George Eliot Memories Quotations

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

In bed our yesterdays are too oppressive: if a man can only get up, though it be but to whistle or to smoke, he has a present which offers some resistance to the past—sensations which assert themselves against tyrannous memories.

The best travel is that which one can take by one's own fireside. In memory or imagination.

Her little butterfly soul fluttered incessantly between memory and dubious expectation.

With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.

How unspeakably the lengthening of memories in common endears our old friends!

To an old memory like mine the present days are but as a little water poured on the deep.

Memory, when duly impregnated with ascertained facts, is sometimes surprisingly fertile.

Vague memories hang about the mind like cobwebs.

In the man whose childhood has known caresses and kindness, there is always a fiber of memory that can be touched to gentle issues.

There's no disappointment in memory, and one's exaggerations are always on the good side.

Childhood has no forebodings; but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.

It is worth repeating that powerful imagination is not false outward vision, but intense inward representation, and a creative energy constantly fed by susceptibility to the veriest minutiæ of experience, which it reproduces and constructs in fresh and fresh wholes; not the habitual confusion of provable fact with the fictions of fancy and transient inclination, but a breadth of ideal association which informs every material object, every incidental fact with far-reaching memories and storied residues of passion, bringing into new light the less obvious relations to human existence.

Among the blessings of love there is hardly one more exquisite than the sense that in uniting the beloved life to ours we can watch over its happiness, bring comfort where hardship was, and over memories of privation and suffering open the sweetest fountains of joy.

So much of our early gladness vanishes utterly from our memory: we can never recall the joy with which we laid our heads on our mother's bosom or rode on our father's back in childhood; doubtless that joy is wrought up into our nature, as the sunlight of long-past mornings is wrought up in the soft mellowness of the apricot; but it is gone forever from our imagination, and we can only believe in the joy of childhood.

I cherish my childish loves--the memory of that warm little nest where my affections were fledged.

Two angels guide The path of man, both aged and yet young. As angels are, ripening through endless years, On one he leans: some call her Memory, And some Tradition; and her voice is sweet, With deep mysterious accords: the other, Floating above, holds down a lamp with streams A light divine and searching on the earth, Compelling eyes and footsteps. Memory yields, Yet clings with loving check, and shines anew, Reflecting all the rays of that bright lamp Our angel Reason holds. We had not walked But for Tradition; we walk evermore To higher paths by brightening Reason's lamp.

As to memory, it is known that this frail faculty naturally lets drop the facts which are less flattering to our self-love - when it does not retain them carefully as subjects not to be approached, marshy spots with a warning flag over them.

For pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion.

Marriage, which has been the bourne of so many narratives, is still a great beginning, as it was to Adam and Eve, who kept their honey-moon in Eden, but had their first little one among the thorns and thistles of the wilderness. It is still the beginning of the home epic - the gradual conquest or irremediable loss of that complete union which make the advancing years a climax, and age the harvest of sweet memories in common.

The memory has as many moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery like a diorama.

Old men's eyes are like old men's memories; they are strongest for things a long way off.