George Eliot Quotes
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Signs are small measurable things, but interpretations are illimitable, and in girls of sweet, ardent nature, every sign is apt to conjure up wonder, hope, belief, vast as a sky, and colored by a thimbleful of matter in the shape of knowledge....wrong reasoning sometimes lands poor mortals in right conclusions: starting a long way off the true point, and proceeding by loops and zigzags, we now and then arrive just where we ought to be. Just because Miss Brooke was hasty in her trust, it is not therefore clear that Mr. Casaubon was unworthy of it.
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Ignorance is not so damnable as humbug, but when it prescribes pills it may happen to do more harm.
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Our life is determined for us - and it makes the mind very free when we give up wishing and only think of bearing what is laid upon us and doing what is given us to do.
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These gems have life in them: their colors speak, say what words fail of.
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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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Satan was a blunderer ... who made a stupendous failure. If he had succeeded, we should all have been worshipping him, and his portrait would have been more flattering.
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The mysterious complexity of our life is not to be embraced by maxims ... to lace ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to repress all the divine promptings and inspirations that spring from growing insight and sympathy.
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The world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities.
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You must love your work, and not be always looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin. And the other is, you must not be ashamed of your work, and think it would be more honorable to you to be doing something else. You must have a pride in your own work and in learning to do it well.
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To manage men one ought to have a sharp mind in a velvet sheath.
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We are all apt to believe what the world believes about us.
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O may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence; live In pulses stirred to generosity, In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn For miserable aims that end with self, In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, And with their mild persistence urge men's search To vaster issues.
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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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In all failures, the beginning is certainly the half of the whole.
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It is better sometimes not to follow great reformers of abuses beyond the threshold of their homes.
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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.
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The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another.
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A blush is no language; only a dubious flag - signal which may mean either of two contradictories.
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The first sense of mutual love excludes other feelings; it will have the soul all to itself.
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I am not resigned: I am not sure life is long enough to learn that lesson.
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Fate has carried me 'Mid the thick arrows: I will keep my stand Not shrink and let the shaft pass by my breast To pierce another.
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Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled egg; and when it takes to cackling will have nothing to announce but that addled delusion.
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They the royal – hearted women are Who nobly love the noblest, yet have grace For needy suffering lives in lowliest place, Carrying a choicer sunlight in their smile, The heavenliest ray that pitieth the vile.
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Nothing at times is more expressive than silence.