Victorian Quotes by George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) (Page 3 of 3)

Self-confidence is apt to address itself to an imaginary dullness in others; as people who are well off speak in a cajoling tone to the poor.

I think what we call the dullness of things is a disease in ourselves. Else how could anyone find an intense interest in life? And many do.

You know nothing about Hope, that immortal, delicious maiden forever courted forever propitious, whom fools have called deceitful, as if it were Hope that carried the cup of disappointment, whereas it is her deadly enemy, Certainty, whom she only es.

There's no disappointment in memory, and one's exaggerations are always on the good side.

One can say everything best over a meal.

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

Nature repairs her ravages, -- repairs them with her sunshine and with human labor.

Childhood has no forebodings; but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.

We all remember epochs in our experience when some dear expectation dies, or some new motive is born.

Love gives insight, Maggie, and insight often gives foreboding. Listen to me, let me supply you with books; do let me see you sometimes, be your brother and teacher, as you said at Lorton. It is less wrong that you should see me than that you should be committing this long suicide.

When you see fair hair Be pitiful.

It is very hard to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings -- much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.

There is nothing that will kill a man so soon as having nobody to find fault with but himself.

Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts--not to hurt others.

The pride of the body is a barrier against the gifts that purify the soul.

Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.

Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.

That quiet mutual gaze of a trusting husband and wife is like the first moment of rest or refuge from a great weariness or a great danger-not to be interfered with by speech or action which would distract the sensations from the fresh enjoyment of repose.

Happy husbands and wives can hear each other say the same thing over and over again without being tired.

Our consciousness rarely registers the beginning of a growth within us any more than without us; there have been many circulation of the sap before we detect the smallest sign of the bud.

When we are suddenly released from an acute absorbing bodily pain, our heart and senses leap out in new freedom; we think even the noise of streets harmonious, and are ready to hug the tradesman who is wrapping up our change.

It is always chilling, in friendly intercourse, to say you have no opinion to give.

I like breakfast-time better than any other moment in the day. No dust has settled on one's mind then, and it presents a clear mirror to the rays of things.

How can one ever do anything nobly Christian, living among people with such petty thoughts?

As to people saying a few idle words about us, we must not mind that, any more than the old church steeple minds the rooks cawing about it.

Effective magic is transcendent nature.

I think there are stores laid up in our human nature that our understandings can make no complete inventory of.

Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state. Suffering can be likened to a baptism -- the passing over the threshold of pain and grief and anguish to claim a new state of being.

Men and women are but children of a larger growth.

Best friend, my well-spring in the wilderness!

When a tender affection has been storing itself in us through many of our years, the idea that we could accept any exchange for it seems to be a cheapening of our lives. And we can set a watch over our affections and our constancy as we can over other treasures.

Fate has carried me 'Mid the thick arrows: I will keep my stand Not shrink and let the shaft pass by my breast To pierce another.

The mind that is too ready at contempt and reprobation is, I may say, as a clenched fist that can give blows, but is shut up from receiving and holding ought that is precious.

Children demand that their heroes should be fleckless, and easily believe them so .

To be candid, in Middlemarch phraseology, meant, to use an early opportunity of letting your friends know that you did not take a cheerful view of their capacity, their conduct, or their position; and a robust candor never waited to be asked for its opinion.

It is impossible, to me at least, to be poetical in cold weather.

A girl of eighteen imagines the feelings behind the face that has moved her with its sympathetic youth as easily as primitive people imagined the humors of the gods in fair weather. What is she to believe in if not in this vision woven from within?

Hurt, he'll never be hurt -- he's made to hurt other people.

Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral.

Confound you handsome young fellows! You think of having it all your own way in the world. You don't understand women. They don't admire you half so much as you admire yourselves.

After all, people may really have in them some vocation which is not quite plain to themselves, may they not? They may seem idle and weak because they are growing. We should be very patient with each other, I think.

You are discontented with the world because you can't get just the small things that suit your pleasure, not because it's a world where myriads of men and women are ground by wrong and misery, and tainted with pollution.

Perhaps the wind Wails so in winter for the summers dead, And all sad sounds are nature's funeral cries For what has been and is not.

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.

Let my body dwell in poverty, and my hands be as the hands of the toiler; but let my soul be as a temple of remembrance where the treasures of knowledge enter and the inner sanctuary is hope.

The worst of misery
Is when a nature framed for noblest things
Condemns itself in youth to petty joys,
And, sore athirst for air, breathes scanty life
Gasping from out the shallows.

A fine lady is a squirrel-headed thing, with small airs and small notions; about as applicable to the business of life as a pair of tweezers to the clearing of a forest.

When one's outward lot is perfect, the sense of inward imperfection is the more pressing.

We cannot speak a loyal word and be meanly silent, we cannot kill and not kill in the same moment; but a moment is room wide enough for the loyal and mean desire, for the outlash of a murderous thought and the sharp bakcward stroke of repetance.

There are new eras in one's life that are equivalent to youth-are something better than youth.

I think I am quite wicked with roses. I like to gather them, and smell them till they have no scent left.

In Rome it seems as if there were so many things which are more wanted in the world than pictures.

The stars are golden fruit upon a tree all out of reach.

A mother's yearning feels the presence of the cherished child even in the degraded man.

It's a father's duty to give his sons a fine chance.

Eros has degenerated; he began by introducing order and harmony, and now he brings back chaos.

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.

But how little we know what would make paradise for our neighbours! We judge from our own desires, and our neighbours themselves are not always open enough even to throw out a hint of theirs.

Primary (the LDS Church's Sunday school for children) is where you go to do with somebody else's mother the things you would do with your own mother if she weren't so busy teaching Primary.

A medical man likes to make psychological observations, and sometimes in the pursuit of such studies is too easily tempted into momentous prophecy which life and death easily set at nought.

Hopes have precarious life.
They are oft blighted, withered, snapped sheer off
In vigorous growth and turned to rottenness.

Self-consciousness of the manner is the expensive substitute for simplicity.

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.

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

The memory has as many moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery like a diorama.

People are almost always better than their neighbors think they are.

Nothing at times is more expressive than silence.

To the old, sorrow is sorrow; to the young, it is despair.

The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character.

There is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence.

But with regard to critical occasions, it often happens that all moments seem comfortably remote until the last.

We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.

Many of us looking back through life would say that the kindest man we have ever known has been a medical man, or perhaps that surgeon whose fine tact, directed by deeply informed perception, has come to us in our need with a more sublime beneficence than that of miracle-workers.

That farewell kiss which resembles greeting, that last glance of love which becomes the sharpest pang of sorrow.

We must learn to accommodate ourselves to the discovery that some of those cunningly-fashioned instruments called human souls have only a very limited range of music, and will not vibrate in the least under a touch that fills others with tremulous rapture or quivering agony.

We learn words by rote, but not their meaning; that must be paid for with our life-blood, and printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves.

There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.

Pride only helps us to be generous; it never makes us so, any more than vanity makes us witty.

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

Is this not a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love -- that makes life and nature harmonize.

The darkest night that ever fell upon the earth never hid the light, never put out the stars. It only made the stars more keenly, kindly glancing, as if in protest against the darkness.

The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.

It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.

Life seems to go on without effort when I am filled with music.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

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

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

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

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

Breed is stronger than pasture.

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?

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

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.

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

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

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.

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

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life.

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

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.

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

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

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

We must not sit still and look for miracles; up and doing, and the Lord will be with thee. Prayer and pains, through faith in Christ Jesus, will do anything.

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

There are many victories worse than a defeat.

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

Falsehood is easy, truth so difficult.

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

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

It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.