George Eliot Quotations

It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees.

Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.

Adventure is not outside man; it is within.

Life began with waking up and loving my mother's face.

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

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

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

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

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

It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.

Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have wrinkles.

The responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision.

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

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

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

The egoism which enters into our theories does not affect their sincerity; rather, the more our egoism is satisfied, the more robust is our belief.

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

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.

Great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion.

Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions; they pass no criticisms.

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.

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

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

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.

It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibers that knit us to the old.

Little children are still the symbol of the eternal marriage between love and duty.

The world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities.

Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

I'm not denyin' the women are foolish. God Almighty made 'em to match the men.

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

Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.

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

Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.

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.

Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.

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.

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.

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.

Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity.

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.

You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.

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 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.

In every parting there is an image of death.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

There are many victories worse than a defeat.

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

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

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

The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.

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

Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?

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

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.

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.

And when a woman's will is as strong as the man's who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment.

Might, could, would - they are contemptible auxiliaries.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!

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

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

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

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

The strongest principle of growth lies in the human choice.

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

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

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

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

Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through.

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

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

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

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

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

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

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

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

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

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.