George Eliot Quotes
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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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After all, the true seeing is within.
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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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It is not ignoble to feel that the fuller life which a sad experience has brought us is worth our personal share of pain. The growth of higher feeling within us is like the growth of faculty, bringing with it a sense of added strength. We can no more wish to return to a narrower sympathy than painters or musicians can wish to return to their cruder manner, or philosophers to their less complete formulas.
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Joy and sorrow are both my perpetual companions, but the joy is called Past and the sorrow Present.
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The scornful nostril and the high head gather not the odors that lie on the track of truth.
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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 vainest woman is never thoroughly conscious of her beauty till she is loved by the man who sets her own passion vibrating in return.
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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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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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Your trouble's easy borne when everybody gives it a lift for you.
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There's things to put up wi' in ivery place, an' you may change an' change an' not better yourself when all's said an' done.
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No man can be wise on an empty stomach.
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In the man whose childhood has known caresses and kindness, there is always a fiber of memory that can be touched to gentle issues.
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There is hardly any contact more depressing to a young ardent creature than that of a mind in which years full of knowledge seem to have issued in a blank absence of interest or sympathy.
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I tell you there isn't a thing under the sun that needs to be done at all, but what a man can do better than a woman, unless it's bearing children, and they do that in a poor make-shift way; it had better ha been left to the men.
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Ignorance ... is a painless evil; so, I should think, is dirt, considering the merry faces that go along with it.
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The stars are golden fruit upon a tree all out of reach.
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... one always believes one's own town to be more stupid than any other.
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We all remember epochs in our experience when some dear expectation dies, or some new motive is born.
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But is it what we love, or how we love, That makes true good?
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A good horse makes short miles.
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Life is so complicated a game that the devices of skill are liable to be defeated at every turn by air-blown chances, incalculable as the descent of thistle-down.
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There are two ways of speaking an audience will always like: one is, to tell them what they don't understand; and the other is, to tell them what they're used to.