George Eliot Quotes
Society never made the preposterous demand that a man should think as much about his own qualifications for making a charming girl happy as he thinks of hers for making himself happy.
The memory has as many moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery like a diorama.
How can one ever do anything nobly Christian, living among people with such petty thoughts?
Her own misery filled her heart—there was no room in it for other people's sorrow.
The dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters the desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic.
We are overhasty to speak as if God did not manifest himself by our silent feeling, and make his love felt through ours.
For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.
You must mind and not lower the Church in people's eyes by seeming to be frightened about it for such a little thing.
Self-consciousness of the manner is the expensive substitute for simplicity.
The select natures who pant after the ideal, and find nothing in pantaloons or petticoats great enough to command their reverence and love, are curiously in unison with the narrowest and pettiest.
In Rome it seems as if there were so many things which are more wanted in the world than pictures.
Selfish— a judgment readily passed by those who have never tested their own power of sacrifice.
Power of generalizing gives men so much the superiority in mistake over the dumb animals.
Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets.
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.
The scornful nostril and the high head gather not the odors that lie on the track of truth.
If you deliver an opinion at all, it is mere stupidity not to do it with an air of conviction and well-founded knowledge. You make it your own in uttering it, and naturally get fond of it.
It is pleasant to have a kind word now and then when one is not near enough to have a kind glance or a hearty shake by the hand.
To have suffered much is like knowing many languages. Thou hast learned to understand all.
People who live at a distance are naturally less faulty than those immediately under our own eyes.
There is hardly any contact more depressing to a young ardent creature than that of a mind in which years full of knowledge seem to have issued in a blank absence of interest or sympathy.
The thing we look forward to often comes to pass, but never precisely in the way we have imagined to ourselves.
I shall never love anybody. I can't love people. I hate them.' 'The time will come, dear, the time will come.
But let the wise be warned against too great readiness to explanation: it multiplies the sources of mistake, lengthening the sum for reckoners sure to go wrong.
Say "I love you" to those you love. The eternal silence is long enough to be silent in, and that awaits us all.
My childhood was full of deep sorrows - colic, whooping-cough, dread of ghosts, hell, Satan, and a Deity in the sky who was angry when I ate too much plumcake.
There are various orders of beauty, causing men to make fools of themselves in various styles.
The sublime delight of truthful speech to one who has the great gift of uttering it, will make itself felt even through the pangs of sorrow.
Often the soul is ripened into fuller goodness while age has spread an ugly film, so that mere glances can never divine the preciousness of the fruit.
It is better sometimes not to follow great reformers of abuses beyond the threshold of their homes.
There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.
There is no sorrow I have thought more about than that-to love what is great, and try to reach it, and yet to fail.
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.
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.
It is necessary to me, not simply to be but to utter, and I require utterance of my friends.
