George Eliot Quotes
How lovely the little river is, with its dark changing wavelets! It seems to me like a living companion while I wander along the bank, and listen to its low, placid voice.
Conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course.
I don't want the world to give me anything for my books except money enough to save me from the temptation to write only for money.
Rome - the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.
What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self.
It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibers that knit us to the old.
There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire; it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.
The egoism which enters into our theories does not affect their sincerity; rather, the more our egoism is satisfied, the more robust is our belief.
The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.
Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.
She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.
There is so much to read and the days are so short! I get more hungry for knowledge every day, and less able to satisfy my hunger.
The darkest night that ever fell upon the earth never hid the light, never put out the stars. It only made the stars more keenly, kindly glancing, as if in protest against the darkness.
I like breakfast-time better than any other moment in the day. No dust has settled on one's mind then, and it presents a clear mirror to the rays of things.
Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?
We must not inquire too curiously into motives. they are apt to become feeble in the utterance: the aroma is mixed with the grosser air. We must keep the germinating grain away from the light.
Sympathetic people often don't communicate well, they back reflected images which hide their own depths.
There is hardly any mental misery worse than that of having our own serious phrases, our own rooted beliefs, caricatured by a charlatan or a hireling.
I've never any pity for conceited people, because I think they carry their comfort about with them.
What is opportunity to the man who can't use it? An unfecundated egg, which the waves of time wash away into nonentity.
Hopes have precarious life. They are oft blighted, withered, snapped sheer off In vigorous growth and turned to rottenness.
A toddling little girl is a centre of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other.
An ingenious web of probabilities is the surest screen a wise man can place between himself and the truth.
Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.
A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards.
But what we strive to gratify, though we may call it a distant hope, is an immediate desire; the future estate for which men drudge up city alleys exists already in their imagination and love.
It is painful to be told that anything is very fine and not be able to feel that it is fine--something like being blind, while people talk of the sky.
