George Eliot Quotations | Page 2

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.

Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness.

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

A toddling little girl is a centre of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other.

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

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

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

Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.

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.

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.

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?

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

A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

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

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.

More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple pity that will not forsake us

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.

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

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the best of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.

Men's men: gentle or simple, they're much of a muchness

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.

She was perfectly quiet now, but not asleep--only soothed by sweet porridge and warmth into that wide-gazing calm which makes us older human beings, with our inward turmoil, feel a certain awe in the presence of a little child, such as we feel before some quiet majesty or beauty in the earth or sky--before a steady glowing planet, or a full-flowered eglantine, or the bending trees over a silent pathway.

Formerly, his heart had been as a locked casket with its treasure inside; but now the casket was empty, and the lock was broken. Left groping in darkness, with his prop utterly gone, Silas had inevitably a sense, though a dull and half-despairing one, that if any help came to him it must come from without; and there was a slight stirring of expectation at the sight of his fellow-men, a faint consciousness of dependence on their goodwill.

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

. . . for the stress of circumstances, Fred felt, was sharpening his acuteness and endowing him with all the constructive power of suspicion.

Ignorance... is a painless evil; so, I should think, is dirt, considering the merry faces that go along with it.

How will you find good? It is not a thing of choice; it is a river that flows from the foot of the invisible throne, and flows by the path of obedience

Lohengrin' to us ordinary mortals seemed something like the whistling of the wind through the keyholes of a cathedral, which has a dreamy charm for a little while, but by and by you long for the sound even of a street organ to rush in and break the

That farewell kiss which resembles greeting, that last glance of love which becomes the sharpest pang of sorrow.

That big muscular frame of his held plenty of animal courage, but helped him to no decision when the dangers to be braved were such as could neither be knocked down nor throttled.

It is easy finding reasons why other folks should be patient

It is never to late to be what you might have been

It is never too late to become what you might have been

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.

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.

Tis God gives skill, but not without men's hand: He could not make Antonio Stradivarius's violins without Antonio

Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have wrinkles. What do we live for if not to make the world less difficult for each other?

Wrong reasoning sometimes lands poor mortals in right conclusions

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

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.

A toddling little girl is a center of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other.

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

Do we not wile away moments of inanity or fatigued waiting by repeating some trivial movement or sound, until the repetition has bred a want, which is incipient habit?

You are never too old to be what you might have been.

The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.

The sense of an entailed disadvantage -- the deformed foot doubtfully hidden by the shoe, makes a restlessly active spiritual yeast, and easily turns a self-centered, unloving nature into an Ishmaelite. But in the rarer sort, who presently see their own frustrated claim as one among a myriad, the inexorable sorrow takes the form of fellowship and makes the imagination tender.

. . . the rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families . . .

What greater thing is there for two human souls that to feel that they are joined... to strengthen each other... to be at one with each other in silent unspeakable memories.

Prophecy is the most gratuitous form of error.

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.

A man will tell you that he has worked in a mine for forty years unhurt by an accident as a reason why he should apprehend no danger, though the roof is beginning to sink . . .

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.

Errors look so very ugly in persons of small means --one feels they are taking quite a liberty in going astray; whereas people of fortune may naturally indulge in a few delinquencies.

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

I like not only to be loved, but to be told that I am loved; the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave.

I'm more and more impressed with the duty of finding happiness

Instead of trying to still his fears, he encouraged them, with that superstitious impression which clings to us all, that if we expect evil very strongly it is the less likely to come . . .

Oh may I join the choir invisible / Of those immortal dead who live again / In minds made better by their presence.

I'm not denying that women are foolish: God almighty made 'em to match the men.

I'm not denying the women are foolish: God almighty made 'em to match the men

It's but little good you'll do, a watering the last year's crop

Children demand that their heroes should be freckleless, and easily believe them so: perhaps a first discovery to the contrary is less revolutionary shock to a passionate child than the threatened downfall of habitual beliefs which makes the world seem to totter for us in maturer life.

Certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we're so fond of it.

Be courteous, be obliging, but don't give yourself over to be melted down for the benefit of the tallow trade

It was a pity he couldna be hatched o'er again, an' hatched different.

And, of course men know best about everything, except what women know better.

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.

My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.

Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person; having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but to pour them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, knowing that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then, with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.

Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses.

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.

Consequences are unpitying.

I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same mind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.

It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.

Those who trust us educate us.

I think I dislike what I don't like more than I like what I like.

That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil -- widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.

It is a common sentence that knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what ignorance in an hour pulls down.

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.

One can begin so many things with a new person! - even begin to be a better man.

It's a father's duty to give his sons a fine chance.

Pride only helps us to be generous; it never makes us so, any more than vanity makes us witty.

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.

I've never any pity for conceited people, because I think they carry their comfort about with them.

When God makes His presence felt through us, we are like the burning bush: Moses never took any heed what sort of bush it was—he only saw the brightness of the Lord.

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.

Decide on what you think is right, and stick to it.

One can say everything best over a meal.

I like not only to be loved, but to be told that I am loved; the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave.