Top 75 George Eliot Quotes

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through.

To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.

Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster.

Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.

The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory.

Conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course.

In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations.

Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

I’m proof against that word failure. I’ve seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.

I like trying to get pregnant. I’m not so sure about childbirth.

Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.

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.

Hobbies are apt to run away with us, you know; it doesn’t do to be run away with. We must keep the reins.

No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.

And when a woman’s will is as strong as the man’s who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment.

Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

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 only failure one should fear, is not hugging to the purpose they see as best.

We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.

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?

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!

Hostesses who entertain much must make up their parties as ministers make up their cabinets, on grounds other than personal liking.

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.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another.

Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.

Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have wrinkles.

That’s what a man wants in a wife, mostly; he wants to make sure one fool tells him he’s wise.

It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees.

When we get to wishing a great deal for ourselves, whatever we get soon turns into mere limitation and exclusion.

An ass may bray a good while before he shakes the stars down.

The beginning of an acquaintance whether with persons or things is to get a definite outline of our ignorance.

All the learnin’ my father paid for was a bit o’ birch at one end and an alphabet at the other.

I like not only to be loved, but also to be told I am loved.

The best augury of a man’s success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.

Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life.

You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.

It is a common enough case, that of a man being suddenly captivated by a woman nearly the opposite of his ideal.

Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.

Breed is stronger than pasture.

Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.

Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which there is much agreement, much disputation, and yet more personal liking.

Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause.

I desire no future that will break the ties with the past.

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.

Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.

The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.

We must not sit still and look for miracles; up and doing, and the Lord will be with thee. Prayer and pains, through faith in Christ Jesus, will do anything.

It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.

I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out.

Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.

What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other?

But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.

The world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities.

We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.

There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.

Little children are still the symbol of the eternal marriage between love and duty.

I’m not denyin’ the women are foolish. God Almighty made ’em to match the men.

When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.

It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.

Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour’s buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.

Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest.

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.

Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.

Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?

Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.

Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.