George Eliot's Quotes

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.

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

When death comes it is never our tenderness that we repent from, but our severity.

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

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

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

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.

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

Breed is stronger than pasture.

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

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

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

He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.

No compliment can be eloquent, except as an expression of indifference.

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

The strongest principle of growth lies in the human choice.

Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.

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

Falsehood is easy, truth so difficult.

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

I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.

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

It always remains true that if we had been greater, circumstance would have been less strong against us.

Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down.

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

No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty.

Our words have wings, but fly not where we would.

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

The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.

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

Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through.

Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.

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

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

Whether happiness may come or not, one should try and prepare one's self to do without it.

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

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

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

Different taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

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.

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

Harold, like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas.

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

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

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

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

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

Iteration, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress.

Might, could, would - they are contemptible auxiliaries.

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

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

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

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

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

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

People who can't be witty exert themselves to be devout and affectionate.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.

We hand folks over to God's mercy, and show none ourselves.

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?