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Quotes by George Eliot

A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.
– George Eliot
Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life.
– George Eliot
Adventure is not outside man; it is within.
– George Eliot
All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.
– George Eliot
All the learnin' my father paid for was a bit o' birch at one end and an alphabet at the other.
– George Eliot
And when a woman's will is as strong as the man's who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment.
– George Eliot
Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.
– George Eliot
Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions; they pass no criticisms.
– George Eliot
Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning, but give me the man who has pluck to fight when he's sure of losing. That's my way, sir; and there are many victories worse than a defeat.
– George Eliot
Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.
– George Eliot
Best friend, my well-spring in the wilderness!
– George Eliot
Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.
– George Eliot
Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.
– George Eliot
Blows are sarcasm's turned stupid.
– George Eliot
Breed is stronger than pasture.
– George Eliot
But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.
– George Eliot
But most of us are apt to settle within ourselves that the man who blocks our way is odious, and not to mind causing him a little of the disgust which his personality excites in ourselves.
– George Eliot
But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.
– George Eliot
But the mother's yearning, that completest type of the life in another life which is the essence of real human love, feels the presence of the cherished child even in the debased, degraded man.
– George Eliot
Conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course.
– George Eliot
Consequences are unpitying.
– George Eliot
Death is the king of this world: 'Tis his park where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music for his banquet.
– George Eliot
Excessive literary production is a social offense.
– George Eliot
Friendships begin with liking or gratitude roots that can be pulled up.
– George Eliot
Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it: it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker.
– George Eliot
Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.
– George Eliot
Harold, like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas.
– George Eliot
He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.
– George Eliot
Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy: -in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures.
– George Eliot
I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.
– George Eliot
I desire no future that will break the ties with the past.
– George Eliot
I hold it a blasphemy to say that a man ought not to fight against authority: there is no great religion and no great freedom that has not done it, in the beginning.
– George Eliot
I like trying to get pregnant. I'm not so sure about childbirth.
– George Eliot
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.
– George Eliot
I tell you there isn't a thing under the sun that needs to be done at all, but what a man can do better than a woman, unless it's bearing children, and they do that in a poor make-shift way; it had better ha been left to the men.
– George Eliot
I'm not denyin' the women are foolish. God Almighty made 'em to match the men.
– George Eliot
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.
– George Eliot
If we use common words on a great occasion, they are the more striking, because they are felt at once to have a particular meaning, like old banners, or everyday clothes, hung up in a sacred place.
– George Eliot
Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.
– George Eliot
In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness.
– George Eliot
In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations.
– George Eliot
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.
– George Eliot
In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause.
– George Eliot
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?
– George Eliot
It is a common enough case, that of a man being suddenly captivated by a woman nearly the opposite of his ideal.
– George Eliot
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.
– George Eliot
It is generally a feminine eye that first detects the moral deficiencies hidden under the dear deceit of beauty.
– George Eliot
It is never too late to be what you might have been.
– George Eliot
It is, I fear, but a vain show of fulfilling the heathen precept, Know thyself, and too often leads to a self-estimate which will subsist in the absence of that fruit by which alone the quality of the tree is made evident.
– George Eliot
It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees.
– George Eliot
Iteration, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress.
– George Eliot
Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.
– George Eliot
Kisses honeyed by oblivion.
– George Eliot
Life is too precious to be spent in this weaving and unweaving of false impressions, and it is better to live quietly under some degree of misrepresentation than to attempt to remove it by the uncertain process of letter-writing.
– George Eliot
Might, could, would -they are contemptible auxiliaries.
– George Eliot
More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.
– George Eliot
My own experience and development deepen everyday my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.
– George Eliot
No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty.
– George Eliot
No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.
– George Eliot
Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.
– George Eliot
One way of getting an idea of our fellow-countrymen's miseries is to go and look at their pleasures.
– George Eliot
Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.
– George Eliot
Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.
– George Eliot
Our consciousness rarely registers the beginning of a growth within us any more than without us; there have been many circulations of the sap before we detect the smallest sign of the bud.
– George Eliot
Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.
– George Eliot
Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.
– George Eliot
Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.
– George Eliot
Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans -which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.
– George Eliot
Our words have wings, but fly not where we would.
– George Eliot
People who can't be witty exert themselves to be devout and affectionate.
– George Eliot
Perhaps his might be one of the natures where a wise estimate of consequences is fused in the fires of that passionate belief which determines the consequences it believes in.
– George Eliot
Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which there is much agreement, much disputation, and yet more personal liking.
– George Eliot
Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?
– George Eliot
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.
– George Eliot
That farewell kiss which resembles greeting, that last glance of love which becomes the sharpest pang of sorrow.
– George Eliot
That's what a man wants in a wife, mostly; he wants to make sure one fool tells him he's wise.
– George Eliot
The beginning of an acquaintance whether with persons or things is to get a definite outline of our ignorance.
– George Eliot
The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.
– George Eliot
The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.
– George Eliot
The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.
– George Eliot
The intense happiness of our union is derived in a high degree from the perfect freedom with which we each follow and declare our own impressions.
– George Eliot
The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another.
– George Eliot
The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory.
– George Eliot
The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.
– George Eliot
The tendancy of liberals is to create bodies of men and women-of all classes-detached from tradition, alienated from religion, and susceptible to mass suggestion-mob rule. And a mob will be no less a mob if it is well fed, well clothed, well housed, and well disciplined.
– George Eliot
The world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities.
– George Eliot
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.
– George Eliot
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.
– George Eliot
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.
– George Eliot
There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.
– George Eliot
There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.
– George Eliot
'Tis God gives skill, but not without men's hand: He could not make Antonio Stradivarius's violins without Antonio.
– George Eliot
'Tis very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence.
– George Eliot
To act with doubleness towards a man whose own conduct was double, was so near an approach to virtue that it deserved to be called by no meaner name than diplomacy.
– George Eliot
To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.
– George Eliot
We hand folks over to God's mercy, and show none ourselves.
– George Eliot
We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.
– George Eliot
We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.
– George Eliot
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.
– George Eliot
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.
– George Eliot