George Eliot Quotes
Surely it is not true blessedness to be free of sorrow while there is sorrow and sin in the world. Sorrow is a part of love and love does not seek to throw it off.
Melodies die out, like the pipe of Pan, with the ears that love them and listen for them.
There is no feeling, perhaps, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music,--that does not make a man sing or play the better.
That golden sky, which was the doubly blessed symbol of advancing day and of approaching rest.
Love is frightened at the intervals of insensibility and callousness that encroach by little and little on the domain of grief, and it makes efforts to recall the keenness of the first anguish.
Is it not rather what we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other?
Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral. They have the same effect of grating incongruity as the sound of a coarse voice breaking the solemn silence of night.
There are some cases in which the sense of injury breeds not the will to inflict injuries and climb over them as a ladder, but a hatred of all injury.
Until every good man is brave, we must expect to find many good women timid--too timid even to believe in the correctness of their own best promptings, when these would place them in a minority.
For what is love itself, for the one we love best? An enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.
The vainest woman is never thoroughly conscious of her beauty till she is loved by the man who sets her own passion vibrating in return.
It cuts one sadly to see the grief of old people; they've no way o' working it off; and the new spring brings no new shoots out on the withered tree.
We have all our secret sins; and if we knew ourselves we should not judge each other harshly.
I found it better for my soul to be humble before the mysteries o' God's dealings, and not be making a clatter about what I could never understand.
If troubles were put up to market, I'd sooner buy old than new. It's something to have seen the worst.
The early months of marriage often are times of critical tumult,--whether that of a shrimp pool or of deeper water,--which afterwards subside into cheerful peace.
A woman mixed of such fine elements That were all virtue and religion dead She'd make them newly, being what she was.
We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into insipid misdoing and shabby achievement.
Life is so complicated a game that the devices of skill are liable to be defeated at every turn by air-blown chances, incalculable as the descent of thistle-down.
Pride only helps us to be generous; it never makes us so, any more than vanity makes us witty.
To think of the part one little woman can play in the life of a man, so that to renounce her may be a very good imitation of heroism, and to win her may be a discipline.
A proud woman who has learned to submit carries all her pride to the reinforcement of her submission, and looks down with severe superiority on all feminine assumption as unbecoming.
As to people saying a few idle words about us, we must not mind that, any more than the old church steeple minds the rooks cawing about it.
There are new eras in one's life that are equivalent to youth-are something better than youth.
Oh may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence.
Imagination is a licensed trespasser: it has no fear of dogs, but may climb over walls and peep in at windows with impunity.
What to one man is the virtue which he has sunk below the possibility of aspiring to, is to another the backsliding by which he forfeits his spiritual crown.
We learn words by rote, but not their meaning; that must be paid for with our life-blood, and printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves.
