Famous George Eliot Quotations

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"Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand."
by George Eliot
"It is a common enough case, that of a man being suddenly captivated by a woman nearly the opposite of his ideal."
by George Eliot
"It is never too late to be what you might have been."
by George Eliot
"Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress."
by George Eliot
"Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which there is much agreement, much disputation, and yet more personal liking."
by George Eliot
"The strongest principle of growth lies in the human choice."
by George Eliot
"The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another."
by George Eliot
"Excessive literary production is a social offense."
by George Eliot
"A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections."
by George Eliot
"The best augury of a man's success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world."
by George Eliot
"The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history."
by George Eliot
"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."
by George Eliot
"The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice."
by 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."
by 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."
by George Eliot
"There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life."
by George Eliot
"To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion."
by George Eliot
"We hand folks over to God's mercy, and show none ourselves."
by George Eliot
"We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been."
by George Eliot
"What quarrel, what harshness, what unbelief in each other can subsist in the presence of a great calamity, when all the artificial vesture of our life is gone, and we are all one with each other in primitive mortal needs?"
by George Eliot
"When death comes it is never our tenderness that we repent from, but our severity."
by George Eliot
"When we get to wishing a great deal for ourselves, whatever we get soon turns into mere limitation and exclusion."
by George Eliot
"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."
by George Eliot
"You may try but you can never imagine what it is to have a man's form of genius in you, and to suffer the slavery of being a girl."
by George Eliot
"All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation."
by George Eliot
"'Tis God gives skill, but not without men's hand: He could not make Antonio Stradivarius's violins without Antonio."
by George Eliot
"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."
by 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."
by George Eliot
"Breed is stronger than pasture."
by George Eliot
"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."
by George Eliot
"Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world."
by George Eliot
"I desire no future that will break the ties with the past."
by George Eliot
"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."
by George Eliot
"In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause."
by George Eliot
"In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness."
by George Eliot
"In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations."
by George Eliot
"Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest."
by George Eliot
"No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence."
by George Eliot
"Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are."
by George Eliot
"Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds."
by George Eliot
"Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them."
by George Eliot
"People who can't be witty exert themselves to be devout and affectionate."
by George Eliot
"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."
by George Eliot
"That's what a man wants in a wife, mostly; he wants to make sure one fool tells him he's wise."
by George Eliot
"Men's men: gentle or simple, they're much of a muchness."
by George Eliot
"Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution."
by George Eliot
"More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us."
by George Eliot
"Our impartiality is kept for abstract merit and demerit, which none of us ever saw."
by George Eliot
"Iteration, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress."
by George Eliot
"Keep true, never be ashamed of doing right; decide on what you think is right and stick to it."
by George Eliot
"The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life."
by George Eliot
"No compliment can be eloquent, except as an expression of indifference."
by George Eliot
"Life began with waking up and loving my mother's face."
by George Eliot
"Our words have wings, but fly not where we would."
by George Eliot
"I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music."
by 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."
by George Eliot
"Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline."
by George Eliot
"Conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course."
by George Eliot
"Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns."
by George Eliot
"Harold, like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas."
by George Eliot
"A toddling little girl is a centre of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other."
by George Eliot
"Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another."
by George Eliot
"All the learnin' my father paid for was a bit o' birch at one end and an alphabet at the other."
by George Eliot
"One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!"
by George Eliot
"Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together."
by George Eliot
"Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers."
by George Eliot
"Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them."
by George Eliot
"I like trying to get pregnant. I'm not so sure about childbirth."
by George Eliot
"I have measured out my life with coffee spoons."
by George Eliot
"When one wanted one's interests looking after whatever the cost, it was not so well for a lawyer to be over honest, else he might not be up to other people's tricks."
by George Eliot
"Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life."
by George Eliot
"Adventure is not outside man; it is within."
by George Eliot
". . . you know nothing about Hope, that immortal, delicious maiden forever courted forever propitious, whom fools have called deceitful, as if it were Hope that carried the cup of disappointment, whereas it is her deadly enemy, Certainty, whom she only escapes by transformation."
by George Eliot
"A woman's heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed recipe."
by George Eliot
"An age at which many men are not quite common - at which they are hopeful of achievement, resolute in avoidance, thinking that Mammon shall never put a bit in their mouths and get astride their backs, but rather that Mammon, if they have anything to"
by George Eliot
"An ass may bray a good while before he shakes the stars down."
by George Eliot
"An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry."
by George Eliot
"Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions; they pass no criticisms."
by George Eliot
"Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms."
by 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."
by George Eliot
"Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love."
by George Eliot
"Be courteous, be obliging, but don't give yourself over to be melted down for the benefit of the tallow trade."
by George Eliot
"Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact."
by George Eliot
"Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact."
by George Eliot
"Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us worthy evidence of the fact."
by 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."
by George Eliot
"But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy."
by George Eliot
"But pride only helps us to be generous; it never makes us so, any more than vanity makes us witty."
by George Eliot
"But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope."
by George Eliot
"Can any man or woman choose duties? No more that they can choose their birthplace, or their father or mother."
by George Eliot
"Childhood has no forebodings; but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow"
by George Eliot
"Childhood has no forebodings, but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow."
by George Eliot
"Consequences are unpitying."
by George Eliot
"Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity."
by 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."
by George Eliot
"Every man who is not a monster, mathematician or a mad philosopher, is the slave of some woman or other."
by George Eliot
"Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster."
by George Eliot
"Falsehood is easy, truth so difficult."
by George Eliot
"Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure."
by George Eliot
"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."
by George Eliot


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