George Eliot Quotes
-
So shall I join the choir invisible Whose music is the gladness of the world.
-
If you are to rule men, you must rule them through their own ideas.
-
If art does not enlarge men's sympathies, it does nothing morally.
-
Among all the many kinds of first love, that which begins in childish companionship is the strongest and most enduring: when passion comes to unite its force to long affection, love is at its spring-tide.
-
And we must learn to accommodate ourselves to the discovery that some of those cunningly-fashioned instruments called human souls have only a very limited range of music, and will not vibrate in the least under a touch that fills others with tremulous rapture or quivering agony.
-
Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds ...
-
Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.
-
Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance!
-
The disappointments of life can never, any more than its pleasures, be estimated singly; and the healthiest and most agreeable of men is exposed to that coincidence of various vexations, each heightening the effect of the other, which may produce in him something corresponding to the spontaneous and externally unaccountable moodiness of the morbid and disagreeable.
-
I love words; they are the quoits, the bows, the staves that furnish the gymnasium of the mind.
-
There is a chill air surrounding those who are down in the world, and people are glad to get away from them, as from a cold room.
-
I say that the strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.
-
Where women love each other, men learn to smother their mutual dislike.
-
In the days when the spinning wheels hummed busily in the farmhouses--and even great ladies, clothed in silk and thread lace, had their toy spinning wheels of polished oak--there might be seen, in districts far away among the lanes, or deep in the bosom of the hills, certain palled undersized men who, by the side of the brawny country-folk, looked like the remnants of a disinherited race.
-
Comments on The Lifted Veil with a motto for it used in the 'Cabinet Edition' of her works (1878), in a letter to John Blackwood (28 February 1873), published in George Eliot's Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals (1885), Vol. 4
-
In the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little.
-
Net the large fish and you are sure to have the small fry.
-
He seemed to weave, like the spider, from pure impulse, without reflection. Every man's work, pursued steadily, tends in this way to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life.
-
That quiet mutual gaze of a trusting husband and wife is like the first moment of rest or refuge from a great weariness or a great danger - not to be interfered with by speech or action which would distract the sensations from the fresh enjoyment of repose.
-
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.
-
Rome - the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.
-
It is always chilling, in friendly intercourse, to say you have no opinion to give.
-
It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them. How can we ever be satisfied without them until our feelings are deadened?
-
The fact is, both callers and work thicken - the former sadly interfering with the latter.