George Eliot Quotes
Religion, like all things, begins with self, And naught is known, until one knows himself.
Who can know how much of his most inward life is made up of the thoughts he believes other men to have about him, until that fabric of opinion is threatened with ruin?
Strong souls Live like fire-hearted suns to spend their strength In farthest striving action; breathe more free In mighty anguish than in trivial ease.
Thought Has joys apart, even in blackest woe, And seizing some fine thread of verity Knows momentary godhead.
The higher life begins for us ... when we renounce our own will to bow before a Divine law.
In our spring-time every day has its hidden growths in the mind, as it has in the earth when the little folded blades are getting ready to pierce the ground.
Some folks' tongues are like the clocks as run on strikin', not to tell you the time o' the day, but because there's summat wrong i' their own inside.
There are but two sorts of government: one where men show their teeth at each other, and one where men show their tongues and lick the feet of the strongest.
I cherish my childish loves--the memory of that warm little nest where my affections were fledged.
The soul of man, when it gets fairly rotten, will bear you all sorts of poisonous toad-stools, and no eye can see whence came the seed thereof.
When you've been used to doing things, and they've been taken away from you, it's as if your hands had been cut off, and you felt the fingers as are of no use to you.
Religion can only change when the emotions which fill it are changed; and the religion of personal fear remains nearly at the level of the savage.
When we are dead : it is the living only who cannot be forgiven the living only from whom men's indulgence and reverence are held off, like the rain by the hard east wind .
Every man who is not a monster, a mathematician, or a mad philosopher, is the slave of some woman or other.
Who can prove Wit to be witty when with deeper ground Dulness intuitive declares wit dull?
I can't bear fishing. I think people look like fools sitting watching a line hour after hour-or else throwing and throwing, and catching nothing.
What is your religion? I mean-not what you know about religion but the belief that helps you most?
I could not without vile hypocrisy and a miserable truckling to the smile of the world ... profess to join in worship which I wholly disapprove.
God, immortality, duty - how inconceivable the first, how unbelievable the second, how peremptory and absolute the third.
It is time the clergy are told that thinking men, after a close examination of that doctrine, pronounce it to be subversive of true moral development and, therefore, positively noxious.
Subtract from the New Testament the miraculous and highly impossible, and what will be the remainder?
When the soul is just liberated from the wretched giant's bed of dogmas on which it has been racked and stretched ever since it began to think, there is a feeling of exultation and strong hope.
Fatally powerful as religious systems have been, human nature is stronger and wider, and though dogmas may hamper they cannot absolutely repress its growth.
Ingenious philosophers tell you, perhaps, that the great work of the steam-engine is to create leisure for mankind. Do not believe them; it only creates a vacuum for eager thought to rush in.
I trust you as holy men trust God; you could do nought that was not pure and loving, though the deed might pierce me unto death.
We reap what we sow, but nature has love over and above that justice, and gives us shadow and blossom and fruit, that spring from no planting of ours.
autobiography at least saves a man or woman that the world is curious about from the publication of a string of mistakes called 'Memoirs.
Childhood is only the beautiful and happy time in contemplation and retrospect: to the child it is full of deep sorrows, the meaning of which is unknown.
