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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The moment of finding a fellow-creature is often as full of mingled doubt and exultation, as the moment of finding an idea.
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The best happiness will be to escape the worst misery.
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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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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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One has to spend many years in learning how to be happy.
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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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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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Man finds his pathways: at first they were foot-tracks, as those of the beast in the wilderness; now they are swift and invisible: his thought dives through the ocean, and his wishes thread the air: has he found all the pathways yet? What reaches him, stays with him, rules him: he must accept it, not knowing its pathway.
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After all, the true seeing is within.
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There are new eras in one's life that are equivalent to youth-are something better than youth.
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A patronizing disposition always has its meaner side.
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It is a very good quality in a man to have a trout-stream.
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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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The words of genius have a wider meaning than the thought that prompted them.
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A bachelor's children are always young: they're immortal children - always lisping, waddling, helpless, and with a chance of turning out good.
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My books don't seem to belong to me after I have once written them; and I find myself delivering opinions about them as if I had nothing to do with them.
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She hates everything that is not what she longs for.
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When a homemaking aunt scolds a niece for following her evangelistic passion instead of domestic pursuits, her reply is interesting. First, she clarifies that God's individual call on her doesn't condemn those in more conventional roles. Then, she says she can no more ignore the cry of the lost than her aunt can the cry of her child.
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Errors look so very ugly in persons of small means -one feels they are taking quite a liberty in going astray; whereas people of fortune may naturally indulge in a few delinquencies.
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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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How will you find good? It is not a thing of choice; it is a river that flows from the foot of the Invisible Throne and flows by the path of obedience.
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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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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.