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George Eliot Quotes
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Mary Anne Evans , known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She is the author of seven novels, including Adam Bede , The Mill on the Floss , Silas Marner , Middlemarch , and Daniel Deronda , most of which are set in provincial England and known for their realism and psychological insight.

She used a male pen name, she said, to ensure that her works would be taken seriously. Female authors were published under their own names during Eliot's life, but she wanted to escape the stereotype of women's writing only lighthearted romances. She also wished to have her fiction judged separately from her already extensive and widely known work as an editor and critic. An additional factor in her use of a pen name may have been a desire to shield her private life from public scrutiny and to prevent scandals attending her relationship with the married George Henry Lewes, with whom she lived for over 20 years.

Eliot's Middlemarch has been described by Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as the greatest novel in the English language.

✵ 22. November 1819 – 22. December 1880  •  Other names Marian Evans
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George Eliot: 300 quotes53 likes

George Eliot Quotes

“Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds …”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Source: Adam Bede (1859)
Context: Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds...

“And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Source: Middlemarch

“Don't judge a book by its cover”

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

Source: The Mill on the Floss

“But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Source: Middlemarch (1871)

“One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Middlemarch (1871)

“What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self.”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Source: Adam Bede

“Our deeds still travel with us from afar/And what we have been makes us what we are.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Source: Middlemarch

“Confound you handsome young fellows! You think of having it all your own way in the world. You don't understand women. They don't admire you half so much as you admire yourselves.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Source: Middlemarch

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

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

Source: The Mill on the Floss

“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.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Source: Middlemarch

“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.”

George Eliot book Daniel Deronda

Source: Daniel Deronda

“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.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

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

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

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss (1860)

“Those who trust us educate us.”

George Eliot book Daniel Deronda

Source: Daniel Deronda (1876)

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

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.”

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

Source: The Mill on the Floss (1860)

“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.”

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.”

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

Source: The Mill on the Floss (1860)

“Blameless people are always the most exasperating.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Source: Middlemarch

“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.”

George Eliot book Daniel Deronda

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.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Source: Middlemarch

“After all, the true seeing is within.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Source: Middlemarch

“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

“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

“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

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

George Eliot

“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