George Eliot Quotes
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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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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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It is easier to quell emotion than to incur the consequences of venting it.
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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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A patronizing disposition always has its meaner side.
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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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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 is because sympathy is but a living again through our own past in a new form, that confession often prompts a response of confession.
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Eros has degenerated; he began by introducing order and harmony, and now he brings back chaos.
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Better a wrong will than a wavering; better a steadfast enemy than an uncertain friend; better a false belief than no belief at all.
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Dark the Night, with breath all flowers, And tender broken voice that fills With ravishment the listening hours,-- Whisperings, wooings, Liquid ripples, and soft ring-dove cooings In low-toned rhythm that love's aching stills! Dark the night Yet is she bright, For in her dark she brings the mystic star, Trembling yet strong, as is the voice of love, From some unknown afar.
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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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What a different result one gets by changing the metaphor!
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The law and medicine should be very serious professions to undertake, should they not? People's lives and fortunes depend on them.
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Perfect love has a breath of poetry which can exalt the relations of the least-instructed human beings.
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A human being in this aged nation of ours is a very wonderful hole, the slow creation of long interchanging influences; and charm is a result of two such wholes, the one loving and the one loved.
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There is no feeling, perhaps, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music,--that does not make a man sing or play the better.
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Unhappily the habit of being offensive 'without meaning it' leads usually to a way of making amends which the injured person cannot but regard as a being amiable without meaning it.
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Upon my word, I think the truth is the hardest missile one can be pelted with.
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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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If people will be censors, let them weigh their words. I mean that the words were unfair by that disproportionateness of the condemnation, which everybody with some conscience must feel to be one of the great difficulties in denouncing a particular person. Every unpleasant dog is only one of many, but we kick him because he comes in our way, and there is always some want of distributive justice in the kicking.
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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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A man deep-wounded may feel too much pain To feel much anger.
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Ignorance ... is a painless evil; so, I should think, is dirt, considering the merry faces that go along with it.