George Eliot Quotes - Page 2

Animals are such agreeable friends- they ask no questions they pass no criticisms.
George Eliot
Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which there is much agreement much disputation and yet more personal liking.
George Eliot
Wear a smile and have friends wear a scowl and have wrinkles.
George Eliot
Best friend my well-spring in the wilderness!
George Eliot
Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions they pass no criticisms.
George Eliot
Hatred is like fire-it makes even light rubbish deadly.
George Eliot
What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?
George Eliot
Those who trust us educate us.
George Eliot
Better a false belief than no belief at all.
George Eliot
Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.
George Eliot
The only failure a man ought to fear is failure in cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.
George Eliot
There's folks 'ud stand on their heads and then say the fault was i' their boots.
George Eliot
Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning.
George Eliot
No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty.
George Eliot
Our deeds still travel with us from afar and what we have been makes us what we are.
George Eliot
The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.
George Eliot
Decide on what you think is right and stick to it.
George Eliot
The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.
George Eliot
Necessity does the work of courage.
George Eliot
Life is measured by the rapidity of change the succession of influences that modify the being.
George Eliot
Blessed is the man who having nothing to say refrains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.
George Eliot
There is no feeling except the extremes of fear and grief that does not find relief in music.
George Eliot
Animals are such agreeable friends they ask no questions pass no criticisms.
George Eliot
It's them that takes advantage that gets advantage i' this world.
George Eliot
Mr. Craig was not above talking politics occasionally, though he piqued himself rather on a wise insight than on specific information.
George Eliot
If I really care for you, if I try to think myself into your position and orientation, then the world is bettered by my effort at understanding and comprehension. If you respond to my effort by trying to extend the same sympathy and understanding to others in turn, then the betterment of the world has been minutely but significantly extended. We want people to feel with us, more than to act for us.
George Eliot
He was a quick fellow, and when hot from play, would toss himself in a corner, and in five minutes be deep in any sort of book that he could lay his hands on: if it were Rasselas or Gulliver, so much the better, but Bailey's Dictionary would do, or the Bible with the Apocrypha in it. Something he must read, when he was not riding the pony, or running and hunting, or listening to the talk of men. All this was true of him at ten years of age; he had then read through Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea, which was neither milk for babes, nor any chalky mixture meant to pass for milk, and it had already occurred to him that books were stuff, and that life was stupid.
George Eliot
The sense of security more frequently springs from habit than from conviction, and for this reason it oftensubsists after such a change in the conditions as might have been expected to suggest alarm. The lapse of time during which a given event has not happened, is, in this logic of habit, constantly alleged as a reason why the event should never happen, even when the lapse of time is precisely the added condition which makes the event imminent.
George Eliot
Her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible,—or from one of our elder poets,—in a paragraph of to-day’s newspaper.
George Eliot
In so complex a thing as human nature, we must consider, it is hard to find rules without exception.
George Eliot
I had some ambition. I meant everything to be different with me. I thought I had more strength and mastery. But the most terrible obstacles are such as nobody can see except oneself.
George Eliot
College mostly makes people like bladders—just good for nothing but t’ hold the stuff as is poured into ‘em.
George Eliot
Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion; and ties us by our heart-strings to the beings that jar us at every movement.
George Eliot
Tom's contemptuous conception of a girl included the attribute of being unfit to walk in dirty places.
George Eliot
He has got no good red blood in his body," said Sir James."No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses," said Mrs. Cadwallader.
George Eliot
what secular avocation on earth was there for a young man (whose friends could not get him an ‘appointment’) which was at once gentlemanly, lucrative, and to be followed without special knowledge?
George Eliot
Will was not without his intentions to be always generous, but our tongues are little triggers which have usually been pulled before general intentions can be brought to bear.
George Eliot
He sat watching what went forward with the quiet outward glance of healthy old age.
George Eliot
How can a man’s candour be seen in all its lustre unless he has a few failings to talk of? But he had an agreeable confidence that his faults were all of a generous kind—impetuous, arm-blooded, leonine; never crawling, crafty, reptilian.
George Eliot
What a different result one gets by changing the metaphor!
George Eliot
I should never have been happy in any profession that did not call forth the highest intellectual strain, and yet keep me in good warm contact with my neighbors. There is nothing like the medical profession for that: one can have the exclusive scientific life that touches the distance and befriend the old fogie in the parish too.
George Eliot
The days were longer then (for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings.
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.
George Eliot
Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets.
George Eliot
...but prejudices, like odorous bodies, have a double existence both solid and subtle — solid as the pyramids, subtle as the twentieth echo of an echo, or as the memory of hyacinths which once scented the darkness.
George Eliot
Power of generalizing gives men so much the superiority in mistake over the dumb animals.
George Eliot
Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning; but give me the man who has pluck to fight when he's sure of losing. That's my way, sir; and there are many victories worse than a defeat.
George Eliot
Eros has degenerated; he began by introducing order and harmony, and now he brings back chaos.
George Eliot
Selfish— a judgment readily passed by those who have never tested their own power of sacrifice.
George Eliot
In Rome it seems as if there were so many things which are more wanted in the world than pictures.
George Eliot
One must be poor to know the luxury of giving.
George Eliot
In poor Rosamond’s mind there was not room enough for luxuries to look small in.
George Eliot
It had never occurred to him that he should live in any other than what he would have called an ordinary way, with green glasses for hock, and excellent waiting at table. In warming himself at French social theories he had brought away no smell of scorching. We may handle even extreme opinions with impunity while our furniture, our dinner-giving, and preference for armorial bearings in our own ease, link us indissolubly with the established order.
George Eliot
Keep true. Never be ashamed of doing right. Decide what you think is right and stick to it.
George Eliot
Mr. Poyser had no reason to be ashamed of his leg, and suspected that the growing abuse of top-boots and other fashions tending to disguise the nether limbs had their origin in a pitiable degeneracy of the human calf.
George Eliot
Wishes are held to be ominous; according to which belief the order of the world is so arranged that if you have an impious objection to a squint, your offspring is more likely to be born with one; also, that if you happen to desire a squint, you would not get it. This desponding view of probability the hopeful entirely reject, taking their wishes as good and sufficient security for all kinds of fulfilment.
George Eliot
That is the way with us when we have any uneasy jealousy in our disposition: if our talents are chiefly of the burrowing kind, our honey-sipping cousin (whom we have grave reasons for objecting to) is likely to have a secret contempt for us, and any one who admires him passes an oblique criticism on ourselves. Having the scruples of rectitude in our souls, we are above the meanness of injuring him—rather we meet all his claims on us by active benefits; and the drawing of cheques for him, being a superiority which he must recognize, gives our bitterness a milder infusion.
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.
George Eliot
Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbor's buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.
George Eliot
Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.
George Eliot