George Eliot Quotes
-
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.
-
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.
-
Inclination snatches argumentsTo make indulgence seem judicious choice.
-
To the old, sorrow is sorrow; to the young, it is despair.
-
It belongs to every large nature, when it is not under the immediate power of some strong unquestioning emotion, to suspect itself, and doubt the truth of its own impressions, conscious of possibilities beyond its own horizon.
-
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.
-
These gems have life in them: their colors speak, say what words fail of.
-
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.
-
I think I dislike what I don't like more than I like what I like.
-
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.
-
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.
-
I am not resigned: I am not sure life is long enough to learn that lesson.
-
For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.
-
Nothing at times is more expressive than silence.
-
It is in the nature of foolish reasonings to seem good to the foolish reasoner.
-
To manage men one ought to have a sharp mind in a velvet sheath.
-
There's no pleasure i' living if you're to be corked up for ever, and only dribble your mind out by the sly, like a leaky barrel.
-
But most of us are apt to settle within ourselves that the man who blocks our way is odious, and not to mind causing him a little of the disgust which his personality excites in ourselves.
-
The mother's love is at first an absorbing delight, blunting all other sensibilities; it is an expansion of the animal existence; it enlarges the imagined range for self to move in: but in after years it can only continue to be joy on the same terms as other long-lived love--that is, by much suppression of self, and power of living in the experience of another.
-
A woman's rank Lies in the fulness of her womanhood: Therein alone she is royal.
-
We are all apt to believe what the world believes about us.
-
There's no disappointment in memory, and one's exaggerations are always on the good side.
-
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.
-
Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down.