Men: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Z
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George Eliot Quotes

Author and Novelist
Born On
1819-11-22
Died On
1880-12-22
Birth Place
Warwickshire, England
Birth Sign
scorpio
Nationality
British
Writers, Poets

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

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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.

George Eliot

The strongest principle of growth lies in the human choice.

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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.

George Eliot

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.

George Eliot

Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.

George Eliot

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.

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

Adventure is not outside man; it is within.

George Eliot

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.

George Eliot

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.

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

There are many victories worse than a defeat.

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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.

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

Breed is stronger than pasture.

George Eliot

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.

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

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

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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.

George Eliot

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.

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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.

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through.

George Eliot

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.

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which there is much agreement, much disputation, and yet more personal liking.

George Eliot

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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.

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

Might, could, would - they are contemptible auxiliaries.

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

Falsehood is easy, truth so difficult.

George Eliot

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.

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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

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

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

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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.

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

Consequences are unpitying.

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster.

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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.

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

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.

George Eliot