George Eliot Quotes
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It is a wonderful subduer-this need of love, this hunger of the heart.
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Joy is the best of wine.
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We have all our secret sins; and if we knew ourselves we should not judge each other harshly.
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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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Hatred is like fire, it makes even light rubbish deadly.
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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.
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A good solid bit of work lasts.
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If a man goes a little too far along a new road, it is usually himself that he harms more than any one else.
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As to people saying a few idle words about us, we must not mind that, any more than the old church steeple minds the rooks cawing about it.
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Explain! Tell a man to explain how he dropped into hell! Explain my preference! I never had a PREFERENCE for her, any more than I have a preference for breathing. No other woman exists by the side of her. I would rather touch her hand if it were dead, than I would touch any other woman's living.
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Unwonted circumstances may make us all rather unlike ourselves: there are conditions under which the most majestic person is obliged to sneeze, and our emotions are liable to be acted on in the same incongruous manner.
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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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When one wanted one's interests looking after whatever the cost, it was not so well for a lawyer to be over honest, else he might not be up to other people's tricks.
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I know forgiveness is a man's duty, but, to my thinking, that can only mean as you're to give up all thoughts o' taking revenge: it can never mean as you're t' have your old feelings back again, for that's not possible.
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The early months of marriage often are times of critical tumult,--whether that of a shrimp pool or of deeper water,--which afterwards subside into cheerful peace.
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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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I easily sink into mere absorption of what other minds have done, and should like a whole life for that alone.
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Particular lies may speak a general truth.
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Hopes have precarious life. They are oft blighted, withered, snapped sheer off In vigorous growth and turned to rottenness.
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A patronizing disposition always has its meaner side.
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He had the superficial kindness of a good-humored, self-satisfied nature, that fears no rivalry, and has encountered no contrarieties.
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There is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence. There are glances of hatred that stab and raise no cry of murder; robberies that leave man or woman for ever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer --committed to no sound except that of low moans in the night, seen in no writing except that made on the face by the slow months of suppressed anguish and early morning tears. Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear.
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For pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion.
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The only failure one should fear, is not hugging to the purpose they see as best.