George Eliot: Trending quotes

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George Eliot: 600 quotes53 likes

“It is a common sentence that knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what ignorance in an hour pulls down.”

George Eliot book Daniel Deronda

Source: Daniel Deronda

“Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts—not to hurt others.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Daniel Deronda (1876)
Source: Middlemarch

“A prig is a fellow who is always making you a present of his opinions.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Source: Middlemarch

“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.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Source: Middlemarch

“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.”

Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 563

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

“I had some ambition. I meant everything to be different with me. I thought I had more strength and mastery. But the most terrible obstacles are such as nobody can see except oneself.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Source: Middlemarch

“For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Source: Middlemarch

“Pride only helps us to be generous; it never makes us so, any more than vanity makes us witty.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Source: Middlemarch

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

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Source: Adam Bede

“If you deliver an opinion at all, it is mere stupidity not to do it with an air of conviction and well-founded knowledge. You make it your own in uttering it, and naturally get fond of it.”

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

Source: The Mill on the Floss

“Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Source: Middlemarch (1871)
Context: Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending. Who can quit young lives after being long in company with them, and not desire to know what befell them in their after-years? For the fragment of a life, however typical, is not the sample of an even web: promises may not be kept, and an ardent outset may be followed by declension; latent powers may find their long-waited opportunity; a past error may urge a grand retrieval.

“People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbors.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Source: Middlemarch (1871)

“Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets.”

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

Source: The Mill on the Floss

“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.”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

“I flutter all ways, and fly in none.”

“Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand - …”

George Eliot book Silas Marner

Source: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Chapter 18 (at page 163)

“She was no longer struggling against the perception of facts, but adjusting herself to their clearest perception.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Source: Middlemarch

“Men outlive their love, but they don’t outlive the consequences of their recklessness.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Source: Middlemarch

“The most solid comfort one can fall back upon is the thought that the business of one's life is to help in some small way to reduce the sum of ignorance, degradation and misery on the face of this beautiful earth.”