George Eliot Quotes
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Great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion.
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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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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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It is one thing to see your road, another to cut it.
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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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Joy is the best of wine.
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A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards.
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It's all one web, sir. The prosperity of the country is one web.
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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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Death was not to be a leap: it was to be a long descent under thickening shadows.
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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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A good solid bit of work lasts.
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Hatred is like fire, it makes even light rubbish deadly.
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I think what we call the dullness of things is a disease in ourselves. Else how could anyone find an intense interest in life? And many do.
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Our virtues are dearer to us the more we have had to suffer for them. It is the same with our children. All profound affection entertains a sacrifice. Our thoughts are often worse than we are, just as they are often better.
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Particular lies may speak a general truth.
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What courage and patience are wanted for every life that aims to produce anything!
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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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For pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion.
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There's times when the crockery seems alive, an' flies out o' your hand like a bird. It's like the glass, sometimes, 'ull crack as it stands. What is to be broke will be broke.
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I have nothing to tell except travellers' stories, which are always tiresome, like the description of a play which was very exciting to those who saw it.
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When what is good comes of age, and is likely to live, there is reason for rejoicing.
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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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Opinions: men's thoughts about great subjects. Taste: their thoughts about small ones: dress, behavior, amusements, ornaments.