George Eliot Quotes
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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.
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Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds ...
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Impatient people, according to Bacon, are like the bees, and kill themselves in stinging others.
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It is, I fear, but a vain show of fulfilling the heathen precept, ''Know thyself,'' and too often leads to a self- estimate which will subsist in the absence of that fruit by which alone the quality of the tree is made evident.
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I had some ambition. I meant everything to be different with me. I thought I had more strength and mastery. But the most terrible obstacles are such as nobody can see except oneself.
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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.
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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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Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest.
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You are discontented with the world because you can't get just the small things that suit your pleasure, not because it's a world where myriads of men and women are ground by wrong and misery, and tainted with pollution.
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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.
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It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much.
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A medical man likes to make psychological observations, and sometimes in the pursuit of such studies is too easily tempted into momentous prophecy which life and death easily set at nought.
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Well, well, my boy, if good luck knocks at your door, don't you put your head out at window and tell it to be gone about its business, that's all.
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Net the large fish and you are sure to have the small fry.
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When you've been used to doing things, and they've been taken away from you, it's as if your hands had been cut off, and you felt the fingers as are of no use to you.
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Lamech's sons were heroes of their race: Jubal, the eldest, bore upon his face The look of that calm river-god, the Nile, Mildly secure in power that needs not guile.
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It's well known there's always two sides, if no more.
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A peasant can no more help believing in a traditional superstition than a horse can help trembling when be sees a camel.
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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.
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In so complex a thing as human nature, we must consider it is hard to find rules without exception.
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. . . 'there's allays two 'pinions; there's the 'pinion a man has of himsen, and there's the 'pinion other folks have on him. There'd be two 'pinions about a cracked bell, if the bell could hear itself.'
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There is no killing the suspicion that deceit has once begotten.
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Don't let us rejoice in punishment, even when the hand of God alone inflicts it. The best of us are but poor wretches, just saved from shipwreck. Can we feel anything but awe and pity when we see a fellow-passenger swallowed by the waves?
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I would rather not be engaged. When people are engaged, they begin to think of being married soon, and I should like everything to go on for a long while just as it is.