George Eliot Quotes
-
What is opportunity to the man who can't use it? An unfecundated egg, which the waves of time wash away into nonentity.
-
There is something strangely winning to most women in that offer of the firm arm; the help is not wanted physically at that moment, but the sense of help, the presence of strength that is outside them and yet theirs, meets a continual want of the imagination.
-
There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.
-
A woman's rank Lies in the fulness of her womanhood: Therein alone she is royal.
-
For my part I am very sorry for him. It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self--never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardour of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dimsighted.
-
One way of getting an idea of our fellow-countrymen's miseries is to go and look at their pleasures.
-
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: -
-
There's no disappointment in memory, and one's exaggerations are always on the good side.
-
To fear the examination of any proposition apears to me an intellectual and a moral palsy that will ever hinder the firm grasping of any substance whatever.
-
I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs, and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.
-
Blameless people are always the most exasperating.
-
Our passions do not live apart in locked chambers but dress in their small wardrobe of notions, bring their provisions to a common table and mess together, feeding out of the common store according to their appetite.
-
There is no killing the suspicion that deceit has once begotten.
-
The tread Of coming footsteps cheats the midnight watcher Who holds her heart and waits to hear them pause, And hears them never pause, but pass and die.
-
But then the need of being loved, the strongest need … in poor Maggie’s nature, began to wrestle with her pride and soon threw it.
-
Life is too precious to be spent in this weaving and unweaving of false impressions, and it is better to live quietly under some degree of misrepresentation than to attempt to remove it by the uncertain process of letter-writing.
-
Let my body dwell in poverty, and my hands be as the hands of the toiler; but let my soul be as a temple of remembrance where the treasures of knowledge enter and the inner sanctuary is hope.
-
Such patience have the heroes who begin, Sailing the first toward lands which others win. Jubal must dare as great beginners dare, Strike form's first way in matter rude and bare, And, yearning vaguely toward the plenteous choir Of the world's harvest, make one poor small lyre.
-
What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?
-
Receptiveness is a rare and massive power, like fortitude.
-
Perhaps his might be one of the natures where a wise estimate of consequences is fused in the fires of that passionate belief which determines the consequences it believes in.
-
Renunciation remains sorrow, though a sorrow borne willingly.
-
I think I dislike what I don't like more than I like what I like.
-
Creeds of terror.