George Eliot Quotes

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“Hold up your head! You were not made for failure, you were made for victory. Go forward with a joyful confidence.”

“I am not imposed upon by fine words; I can see what actions mean.”

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

“It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much.”

“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.”

“Don't judge a book by its cover”

“People are almost always better than their neighbors think they are.”

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

“One can begin so many things with a new person! - even begin to be a better man.”

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

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

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

“I desire no future that will break the ties of the past.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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“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.”

“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.”

“Those who trust us educate us.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“After all, the true seeing is within.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?”