George Eliot Quotes

If we use common words on a great occasion, they are the more striking, because they are felt at once to have a particular meaning, like old banners, or everyday clothes, hung up in a sacred place.

This is a puzzling world, and Old Harry's got a finger in it.

I would not creep along the coast but steer Out in mid-sea, by guidance of the stars.

A human being in this aged nation of ours is a very wonderful hole, the slow creation of long interchanging influences; and charm is a result of two such wholes, the one loving and the one loved.

Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing was, than simply to know it; for conjecture soon became more confident than knowledge, and had a more liberal allowance for the incompatible.

We are all apt to believe what the world believes about us.

If a woman's young and pretty, I think you can see her good looks all the better for her being plainly dressed.

Them as ha' never had a cushion don't miss it.

In the man whose childhood has known caresses and kindness, there is always a fiber of memory that can be touched to gentle issues.

Whatever may be the success of my stories, I shall be resolute in preserving my incognito, having observed that a nom de plume secures all the advantages without the disagreeables of reputation.

It is in the nature of foolish reasonings to seem good to the foolish reasoner.

What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known, and loved because it is known?

There is a mercy which is weakness, and even treason against the common good.

A good solid bit of work lasts.

The words of genius have a wider meaning than the thought that prompted them.

Husbands are an inferior class of men, who require keeping in order.

The mother's love is at first an absorbing delight, blunting all other sensibilities; it is an expansion of the animal existence.

Beauty is part of the finished language by which goodness speaks.

What furniture can give such finish to a room as a tender woman's face? And is there any harmony of tints that has such stirring of delight as the sweet modulation of her voice?

The moment of finding a fellow-creature is often as full of mingled doubt and exultation, as the moment of finding an idea.

I hold it a blasphemy to say that a man ought not to fight against authority: there is no great religion and no great freedom that has not done it, in the beginning.

The first condition of human goodness is something to love; the second, something to reverence.

When a workman knows the use of his tools, he can make a door as well as a window.

Boots and shoes are the greatest trouble of my life.

Our deeds are fetters that we forge ourselves.

What can still that hunger of the heart which sickens the eye for beauty, and makes sweet-scented ease an oppression?

Things are achieved when they are well begun. The perfect archer calls the deer his own While yet the shaft is whistling.

All who remember their childhood remember the strange vague sense, when some new experience came, that everything else was going to be changed, and that there would be no lapse into the old monotony.

It is strange how deeply colours seem to penetrate one, like scent.

Human longings are perversely obstinate; and to the man whose mouth is watering for a peach, it is of no use to offer the largest vegetable marrow.

To men who only aim at escaping felony, nothing short of the prisoner's dock is disgrace.

Obligation may be stretched till it is no better than a brand of slavery stamped on us when we were too young to know its meaning.

That sort of reputation which precedes performance [is] often the larger part of a man's fame.

Whatever be thy fate today, Remember, this will pass away!

They say fortune is a woman and capricious. But sometimes she is a good woman, and gives to those who merit.

When gratitude has become a matter of reasoning there are many ways of escaping from its bonds.

I'd sooner have one real grief on my mind than twenty false. It's better to know one's robbed than to think one's going to be murdered.

The purifying influence of public confession springs from the fact, that by it the hope in lies is forever swept away, and the soul recovers the noble attitude of simplicity.

Folks as have no mind to be o' use have allays the luck to be out o' the road when there's anything to be done.

You must learn to deal with the odd and even in life, as well as in figures.

So our lives glide on: the river ends we don't know where, and the sea begins, and then there is no more jumping ashore.

Life was never anything but a perpetual see-saw between gravity and jest.

In all failures, the beginning is certainly the half of the whole.

It must be sad to outlive aught we love.

We look at the one little woman's face we love, as we look at the face of our mother earth, and see all sorts of answers to our own yearnings.

In the love of a brave and faithful man there is always a strain of maternal tenderness; he gives out again those beams of protecting fondness which were shed on him as he lay on his mother's knee.

I've had my say out, and I shall be the' easier for't all my life. There's no pleasure i' living, if you're to be corked up forever, and only dribble your mind out by the sly, like a leaky barrel.

There are moments when our passions speak and decide for us ... like a fire kindled within our being to which everything else in us is mere fuel.

The best fire doesna flare up the soonest.

We mustn't be in a hurry to fix and choose our own lot; we must wait to be guided.