George Eliot Quotes
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Men outlive their love, but they don’t outlive the consequences of their recklessness.
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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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And Dorothea..she had no dreams of being praised above other women. Feeling that there was always something better which she might have done if she had only been better and known better, her full nature spent itself in deeds which left no great name on the earth, but the effect of her being on those around her was incalculable. For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts and on all those Dorotheas who life faithfully their hidden lives and rest in unvisited tombs. Middlemarch
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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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For character too is a process and an unfoldingamong our valued friends is there not someone or other who is a little too self confident and disdainful; whose distinguished mind is a little spotted with commonness; who is a little pinched here and protruberent there with native prejudices; or whose better energies are liable to lapse down the wrong channel under the influence of transient solicitations?
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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.
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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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He said within his soul, ''This is the end: O'er all the earth to where the-heavens bend And hem men's travel, I have breathed my soul: I lie here now the remnant of that whole, The embers of a life, a lonely pain; As far-off rivers to my thirst were vain, So of my mighty years nought comes to me again'.
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The sense of an entailed disadvantage - the deformed foot doubtfully hidden by the shoe, makes a restlessly active spiritual yeast, and easily turns a self-centered, unloving nature into an Ishmaelite.
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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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Howiver, I'm not denyin' the women are foolish: God Almighty made 'em to match the men.
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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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You must mind and not lower the Church in people's eyes by seeming to be frightened about it for such a little thing.
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The fact is, both callers and work thicken - the former sadly interfering with the latter.
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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.
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That farewell kiss which resembles greeting, that last glance of love which becomes the sharpest pang of sorrow.
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Impatient people, according to Bacon, are like the bees, and kill themselves in stinging others.
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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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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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'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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Kisses honeyed by oblivion.
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A child, more than all other gifts That earth can offer to declining man, Brings hope with it, and forward-looking thoughts." —WORDSWORTH.
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It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much.
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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.