George Eliot Quotes
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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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When one is five-and-twenty, one has not chalk-stones at one's finger-ends that the touch of a handsome girl should be entirely indifferent.
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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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... one always believes one's own town to be more stupid than any other.
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Awful Night! Ancestral mystery of mysteries.
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I trust you as holy men trust God; you could do nought that was not pure and loving, though the deed might pierce me unto death.
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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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It is a wonderful subduer-this need of love, this hunger of the heart.
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The Jews are among the aristocracy of every land; if a literature is called rich in the possession of a few classic tragedies, what shall we say to a national tragedy lasting for fifteen hundred years, in which the poets and the actors were also the heroes.
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It's all one web, sir. The prosperity of the country is one web.
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The stars are golden fruit upon a tree all out of reach.
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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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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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Of a truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what may be. . . .
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One has to spend many years in learning how to be happy.
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She hates everything that is not what she longs for.
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For pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion.
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Religion can only change when the emotions which fill it are changed; and the religion of personal fear remains nearly at the level of the savage.
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Eros has degenerated; he began by introducing order and harmony, and now he brings back chaos.
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Anger seek it prey,-- Something to tear with sharp-edged tooth and claw, Like not to go off hungry, leaving Love To feast on milk and honeycomb at will.
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There is a mercy which is weakness, and even treason against the common good.
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Adventure is not outside man; it is within.
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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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We have all our secret sins; and if we knew ourselves we should not judge each other harshly.