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“Our life is determined for us — and it makes the mind very free when we give up wishing and only think of bearing what is laid upon us and doing what is given us to do.”

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

Book V, ch. i
The Mill on the Floss (1860)

“Who can prove
Wit to be witty when with deeper ground
Dulness intuitive declares wit dull?”

George Eliot book Scenes of Clerical Life

A College Breakfast-party, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Scenes of Clerical Life (1858)

“[Most people] are neither extraordinarily silly, nor extraordinarily wicked, nor extraordinarily wise; their eyes are neither deep and liquid with sentiment, nor sparkling with suppressed witticisms; they have probably had no hairbreadth escapes or thrilling adventures; their brains are certainly not pregnant with genius, and their passions have not manifested themselves at all after the fashion of a volcano. … Depend upon it, you would gain unspeakably if you would learn with me to see some of the poetry and the pathos, the tragedy and the comedy, lying in the experience of a human soul that looks out through dull grey eyes, and that speaks in a voice of quite ordinary tones.”

George Eliot book Scenes of Clerical Life

"The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton" Ch. 5
Scenes of Clerical Life (1858)

“Come in, Adam, and rest; it has been a hard day for thee.”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

“Doubtless a great anguish may do the work of years, and we may come out from that baptism of fire with a soul full of new awe and new pity.”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

“High achievements demand some other unusual qualification besides an unusual desire for high prizes.”

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss (1860)

“[Christian] … he felt very much like an uninitiated chess-player who sees that the pieces are in a peculiar position on the board, and might open the way for him to give checkmate, if he only knew how.”

George Eliot book Felix Holt, the Radical

Source: Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Chapter 25 (at page 210)

“There's folks as make bad butter and trusten to the salt t' hide it.”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Mrs Poyser
Adam Bede (1859)

“A serious ape whom none take seriously,
Obliged in this fool's world to earn his nuts
By hard buffoonery.”

Book 1
The Spanish Gypsy (1868)

“I think any hardship is better than pretending to do what one is paid for, and never really doing it.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Middlemarch (1871)

“Sad as a wasted passion.”

Book 1
The Spanish Gypsy (1868)

“Creeds of terror.”

Book 1
The Spanish Gypsy (1868)

“A woman's hopes are woven of sunbeams; a shadow annihilates them. ”

“Deeds are the pulse of time. ”

“That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. 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. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Middlemarch (1871)

“I see a face of love,
Fair as sweet music when my heart was strong:
Yea — art thou come again to me, great Song?”

The face bent over him like silver night
In long-remembered summers; that calm light
Of days which shine in firmaments of thought,
That past unchangeable, from change still wrought.
The Legend of Jubal (1869)

“This is life to come, —
Which martyred men have made more glorious
For us who strive to follow. May I reach
That purest heaven, — be to other souls
The cup of strength in some great agony,
Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love,
Beget the smiles that have no cruelty,
Be the sweet presence of a good diffused,
And in diffusion ever more intense!
So shall I join the choir invisible
Whose music is the gladness of the world.”

O May I Join the Choir Invisible (1867)

“O may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence; live
In pulses stirred to generosity,
In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn
For miserable aims that end with self,
In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,
And with their mild persistence urge men's search
To vaster issues.”

O May I Join the Choir Invisible (1867)

“Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”

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

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

Book VI, ch. iii
The Mill on the Floss (1860)