George Eliot Quotes
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If art does not enlarge men's sympathies, it does nothing morally.
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When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.
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The human heart finds nowhere shelter but in human kind.
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May every soul that touches mine - be it the slightest contact - get there from some good; some little grace; one kindly thought; one aspiration yet unfelt; one bit of courage for the darkening sky; one gleam of faith to brave the thickening ills of life; one glimpse of brighter skies beyond the gathering mists - to make this life worthwhile.
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How oft review; each finding, like a friend, Something to blame, and something to commend.
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I say that the strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.
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Perhaps the windWails so in winter for the summers dead,And all sad sounds are nature's funeral criesFor what has been and is not.
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All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.
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Who can proveWit to be witty when with deeper groundDulness intuitive declares wit dull?
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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!
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If you are to rule men, you must rule them through their own ideas.
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It is always chilling, in friendly intercourse, to say you have no opinion to give.
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What believer sees a disturbing omission or infelicity? The text, whether of prophet or of poet, expands for whatever we can put into it, and even his bad grammar is sublime.
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I love words; they are the quoits, the bows, the staves that furnish the gymnasium of the mind.
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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.
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Where women love each other, men learn to smother their mutual dislike.
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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.
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Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds ...
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Childhood is only the beautiful and happy time in contemplation and retrospect: to the child it is full of deep sorrows, the meaning of which is unknown.
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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.
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Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.
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What business has an old bachelor like that to marry?' said Sir James. 'He has one foot in the grave.' 'He means to draw it out again, I suppose.
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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
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I think the effective use of quotation is an important point in the art of writing. Given sparingly, quotations serve admirably as a climax or as a corroboration, but when they are long and frequent, they seriously weaken the effect of a book. We lose sight of the writer - he scatters our sympathy among others than himself - and the ideas which he himself advances are not knit together with our impression of his personality.