George Eliot Life Quotations

What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other?

I like not only to be loved, but also to be told I am loved.

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

The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.

The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.

Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

We women are always in danger of living too exclusively in the affections; and though our affections are perhaps the best gifts we have, we ought also to have our share of the more independent life -- some joy in things for their own sake. It is piteous to see the helplessness of some sweet women when their affections are disappointed -- because all their teaching has been, that they can only delight in study of any kind for the sake of a personal love. They have never contemplated an independent delight in ideas as an experience which they could confess without being laughed at. Yet surely women need this defense against passionate affliction even more than men.

It's no trifle at her time of life to part with a doctor who knows her constitution

Life was never anything but a perpetual see-saw between gravity and jest.

Looking at your life as a debt may seem the dreariest view of things at a distance; but it cannot really be so. What makes life dreary is the want of motive; but once beginning to act with the penitential, loving purpose you have in your mind, there will be unexpected satisfactions--there will be newly-opening needs--continually coming to carry you on from day to day. You will find your life growing like a plant.

When our life is a continuous trial, the moments of respite seem only to substitute the heaviness of dread for the heaviness of actual suffering; the curtain of cloud seems parted an instant only that we may measure all its horror as it hangs low, black, and imminent, in contrast with the transient brightness; the waterdrops that visit the parched lips in the desert bear with them only the keen imagination of thirst.

So our lives glide on: the river ends we don't know where, and the sea begins, and then there is no more jumping ashore.

The great river-courses which have shaped the lives of men have hardly changed; and those other streams, the life-currents that ebb and flow in human hearts, pulsate to the same great needs, the same great loves and terrors. As our thought follows close in the slow wake of the dawn, we are impressed with the broad sameness of the human lot, which never alters in the main headings of its history--hunger and labour, seed-time and harvest, love and death.

In the chequered area of human experience the seasons are all mingled as in the golden age: fruit and blossom hang together; in the same moment the sickle is reaping and the seed is sprinkled; one tends the green cluster and another treads the wine-press. Nay, in each of our lives harvest and spring-time are continually one, until Death himself gathers us and sows us anew in his invisible fields.

You must learn to deal with the odd and even in life, as well as in figures.

Life is like a game of whist. I don't enjoy the game much; but I like to play my cards well, and see what will be the end of it.

Perhaps nothing ud be a lesson to us if it didn't come too late. It's well we should feel as life's a reckoning we can't make twice over; there's no real making amends in this world, any more nor you can mend a wrong subtraction by doing your addition right.

Boots and shoes are the greatest trouble of my life. Everything else one can turn and turn about, and make old look like new; but there's no coaxing boots and shoes to look better than they are.

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.

Uncomfortable thoughts must be got rid of by good intentions for the future.

Affection is the broadest basis of a good life.

Women know no perfect love: Loving the strong, they can forsake the strong; Man clings because the being whom he loves Is weak and needs him.

But is it what we love, or how we love, That makes true good?

Life's a vast sea That does its mighty errand without fail, Painting in unchanged strength though waves are changing.

Life is so complicated a game that the devices of skill are liable to be defeated at every turn by air-blown chances, incalculable as the descent of thistle-down.

I am not resigned: I am not sure life is long enough to learn that lesson.

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.

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.