George Eliot Quotes

We judge other according to results; how else?--not knowing the process by which results are arrived at.

Leisure is gone,--gone where the spinning-wheels are gone, and the pack-horses, and the slow wagons, and the peddlers, who brought bargains to the door on sunny afternoons.

It is very difficult to be learned; it seems as if people were worn out on the way to great thoughts, and can never enjoy them because they are too tired.

The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

Primary (the LDS Church's Sunday school for children) is where you go to do with somebody else's mother the things you would do with your own mother if she weren't so busy teaching Primary.

Shall we, because we walk on our hind feet, assume to ourselves only the privilege of imperishability?

Harold, like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas.

Affection is the broadest basis of a good life.

There is nothing that will kill a man so soon as having nobody to find fault with but himself.

In the schoolroom her quick mind had taken readily that strong starch of unexplained rules and disconnected facts which saves ignorance from any painful sense of limpness.

You must love your work and not always be looking over the edge of it wanting your play to begin.

News is often dispersed as thoughtlessly and effectively as that pollen which the bees carry off (having no idea how powdery they are) when they are buzzing in search of their particular nectar.

Life would be no better than candlelight tinsel and daylight rubbish if our spirits were not touched by what has been.

to my thinking, it is more pitiable to bore than to be bored.

It is always chilling, in friendly intercourse, to say you have no opinion to give.

We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinnertime.

Our words have wings, but fly not where we would.

A fine lady is a squirrel-headed thing, with small airs and small notions; about as applicable to the business of life as a pair of tweezers to the clearing of a forest.

The commonest man, who has his ounce of sense and feeling, is conscious of the difference between a lovely, delicate woman and a coarse one. Even a dog feels a difference in her presence.

Man may content himself with the applause of the world and the homage paid to his intellect, but woman's heart has holier idols.

Perfect love has a breath of poetry which can exalt the relations of the least-instructed human beings.

Fear was stronger than the calculation of probabilities.

A medical man likes to make psychological observations, and sometimes in the pursuit of such studies is too easily tempted into momentous prophecy which life and death easily set at nought.

Those bitter sorrows of childhood!-- when sorrow is all new and strange, when hope has not yet got wings to fly beyond the days and weeks, and the space from summer to summer seems measureless.

Veracity is a plant of paradise, and the seeds have never flourished beyond the walls.

Trouble's made us kin.

Genius ... is necessarily intolerant of fetters.

"Abroad," that large home of ruined reputations.

We are contented with our day when we have been able to bear our grief in silence, and act as if we were not suffering.

there are two ways of speaking an audience will always like: one is, to tell them what they don't understand; and the other is, to tell them what they're used to.

We are led on, like little children, by a way we know not.

I flutter all ways, and fly in none.

Joy and sorrow are both my perpetual companions, but the joy is called Past and the sorrow Present.

If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie? We should have no law but the inclination of the moment.

Starting a long way off the true point, and proceeding by loops and zigzags , we now and then arrive just where we ought to be.

How oft review; each finding, like a friend, Something to blame, and something to commend.

There are answers which, in turning away wrath, only send it to the other end of the room.

If you could make a pudding wi' thinking o' the batter, it 'ud be easy getting dinner.

As leopard feels at home with leopard.

Some people are born to make life pretty, and others to grumble that it is not pretty enough.

... the fallibility of human brains is in nothing more obvious than in proof reading.

To judge wisely, we must know how things appear to the unwise.

... it is seldom a medical man has true religious views--there is too much pride of intellect.

People are almost always better than their neighbors think they are.

She was no longer struggling against the perception of facts, but adjusting herself to their clearest perception.

Duty has a trick of behaving unexpectedly -- something like a heavy friend whom we have amiably asked to visit us, and who breaks his leg within our gates.

When a man has seen the woman whom he would have chosen if he had intended to marry speedily, his remaining a bachelor will usually depend on her resolution rather than on his.

To know intense joy without a strong bodily frame, one must have an enthusiastic soul.

I would rather not be engaged. When people are engaged, they begin to think of being married soon, and I should like everything to go on for a long while just as it is.

We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.