George Eliot: Trending quotes

“Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure.”

Source: Middlemarch

“We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.”

Source: The Mill on the Floss

“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.”

Source: Middlemarch

“For pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion.”

Source: Daniel Deronda

“The clergy are, practically, the most irresponsible of all talkers.

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Source: Middlemarch

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 to have recovered hope.”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

“Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.”

“There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.”

Source: Middlemarch (1871), Chapter 1 (misprinted as "Some people did" in some editions, such as Penguin Signet Classics).

“Those who trust us educate us.”

The Mill on the Floss (1860)

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

Source: Daniel Deronda (1876)

“Hurt, he'll never be hurt--he's made to hurt other people.”

Source: Middlemarch

George Eliot book Silas Marner

Source: Silas Marner

“These bitter sorrows of childhood! when sorrow is all new and strange, when hope has not yet got wings to fly beyond the days and weeks, and the space from summer to summer seems measureless.”

“There is one order of beauty which seems made to turn heads. It is a beauty like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle.”

Source: The Mill on the Floss (1860)

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Source: Adam Bede

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

“Blameless people are always the most exasperating.”

Source: The Mill on the Floss (1860)

“Let my body dwell in poverty, and my hands be as the hands of the toiler; but let my soul be as a temple of remembrance where the treasures of knowledge enter and the inner sanctuary is hope.”

Source: Middlemarch

“I think I dislike what I don't like more than I like what I like.”

Source: Daniel Deronda

“When a man has seen the woman whom he would have chosen if he had intended to marry speedily, his remaining a bachelor will usually depend on her resolution rather than on his.”

Source: Daniel Deronda

“After all, the true seeing is within.”

Source: Middlemarch