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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
George Eliot photo
George Eliot: 300 quotes53 likes

George Eliot Quotes

“It was one of those dangerous moments when speech is at once sincere and deceptive - when feeling, rising high above its average depth, leaves flood-marks which are never reached again.”

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

Source: The Mill on the Floss

“We learn words by rote, but not their meaning; that must be paid for with our life-blood, and printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves.”

George Eliot book The Lifted Veil

Source: The Lifted Veil

“A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Source: Middlemarch

“Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

First lines.
Source: Middlemarch (1871)

“She hates everything that is not what she longs for.”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Source: Adam Bede

“I protest against any absolute conclusion.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Source: Middlemarch

“He distrusted her affection; and what loneliness is more lonely than distrust.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Variant: What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?
Source: Middlemarch (1871)

“A man falling into dark waters seeks a momentary footing even on sliding stones.”

George Eliot book Silas Marner

Source: Silas Marner

“Few things hold the perception more thoroughly captive than anxiety about what we have got to say”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Source: Middlemarch

“Her own misery filled her heart—there was no room in it for other people's sorrow.”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Source: Adam Bede

“We all remember epochs in our experience when some dear expectation dies, or some new motive is born.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Source: Middlemarch

“I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same kind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.”

George Eliot

Letter to Georgiana Burne-Jones, wife of the artist Edward Burne-Jones (1875)

“It's a father's duty to give his sons a fine chance.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Source: Middlemarch

“There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.”

George Eliot book Daniel Deronda

Book 3, Ch. 24
Source: Daniel Deronda (1876)

“All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.”

George Eliot book Daniel Deronda

Source: Daniel Deronda

“I am not quite sure whether clever men ever dance.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Middlemarch

“Consequences are unpitying. Our”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Adam Bede

“Consequences are unpitying. Our deeds carry their terrible consequences, quite apart from any fluctuations that went before — consequences that are hardly ever confined to ourselves.”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

“It seems to me now, if I was to find Father at home to-night, I should behave different; but there's no knowing — perhaps nothing 'ud be a lesson to us if it didn't come too late.”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

“Howiver, I'm not denyin' the women are foolish: God Almighty made 'em to match the men.”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Chapter 53 http://books.google.com/books?id=0OU8AAAAYAAJ&amp;q=%22Howiver+I&#x27;m+not+deny+in+the+women+are+foolish+God+Almighty+made+em+to+match+the+men%22&amp;pg=PA530#v=onepage <br class="br">Adam Bede (1859)

“While the arm is strong to strike and heave,
Let soul and arm give shape that will abide…”

George Eliot

The Legend of Jubal (1869)

“Fancy what a game at chess would be if all the chessmen had passions and intellects, more or less small and cunning; if you were not only uncertain about your adversary's men, but a little uncertain also about your own; if your knight could shuffle himself on to a new square by the sly; if your bishop, in disgust at your castling, could wheedle your pawns out of their places; and if your pawns, hating you because they are pawns, could make away from their appointed posts that you might get checkmate on a sudden. You might be the longest-headed of deducted reasoners, and yet you might be beaten by your own pawns. You would be especially likely to be beaten, if you depended arrogantly on your mathematical imagination, and regarded your passionate pieces with contempt.
Yet this imaginary chess is easy compared with the game a man has to play against his fellow-men with other fellow-men for his instruments. He thinks himself sagacious, perhaps, because he trusts no bond except that of self-interest; but the only self-interest he can safely rely on is what seems to be such to the mind he would use or govern. Can he ever be sure of knowing this?”

George Eliot book Felix Holt, the Radical

Start of Chapter 29 (at page 237)
Felix Holt, the Radical (1866)

“It is true that an observer, under that softening influence of the fine arts which makes other people’s hardships picturesque, might have been delighted with this homestead called Freeman’s End.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Middlemarch (1871)

“But a morbid consciousness that others did not give him the place which he had not demonstrably merited—a perpetual suspicious conjecture that the views entertained of him were not to his advantage— a melancholy absence of passion in his efforts at achievement, and a passionate resistance to the confession that he had achieved nothing.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Middlemarch (1871)

“Knightly love is blent with reverence
As heavenly air is blent with heavenly blue.”

George Eliot

Book 1
The Spanish Gypsy (1868)

“But what a voice! It was like the voice of a soul that had once lived in an Aeolian harp.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Middlemarch (1871)

“My own experience and development deepen everyday my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.”

George Eliot

Letter to Charles Bray (15 November 1857)

“I suppose one reason why we are seldom able to comfort our neighbours with our words is that our goodwill gets adulterated, in spite of ourselves, before it can pass our lips. We can send black puddings and petticoes without giving them a flavour of our own egoism; but language is a stream that is almost sure to smack of a mingled soil. There was a fair proportion of kindness in Raveloe; but it was often of a beery and bungling sort, and took the shape least allied to the complimentary and hypocritical.”

George Eliot

Source: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Chapter 10 (at page 77-78)

“It was a still afternoon — the golden light was lingering languidly among the upper boughs, only glancing down here and there on the purple pathway and its edge of faintly sprinkled moss: an afternoon in which destiny disguises her cold awful face behind a hazy radiant veil, encloses us in warm downy wings, and poisons us with violet-scented breath.”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

“It is good to be unselfish and generous; but don't carry that too far. It will not do to give yourself to be melted down for the benefit of the tallow-trade; you must know where to find yourself.”

George Eliot book Daniel Deronda

This has been paraphrased as: "Be courteous, be obliging, but don't give yourself over to be melted down for the benefit of the tallow trade."
Daniel Deronda (1876)

“Formerly, his heart had been as a locked casket with its treasure inside; but now the casket was empty, and the lock was broken. Left groping in darkness, with his prop utterly gone, Silas had inevitably a sense, though a dull and half-despairing one, that if any help came to him it must come from without; and there was a slight stirring of expectation at the sight of his fellow-men, a faint consciousness of dependence on their goodwill.”

George Eliot

Source: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Chapter 10 (at page 81)

“That quiet mutual gaze of a trusting husband and wife is like the first moment of rest or refuge from a great weariness or a great danger — not to be interfered with by speech or action which would distract the sensations from the fresh enjoyment of repose.”

George Eliot

Source: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Chapter 20 (at page 174)

“Such young unfurrowed souls roll to meet each other like two velvet peaches that touch softly and are at rest; they mingle as easily as two brooklets that ask for nothing but to entwine themselves and ripple with ever-interlacing curves in the leafiest hiding-places.”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

“You told me the truth when you said to me once, "There's a sort of wrong that can never be made up for."”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

“I began … to watch with peculiar alarm lest what I called my philosophic estimate of the human lot in general, should be a mere prose lyric expressing my own pain and consequent bad temper.”

George Eliot book Impressions of Theophrastus Such

Part 1
Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879)

“Already handbills were in circulation; some presenting, in large print, the alternative of justice on the conspirators or ruin to the Republic; others in equally large print urging the observance of the law and the granting of the Appeal. Round these jutting islets of black capitals there were lakes of smaller characters setting forth arguments less necessary to be read: for it was an opinion entertained at that time (in the first flush of triumph at the discovery of printing), that there was no argument more widely convincing than question-begging phrases in large type.”

George Eliot book Romola

Volume III, Chapter XIII
Romola (1863)

“Inclination snatches arguments
To make indulgence seem judicious choice.”

George Eliot

Book 1
The Spanish Gypsy (1868)

“Rosamond felt herself beginning to know a great deal of the world, especially in discovering what when she was in her unmarried girlhood had been inconceivable to her except as a dim tragedy in by-gone costumes— that women, even after marriage, might make conquests and enslave men. Still, vanity, with a woman’s whole mind and day to work in, can construct abundantly on slight hints, especially on such a hint as the possibility of indefinite conquests. How delightful to make captives from the throne of marriage with a husband as crown-prince by your side—himself in fact a subject— while the captives look up forever hopeless, losing their rest probably, and if their appetite too, so much the better!”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Middlemarch (1871)

“I like breakfast-time better than any other moment in the day," said Mr. Irwine. "No dust has settled on one's mind then, and it presents a clear mirror to the rays of things.”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

“We hand folks over to God's mercy, and show none ourselves.”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

“How is it that the poets have said so many fine things about our first love, so few about our later love? Are their first poems their best? Or are not those the best which come from their fuller thought, their larger experience, their deeper-rooted affections?”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

“There comes a night when all too late
The mind shall long to prompt the achieving hand,
The eager thought behind closed portals stand,
And the last wishes to the mute lips press
Buried ere death in silent helplessness.”

George Eliot

The Legend of Jubal (1869)

“Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state.”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

“the rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families...”

George Eliot

Source: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Chapter 3 (at page 23)

“This was not the first time that Mr. Bulstrode had begun by admonishing Mr. Vincy, and had ended by seeing a very unsatisfactory reflection of himself in the coarse unflattering mirror which that manufacturer’s mind presented to the subtler lights and shadows of his fellowmen; and perhaps his experience ought to have warned him how the scene would end. But a full-fed fountain will be generous with its waters even in the rain, when they are worse than useless; and a fine fount of admonition is apt to be equally irrepressible.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Middlemarch (1871)

“His mind was destitute of that dread which has been erroneously decried as if it were nothing higher than a man’s animal care for his own skin: that awe of the Divine Nemesis which was felt by religious pagans, and, though it took a more positive form under Christianity, is still felt by the mass of mankind simply as a vague fear at anything which is called wrong-doing. Such terror of the unseen is so far above mere sensual cowardice that it will annihilate that cowardice: it is the initial recognition of a moral law restraining desire, and checks the hard bold scrutiny of imperfect thought into obligations which can never be proved to have any sanctity in the absence of feeling.”

George Eliot book Romola

Volume I, Chapter XI
Romola (1863)