George Eliot: Trending quotes

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“It was entirely from worldly vanity that you destined him for the Church: with a family of three sons and four daughters, you were not warranted in devoting money to an expensive education which has succeeded in nothing but in giving him extravagant idle habits. You are now reaping the consequences.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Middlemarch (1871)

“She was perfectly quiet now, but not asleep — only soothed by sweet porridge and warmth into that wide-gazing calm which makes us older human beings, with our inward turmoil, feel a certain awe in the presence of a little child, such as we feel before some quiet majesty or beauty in the earth or sky — before a steady glowing planet, or a full-flowered eglantine, or the bending trees over a silent pathway.”

George Eliot

Source: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Chapter 13 (at page 118)

“He seemed to weave, like the spider, from pure impulse, without reflection. Every man's work, pursued steadily, tends in this way to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life.”

George Eliot

Source: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Chapter 2 (at page 16 – Page numbers as per the 1996 Penguin Classics Edition)

“There was no gleam, no shadow, for the heavens, too, were one still, pale cloud; no sound or motion in anything but the dark river that flowed and moaned like an unresting sorrow.”

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss (1860)

“Twas easy following where invention trod
— All eyes can see when light flows out from God.
And thus did Jubal to his race reveal
Music their larger soul, where woe and weal
Filling the resonant chords, the song, the dance,
Moved with a wider-winged utterance.”

George Eliot

The Legend of Jubal (1869)

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

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss (1860)

“It is seldom that the miserable can help regarding their misery as a wrong inflicted by those who are less miserable.”

George Eliot

Source: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Chapter 12 (at page 107)

“Her heart lived in no cherished secrets of its own, but in feelings which it longed to share with all the world.”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

“Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of of those who diffuse it: it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker.”

George Eliot book Daniel Deronda

Daniel Deronda (1876)

“"Jubal," the face said, "I am thy loved Past,
The soul that makes thee one from first to last.
I am the angel of thy life and death,
Thy outbreathed being drawing its last breath.
Am I not thine alone, a dear dead bride
Who blest thy lot above all men's beside?”

George Eliot

The Legend of Jubal (1869)

“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?”

George Eliot

Source: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Chapter 2 (at page 19)

“Why, what can a man do when he takes to adoring one of you mermaids? He only neglects his work and runs up bills.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Middlemarch (1871)

“… that modern sect of Flagellants who make a ritual of lashing — not themselves but — all their neighbours.”

George Eliot book Impressions of Theophrastus Such

Part 2
Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879)

“... "there's allays two 'pinions; there's the 'pinion a man has of himsen, and there's the 'pinion other folks have on him. There'd be two 'pinions about a cracked bell, if the bell could hear itself."”

George Eliot

Source: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Chapter 6 (at page 48)

“I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs, and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.”

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss (1860)

“She nursed him, she read to him, she anticipated his wants, and was solicitous about his feelings; but there had entered into the husband’s mind the certainty that she judged him, and that her wifely devotedness was like a penitential expiation of unbelieving thoughts—was accompanied with a power of comparison by which himself and his doings were seen too luminously as a part of things in general. His discontent passed vaporlike through all her gentle loving manifestations, and clung to that unappreciative world which she had only brought nearer to him.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Middlemarch (1871)

“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.”

George Eliot

Book 1
The Spanish Gypsy (1868)

“The miller's daughter of fourteen could not believe that high gentry behaved badly to their wives, but her mother instructed her — "Oh, child, men's men: gentle or simple, they're much of a muchness…"”

George Eliot book Daniel Deronda

Daniel Deronda (1876)

“There could have been no more complete answer than that silence, and Lydgate, forgetting everything else, completely mastered by the outrush of tenderness at the sudden belief that this sweet young creature depended on him for her joy, actually put his arms round her, folding her gently and protectingly— he was used to being gentle with the weak and suffering—and kissed each of the two large tears. This was a strange way of arriving at an understanding, but it was a short way.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Middlemarch (1871)

“Our deeds are like children that are born to us; they live and act apart from our own will. Nay, children may be strangled, but deeds never: they have an indestructible life both in and out of our consciousness;”

George Eliot book Romola

Volume I, Chapter XVI
Romola (1863)