George Eliot Quotes
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It is always chilling, in friendly intercourse, to say you have no opinion to give.
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An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.
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Where women love each other, men learn to smother their mutual dislike.
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Apropos of the 'The Lifted Veil,' I think it will not be judicious to reprint it at present. I care for the idea which it embodies, and which justifies its painfulness. A motto which I wrote on it yesterday perhaps is a sufficient indication of that idea: -
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Autobiography at least saves a man or woman that the world is curious about from the publication of a string of mistakes called 'Memoirs.
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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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Blameless people are always the most exasperating.
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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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When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.
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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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To be candid, in Middlemarch phraseology, meant, to use an early opportunity of letting your friends know that you did not take a cheerful view of their capacity, their conduct, or their position; and a robust candor never waited to be asked for its opinion.
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They kissed each other with a deep joy. What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life - to strengthen each other in all labour, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?
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What is opportunity to the man who can't use it? An unfecundated egg, which the waves of time wash away into nonentity.
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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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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.
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We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves.
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Kisses honeyed by oblivion.
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Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.
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'Jubal,' the face said, 'I am thy loved Past, The soul that makes thee one from first to last. I am the angel of thy life and death, Thy outbreathed being drawing its last breath. Am I not thine alone, a dear dead bride Who blest thy lot above all men's beside?
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His smile is sweetened by his gravity.
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To manage men one ought to have a sharp mind in a velvet sheath.
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Such young unfurrowed souls roll to meet each other like two velvet peaches that touch softly and are at rest; they mingle as easily as two brooklets that ask for nothing but to entwine themselves and ripple with ever-interlacing curves in the leafiest hiding-places.
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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?
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Men outlive their love, but they don’t outlive the consequences of their recklessness.