and try to reach it, and yet to fail.
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The best happiness will be to escape the worst misery.
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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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The intensest form of hatred is that rooted in fear.
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The right to rebellion is the right to seek a higher rule, and not to wander in mere lawlessness.
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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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There are but two sorts of government: one where men show their teeth at each other, and one where men show their tongues and lick the feet of the strongest.
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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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When you get me a good man made out of arguments, I will get you a good dinner with reading you the cookery book.
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The stars are golden fruit upon a tree all out of reach.
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The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.
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It is one thing to see your road, another to cut it.
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In the schoolroom her quick mind had taken readily that strong starch of unexplained rules and disconnected facts which saves ignorance from any painful sense of limpness.
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Your trouble's easy borne when everybody gives it a lift for you.
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What moments of despair that life would ever be made precious to me by the consciousness that I lived to some good purpose! It was that sort of despair that sucked away the sap of half the hours which might have been filled by energetic youthful activity: and the same demon tries to get hold of me again whenever an old work is dismissed and a new one is being meditated.
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The only failure one should fear, is not hugging to the purpose they see as best.
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in certain crises direct expression of sympathy is the least possible to those who most feel sympathy.
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I've always felt that your belongings have never been on a level with you.
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In old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now. But yet men are led away from threatening destruction: a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may be a little child's.