Quotes by George Eliot (Page 2 of 4)

Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.

Consequences are unpitying. Our deeds carry their terrible consequences, quite apart from any fluctuations that went before--consequences that are hardly ever confined to ourselves. And it is best to fix our minds on that certainty, instead of considering what may be the elements of excuse for us.

When we are young we think our troubles a mighty business -- that the world is spread out expressly as a stage for the particular drama of our lives and that we have a right to rant and foam at the mouth if we are crossed. I have done enough of that in my time.

On the contrary, having the amiable vanity which knits us to those who are fond of us, and disinclines us to those who are indifferent, and also a good grateful nature, the mere idea that a woman had a kindness towards him spun little threads of tenderness from out his heart towards hers.

In the love of a brave and faithful man there is always a strain of maternal tenderness; he gives out again those beams of protecting fondness which were shed on him as he lay on his mother's knee.

There's good chances and bad chances, and nobody's luck is pulled only by one string.

Things don't happen because they're bad or good, else all eggs would be addled or none at all, and at the most it is but six to the dozen. There's good chances and bad chances, and nobody's luck is pulled only by one string.

As to memory, it is known that this frail faculty naturally lets drop the facts which are less flattering to our self-love -- when it does not retain them carefully as subjects not to be approached, marshy spots with a warning flag over them.

Bad literature of the sort called amusing is spiritual gin.

There's truth in wine, and there may be some in gin and muddy beer; but whether it's truth worth my knowing, is another question.

The rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families.

When we are treated well, we naturally begin to think that we are not altogether unmeritous, and that it is only just we should treat ourselves well, and not mar our own good fortune.

John considered a young master as the natural enemy of an old servant, and young people in general as a poor contrivance for carrying on the world.

To fear the examination of any proposition apears to me an intellectual and a moral palsy that will ever hinder the firm grasping of any substance whatever.

I easily sink into mere absorption of what other minds have done, and should like a whole life for that alone.

One always believes one's own town to be more stupid than any other.

I can't bear fishing. I think people look like fools sitting watching a line hour after hour-or else throwing and throwing, and catching nothing.

'Tis God gives skill, but not without men's hand: He could not make Antonio Stradivarius's violins without Antonio.

No man can be wise on an empty stomach.

There's things to put up wi' in ivery place, an' you may change an' change an' not better yourself when all's said an' done.

Even those who call themselves 'intimate' know very little about each other -- hardly ever know just how a sorrow is felt, and hurt each other by their very attempts at sympathy or consolation. We can bear no hand on our bruises.

Few things hold the perception more thoroughly captive than anxiety about what we have got to say.

No matter whether failure came A thousand different times, For one brief moment of success, Life rang its golden chimes.

Vague memories hang about the mind like cobwebs.

It is for art to present images of a lovelier order than the actual, gently winning the affections, and so determining the taste.

There are natures in which, if they love us, we are conscious of having a sort of baptism and consecration.

When you get me a good man made out of arguments, I will get you a good dinner with reading you the cookery book.

Them as ha' never had a cushion don't miss it.

Shall we, because we walk on our hind feet, assume to ourselves only the privilege of imperishability?

All honour and reverence to the divine beauty of form! Let us cultivate it to the utmost in men, women and children -- in our gardens and in our houses. But let us love that other beauty too, which lies in no secret of proportion but in the secret of deep human sympathy.

What mortal is there of us, who would find his satisfaction enhanced by an opportunity of comparing the picture he presents to himself of his doings, with the picture they make on the mental retina of his neighbours? We are poor plants buoyed up by the air-vessels of our own conceit.

It is always good to know, if only in passing, charming human beings. It refreshes one like flowers and woods and clear brooks.

A man falling into dark waters seeks a momentary footing even on sliding stones.

To men who only aim at escaping felony, nothing short of the prisoner's dock is disgrace.

The dew-bead Gem of earth and sky begotten.

Do we not wile away moments of inanity or fatigued waiting by repeating some trivial movement or sound, until the repetition has bred a want, which is incipient habit?

I wish always to be quoted as George Eliot.

It's them as take advantage that get advantage I' this world, I think: folks have to wait long enough afore it's brought to 'em.

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

Our deeds are fetters that we forge ourselves.

The most solid comfort one can fall back upon is the thought that the business of one's life is to help in some small way to reduce the sum of ignorance, degradation and misery on the face of this beautiful earth.

I am not imposed upon by fine words; I can see what actions mean.

Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through.

Life is very difficult. It seems right to me sometimes that we should follow our strongest feelings; but then such feelings continually come across the ties that all our former life has made for us, -- the ties that have made others dependent on us, -- and would cut them in two.

The best fire doesna flare up the soonest.

Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest.

As soon as we lay ourselves entirely at His feet, we have enough light given us to guide our own steps; as the foot-soldier who hears nothing of the councils that determine the course of the great battle he is in, hears plainly enough the word of command that they must themselves obey.

They say fortune is a woman and capricious. But sometimes she is a good woman, and gives to those who merit.

Certainly the determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and novel impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion.

One's own faults are always a heavy chain to drag through life and one can't help groaning under the weight now and then.

I hold it a blasphemy to say that a man ought not to fight against authority: there is no great religion and no great freedom that has not done it, in the beginning.

The vainest woman is never thoroughly conscious of her beauty till she is loved by the man who sets her own passion vibrating in return.

The sublime delight of truthful speech to one who has the great gift of uttering it, will make itself felt even through the pangs of sorrow.

Imagination is a licensed trespasser: it has no fear of dogs, but may climb over walls and peep in at windows with impunity.

How should all the apparatus of heaven and earth make poetry for a mind that had no movements of awe and tenderness, no sense of fellowship which thrills from the near to the distant, and back again from the distant to the near?

Love has a way of cheating itself consciously, like a child who plays at solitary hide-and-seek; it is pleased with assurances that it all the while disbelieves.

One has to spend many years in learning how to be happy.

If you like to swallow him, for his sister's sake, you may; but I've no sauce that will make him go down.

There is so much to read and the days are so short! I get more hungry for knowledge every day, and less able to satisfy my hunger.

Joy and sorrow are both my perpetual companions, but the joy is called Past and the sorrow Present.

Blessed influence of one true loving human soul on another! Not calculable by algebra, not deducible by logic, but mysterious, effectual, mighty as the hidden process by which the tiny seed is quickened, and bursts forth into tall stem and broad leaf, and glowing tasseled flower.

As leopard feels at home with leopard.

There's nothing but what's bearable as long as a man can work.... The square o' four is sixteen, and you must lengthen your lever in proportion to your weight, is as true when a man's miserable as when he's happy; and the best o' working is, it gives you a grip hold o' things outside your own lot.

Surely there was something taught her by this experience of great need; and she must be learning a secret of human tenderness and long-suffering, that the less erring could hardly know?

Where women love each other, men learn to smother their mutual dislike.

No anguish I have had to bear on your account has been too heavy a price to pay for the new life into which I have entered in loving you.

I think there is more than enough literature of the criticizing sort...To read much of it seems to me seriously injurious: it accustoms men and women to formulate opinions instead of receiving deep impressions, and to receive deep impressions is the foundation of all true mental power.

The beauty of a lovely woman is like music.

In the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little.

Do we not all agree to call rapid thought and noble impulse by the name of inspiration?

Genius consisting neither in self-conceit nor in humilty, but in a power to making or do, not anything in general, but something in particular.

When the commonplace We must all die tranfors itself suddenly into the acute consciousness I must die -- and soon, then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel; afterwards, he may come to fold us in his arms as our mother did, and our last moment of dim earthly discerning may be like the first.

Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life--the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it--can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

It is strange how deeply colors seem to penetrate one, like scent. I suppose that is the reason why gems are used as spiritual emblems in the Revelation of St John. They look like fragments of heaven. I think the emerald is more beautiful than any of them.

Souls have complexions too: what will suit one will not suit another.

You are a good young man, she said. But I do not like husbands. I will never have another.

For pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion.

And, of course men know best about everything, except what women know better.

We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinnertime.

A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards.

After all, the true seeing is within.

Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in her hand.

Character is not cut in marble -- it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.

The nature o' things doesn't change, though it seems as if one's own life was nothing but change.

Oh may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence.

Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.

Unhappily the habit of being offensive 'without meaning it' leads usually to a way of making amends which the injured person cannot but regard as a being amiable without meaning it.

It so often happens that others are measuring us by our past self while we are looking back on that self with a mixture of disgust and sorrow.

The idea of duty -- that recognition of something to be lived for beyond the mere satisfaction of self -- is to the moral life what the addition of a great central ganglion is to animal life.

He had no ideal world of dead heroes; he knew little of the life of men in the past; he must find the beings to whom he could cling with loving admiration among those who came within speech of him.

The first sense of mutual love excludes other feelings; it will have the soul all to itself.

Keep true, never be ashamed of doing right.

The mother's love is at first an absorbing delight, blunting all other sensibilities; it is an expansion of the animal existence.

Well, well, my boy, if good luck knocks at your door, don't you put your head out at window and tell it to be gone about its business, that's all.

The perpetual mourner -- the grief that can never be healed -- is innocently enough felt to be wearisome by the rest of the world. And my sense of desolation increases. Each day seems a new beginning -- a new acquaintance with grief.

Of new acquaintances one can never be sure because one likes them one day that it will be so the next. Of old friends one is sure that it will be the same yesterday, today, and forever.

Conscience is harder than our enemies,
Knows more, accuses with more nicety.

I cherish my childish loves -- the memory of that warm little nest where my affections were fledged.

Our sense of duty must often wait for some work which shall take the place of dilettanteism sic and make us feel that the quality of our action is not a matter of indifference.

A human being in this aged nation of ours is a very wonderful hole, the slow creation of long interchanging influences; and charm is a result of two such wholes, the one loving and the one loved.

Whatever be thy fate today, Remember, this will pass away!

Some people are born to make life pretty, and others to grumble that it is not pretty enough.

How lovely the little river is, with its dark changing wavelets! It seems to me like a living companion while I wander along the bank, and listen to its low, placid voice.

Oh, sir, the loftiest hopes on earth Draw lots with meaner hopes: heroic breasts, Breathing bad air, run risk of pestilence; Or, lacking lime-juice when they cross the Line, May languish with the scurvy.

Would not love see returning penitence afar off, and fall on its neck and kiss it?

News is often dispersed as thoughtlessly and effectively as that pollen which the bees carry off (having no idea how powdery they are) when they are buzzing in search of their particular nectar.

If you are not proud of your cellar, there is no thrill of satisfaction in seeing your guest hold up his wineglass to the light and look judicial.

Deeds are the pulse of Time, his beating life, And righteous or unrighteous, being done, Must throb in after-throbs till Time itself Be laid in stillness, and the universe Quiver and breathe upon no mirror more.

It is because sympathy is but a living again through our own past in a new form, that confession often prompts a response of confession.

It is better sometimes not to follow great reformers of abuses beyond the threshold of their homes.

Nature has the deep cunning which hides itself under the appearance of openness, so that simple people think they can see through her quite well, and all the while she is secretly preparing a refutation of their confident prophecies.

What should I do--how should I act now, this very day ... What she would resolve to do that day did not yet seem quite clear, but something that she could achieve stirred her as with an approaching murmur which would soon gather distinctness.

The worst service, I fancy, that anyone can do for truth, is to set silly people writing on its behalf.

It is, I fear, but a vain show of fulfilling the heathen precept, ''Know thyself,'' and too often leads to a self- estimate which will subsist in the absence of that fruit by which alone the quality of the tree is made evident.

Letter-writing I imagine is counted as 'work' from which you must abstain, and I scribble this letter simply from the self-satisfied notion that you will like to hear from me. You see, I have asked no questions, which are the torture-screws of correspondence. Hence you have nothing to answer.

Society never made the preposterous demand that a man should think as much about his own qualifications for making a charming girl happy as he thinks of hers for making himself happy. As if a man could choose not only his wife but his wife's husband!

Love supreme defies all sophistry.

Fine old Christmas, with the snowy hair and ruddy face, had done his duty that year in the noblest fashion, and had set off his rich gifts of warmth and color with all the heightening contrast of frost and snow.

I would not creep along the coast but steer Out in mid-sea, by guidance of the stars.

In our spring-time every day has its hidden growths in the mind, as it has in the earth when the little folded blades are getting ready to pierce the ground.

It is possible to have a strong self-love without any self-satisfaction, rather with a self-discontent which is the more intense because one's own little core of egoistic sensibility is a supreme care.

I know forgiveness is a man's duty, but, to my thinking, that can only mean as you're to give up all thoughts o' taking revenge: it can never mean as you're t' have your old feelings back again, for that's not possible.

God, immortality, duty -- how inconceivable the first, how unbelievable the second, how peremptory and absolute the third.

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.

The best part of a woman's love is worship; but it is hard to her to be sent away with her precious spikenard rejected, and her long tresses, too, that were let fall, ready to soothe the wearied feet.

It's well known there's always two sides, if no more.

No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence.

When one is five-and-twenty, one has not chalk-stones at one's finger-ends that the touch of a handsome girl should be entirely indifferent.

Ingenious philosophers tell you, perhaps, that the great work of the steam-engine is to create leisure for mankind. Do not believe them; it only creates a vacuum for eager thought to rush in.

To most mortals there is a stupidity which is unendurable and a stupidity which is altogether acceptable -- else, indeed, what would become of social bonds?

Of a truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what may be.

Leisure is gone, -- gone where the spinning-wheels are gone, and the pack-horses, and the slow wagons, and the peddlers, who brought bargains to the door on sunny afternoons.

I only thought of myself, and I made you grieve. It hurts me now to think of your grief. You must not grieve anymore for me. It is better_it shall be better with me because I have known you.

Those old stories of visions and dreams guiding men have their truth; we are saved by making the future present to ourselves.

We get a deal o' useless things about us, only because we've got the money to spend.

My childhood was full of deep sorrows -- colic, whooping-cough, dread of ghosts, hell, Satan, and a Deity in the sky who was angry when I ate too much plumcake.

Better spend an extra hundred or two on your son's education, than leave it him in your will.

The difficult task of knowing another soul is not for young gentlemen whose consciousness is chiefly made up of their own wishes.

I love words; they are the quoits, the bows, the staves that furnish the gymnasium of the mind.

Nature has her language, and she is not unveracious; but we don't know all the intricacies of her syntax just yet, and in a hasty reading we may happen to extract the very opposite of her real meaning.

We are poor plants buoyed up by the air-vessels of our own conceit: alas for us, if we get a few pinches that empty us of that windy self-subsistence.

To the receptive soul the river of life pauseth not, nor is diminished.