-
Great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion.
George Eliot
-
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.
George Eliot
-
What courage and patience are wanted for every life that aims to produce anything!
George Eliot
-
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.
George Eliot
-
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. . . .
George Eliot
-
Hatred is like fire, it makes even light rubbish deadly.
George Eliot
-
In the man whose childhood has known caresses and kindness, there is always a fiber of memory that can be touched to gentle issues.
George Eliot
-
The sweetest of all success is that which one wins by hard exertion.
George Eliot
-
All things journey: sun and moon, Morning, noon, and afternoon, Night and all her stars; 'Twixt the east and western bars Round they journey, Come and go! We go with them!
George Eliot
-
When one wanted one's interests looking after whatever the cost, it was not so well for a lawyer to be over honest, else he might not be up to other people's tricks.
George Eliot
-
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.
George Eliot
-
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.
George Eliot
-
Death was not to be a leap: it was to be a long descent under thickening shadows.
George Eliot
-
A good horse makes short miles.
George Eliot
-
She hates everything that is not what she longs for.
George Eliot
-
A bachelor's children are always young: they're immortal children - always lisping, waddling, helpless, and with a chance of turning out good.
George Eliot
-
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.
George Eliot
-
Joy and sorrow are both my perpetual companions, but the joy is called Past and the sorrow Present.
George Eliot
-
A man vows, and yet will not east away the means of breaking his vow. Is it that he distinctly means to break it? Not at all; but the desires which tend to break it are at work in him dimly, and make their way into his imagination, and relax his muscles in the very moments when he is telling himself over again the reasons for his vow.
George Eliot
-
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.
George Eliot
-
A prig is a fellow who is always making you a present of his opinions.
George Eliot
-
After all, the true seeing is within.
George Eliot
-
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.
George Eliot
-
There are new eras in one's life that are equivalent to youth-are something better than youth.
George Eliot
