Top 1025 Quotes & Sayings by George Eliot - Page 4

People who live at a distance are naturally less faulty than those immediately under our own eyes.

The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots.

I don't want the world to give me anything for my books except money enough to save me from the temptation to write only for money.

Those who trust us educate us.

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

What are a handful of reasonable men against a crowd with stones in their hands?

I carry my unwritten poems in cipher on my face!

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

Her little butterfly soul fluttered incessantly between memory and dubious expectation.

Your trouble's easy borne when everybody gives it a lift for you.

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.

We have had an unspeakably delightful journey, one of those journeys which seem to divide one's life in two, by the new ideas they suggest and the new views of interest they open.

There is no killing the suspicion that deceit has once begotten.

The best travel is that which one can take by one's own fireside. In memory or imagination.

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

In bed our yesterdays are too oppressive: if a man can only get up, though it be but to whistle or to smoke, he has a present which offers some resistance to the past—sensations which assert themselves against tyrannous memories.

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.

A blush is no language; only a dubious flag - signal which may mean either of two contradictories

Nice distinctions are troublesome. It is so much easier to say that a thing is black, than to discriminate the particular shade of brown, blue, or green, to which it really belongs. It is so much easier to make up your mind that your neighbour is good for nothing, than to enter into all the circumstances that would oblige you to modify that opinion.

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it.

Much of our waking experience is but a dream in the daylight.

Human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty — it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it.

The mother's love is at first an absorbing delight, blunting all other sensibilities; it is an expansion of the animal existence; it enlarges the imagined range for self to move in: but in after years it can only continue to be joy on the same terms as other long-lived love--that is, by much suppression of self, and power of living in the experience of another.

Jews are not fit for Heaven, but on earth they are most useful.

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Our thoughts are often worse than we are.

She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.

If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie? We should have no law but the inclination of the moment.

We are led on, like little children, by a way we know not.

My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.

I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same mind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.

And Dorothea..she had no dreams of being praised above other women. Feeling that there was always something better which she might have done if she had only been better and known better, her full nature spent itself in deeds which left no great name on the earth, but the effect of her being on those around her was incalculable. For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts and on all those Dorotheas who life faithfully their hidden lives and rest in unvisited tombs. Middlemarch

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

To manage men one ought to have a sharp mind in a velvet sheath.

What a wretched lot of old shrivelled creatures we shall be by-and-by. Never mind - the uglier we get in the eyes of others, the lovelier we shall be to each other; that has always been my firm faith about friendship.

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

"Heaven help us," said the old religion; the new one, from its very lack of that faith, will teach us all the more to help one another.

These gems have life in them: their colors speak, say what words fail of.

I flutter all ways, and fly in none.

It is painful to be told that anything is very fine and not be able to feel that it is fine--something like being blind, while people talk of the sky.

A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar, unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge.

A patronizing disposition always has its meaner side.

The thing we look forward to often comes to pass, but never precisely in the way we have imagined to ourselves.

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.

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.

I love not to be choked with other men's thoughts.

When God makes His presence felt through us, we are like the burning bush: Moses never took any heed what sort of bush it was—he only saw the brightness of the Lord.

Justice is like the kingdom of God--it is not without us as a fact, it is within us as a great yearning.

The tale of the Divine Pity was never yet believed from lips that were not felt to be moved by human pity.

It is a very good quality in a man to have a trout-stream.

It's no use filling your pocket with money if you have got a hole in the corner.

I don't mind how many letters I receive from one who interests me as much as you do. The receptive part of correspondence I can carry on with much alacrity. It is writing answers that I groan over.

It is hard to believe long together that anything is "worth while," unless there is some eye to kindle in common with our own, some brief word uttered now and then to imply that what is infinitely precious to us is precious alike to another mind.

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

Examining the world in order to find consolation is very much like looking carefully over the pages of a great book in order to find our own name . ... Whether we find what we want or not, our preoccupation has hindered us from a true knowledge of the contents.

Power of generalizing gives men so much the superiority in mistake over the dumb animals.

People are so ridiculous with their illusions, carrying their fool's caps unawares, thinking their own lies opaque while everybody else's are transparent, making themselves exceptions to everything, as if when all the world looked yellow under a lamp they alone are rosy.

There is hardly any contact more depressing to a young ardent creature than that of a mind in which years full of knowledge seem to have issued in a blank absence of interest or sympathy.

How is it that the poets have said so many fine things about our first love, so few about our later love? Are their first poems their best? or are not those the best which come from their fuller thought, their larger experience, their deeper-rooted affections? The boy's flute-like voice has its own spring charm; but the man should yield a richer, deeper music.

Ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities.