George Eliot Quotes
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We are all apt to believe what the world believes about us.
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Renunciation remains sorrow, though a sorrow borne willingly.
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Conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course.
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You told me the truth when you said to me once, 'There's a sort of wrong that can never be made up for'.
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I think what we call the dullness of things is a disease in ourselves. Else how could anyone find an intense interest in life? And many do.
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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 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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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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Death is the only physician, the shadow of his valley the only journeying that will cure us of age and the gathering fatigue of years.
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It is always your heaviest bore who is astonished at the tameness of modern celebrities: naturally; for a little of his company has reduced them to a state of flaccid fatigue.
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To manage men one ought to have a sharp mind in a velvet sheath.
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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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I think I dislike what I don't like more than I like what I like.
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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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A blush is no language; only a dubious flag - signal which may mean either of two contradictories.
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These gems have life in them: their colors speak, say what words fail of.
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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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What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?
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You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.
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Nothing at times is more expressive than silence.
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The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another.
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Leisure is gone,--gone where the spinning-wheels are gone, and the pack-horses, and the slow wagons, and the peddlers, who brought bargains to the door on sunny afternoons.
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Marriage, which has been the bourne of so many narratives, is still a great beginning, as it was to Adam and Eve, who kept their honey-moon in Eden, but had their first little one among the thorns and thistles of the wilderness. It is still the beginning of the home epic - the gradual conquest or irremediable loss of that complete union which make the advancing years a climax, and age the harvest of sweet memories in common.
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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.