Inspiring Quotes by George Eliot
(Page 3 of 6)

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.

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.

As leopard feels at home with leopard.

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.

The beauty of a lovely woman is like music.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Love supreme defies all sophistry.

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.

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.

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.

There is a lightness about the feminine mind -- a touch and go -- music, the fine arts, that kind of thing -- they should study those up to a certain point, women should; but in a light way, you know.

The fact is, both callers and work thicken -- the former sadly interfering with the latter.

It is pleasant to have a kind word now and then when one is not near enough to have a kind glance or a hearty shake by the hand.

Love is frightened at the intervals of insensibility and callousness that encroach by little and little on the domain of grief, and it makes efforts to recall the keenness of the first anguish.