1. Quotes
  2. Authors
  3. George Eliot

George Eliot Quotes
page 5

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

“He said within his soul, "'This is the end:
O'er all the earth to where the-heavens bend
And hem men's travel, I have breathed my soul:
I lie here now the remnant of that whole,
The embers of a life, a lonely pain;
As far-off rivers to my thirst were vain,
So of my mighty years nought comes to me again."”

George Eliot

The Legend of Jubal (1869)

“Tito was experiencing that inexorable law of human souls, that we prepare ourselves for sudden deeds by the reiterated choice of good or evil that gradually determines character.”

George Eliot book Romola

Volume II, Chapter III
Romola (1863)

“Ugly and deformed people have great need of unusual virtues, because they are likely to be extremely uncomfortable without them.”

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

Book V
The Mill on the Floss (1860)

“Men's lives are as thoroughly blended with each other as the air they breathe: evil spreads as necessarily as disease.”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

“There's no disappointment in memory, and one's exaggerations are always on the good side.”

George Eliot book Daniel Deronda

Daniel Deronda (1876)

“I'm proof against that word failure. I've seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.”

George Eliot book Felix Holt, the Radical

Felix Holt, the Radical (1866)

“There's no pleasure i' living if you're to be corked up for ever, and only dribble your mind out by the sly, like a leaky barrel.”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

“The immortal name of Jubal filled the sky,
While Jubal lonely laid him down to die.”

George Eliot

The Legend of Jubal (1869)
Context: But ere the laughter died from out the rear,
Anger in front saw profanation near;
Jubal was but a name in each man's faith
For glorious power untouched by that slow death
Which creeps with creeping time; this too, the spot,
And this the day, it must be crime to blot,
Even with scoffing at a madman's lie:
Jubal was not a name to wed with mockery.
Two rushed upon him: two, the most devout
In honor of great Jubal, thrust him out,
And beat him with their flutes. 'Twas little need;
He strove not, cried not, but with tottering speed,
As if the scorn and howls were driving wind
That urged his body, serving so the mind
Which could but shrink and yearn, he sought the screen
Of thorny thickets, and there fell unseen.
The immortal name of Jubal filled the sky,
While Jubal lonely laid him down to die.

“If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Middlemarch (1871)

“There are so many of us, and our lots are so different, what wonder that Nature's mood is often in harsh contrast with the great crisis of our lives? We are children of a large family, and must learn, as such children do, not to expect that our hurts will be made much of — to be content with little nurture and caressing, and help each other the more.”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

“when a man had deserved his good luck, it was the part of his neighbours to wish him joy.”

George Eliot

Conclusion (at page 183)
Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861)

“He fled to his usual refuge, that of hoping for some unforeseen turn of fortune, some favourable chance which would save him from unpleasant consequences – perhaps even justify his insincerity by manifesting prudence.
In this point of trusting in some throw of fortune's dice, Godfrey can hardly be called old-fashioned. Favourable Chance is the god of all men who follow their own devices instead of obeying a law they believe in. Let even a polished man of these days get into a position he is ashamed to avow, and his mind will be bent on all the possible issues that may deliver him from the calculable results of that position. Let him live outside his income, or shirk the resolute honest work that brings wages, and he will presently find himself dreaming of a possible benefactor, a possible simpleton who may be cajoled into using his interest, a possible state of mind in some possible person not yet forthcoming. Let him neglect the responsibilities of his office, and he will inevitably anchor himself on the chance, that the thing left undone may turn out not to be of the supposed importance. Let him betray his friend's confidence, and he will adore that same cunning complexity called Chance, which gives him the hope that his friend will never know. Let him forsake a decent craft that he may pursue the gentilities of a profession to which nature never called him, and his religion will infallibly be the worship of blessed Chance, which he will believe in as the mighty creator of success. The evil principle deprecated in that religion, is the orderly sequence by which the seed brings forth a crop after its kind.”

George Eliot

Source: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Chapter 9 (at page 73-74)

“But then the need of being loved, the strongest need … in poor Maggie’s nature, began to wrestle with her pride and soon threw it.”

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss (1860)

“Tis God gives skill,
But not without men's hands: He could not make
Antonio Stradivari's violins
Without Antonio.”

George Eliot

Stradivarius (c. 1868)

“It's but little good you'll do a-watering the last year's crop.”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

“I see a face of love,
Fair as sweet music when my heart was strong:
Yea — art thou come again to me, great Song?"
The face bent over him like silver night
In long-remembered summers; that calm light
Of days which shine in firmaments of thought,
That past unchangeable, from change still wrought.”

George Eliot

The Legend of Jubal (1869)

“It was a room where you had no reason for sitting in one place rather than in another.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Ch. 54 http://books.google.com/books?id=A2wOAAAAQAAJ&amp;q=%22It+was+a+room+where+you+had+no+reason+for+sitting+in+one+place+rather+than+in+another%22&amp;pg=PA187#v=onepage <br class="br">Middlemarch (1871)

“Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love…”

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

Book I, ch. x
The Mill on the Floss (1860)

“We see human heroism broken into units and say, this unit did little – might as well not have been. But in this way we might break up a great army into units; in this way we might break the sunlight into fragments, and think that this and the other might be cheaply parted with. Let us rather raise a monument to the soldiers whose brave hearts only kept the ranks unbroken and met death – a monument to the faithful who were not famous, and who are precious as the continuity of the sunbeams is precious, though some of them fall unseen and on barrenness.”

George Eliot book Felix Holt, the Radical

Source: Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Chapter 16 (at page 158)

“The darkest night that ever fell upon the earth never hid the light, never put out the stars. It only made the stars more keenly, kindly glancing, as if in protest against the darkness.”

George Eliot

As quoted in Golden Gleams of Thought from the Words of Leading Orators, Divines, Philosophers, Statesmen and Poets (1881) by S. Pollock Linn; also in Still Waters http://books.google.com/books?id=VjAqAAAAYAAJ (1913)

“She and Stephen were in that stage of courtship which makes the most exquisite moment of youth, the freshest blossom-time of passion, — when each is sure of the other's love, but no formal declaration has been made, and all is mutual divination, exalting the most trivial word, the lightest gesture, into thrills delicate and delicious as wafted jasmine scent.”

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss (1860)

“Ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities.”

George Eliot book Daniel Deronda

Daniel Deronda (1876)

“Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Middlemarch (1871)

“He hated the thought of the past; there was nothing that called out his love and fellowship toward the strangers he had come amongst; and the future was all dark.”

George Eliot

Source: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Chapter 2 (at page 17)

“The lapse of time during which a given event has not happened, is, in this logic of habit, constantly alleged as a reason why the event should never happen, even when the lapse of time is precisely the added condition which makes the event imminent. A man will tell you that he has worked in a mine for forty years unhurt by an accident as a reason why he should apprehend no danger, though the roof is beginning to sink...”

George Eliot

Source: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Chapter 5 (at page 41)

“If I got places, sir, it was because I made myself fit for 'em. If you want to slip into a round hole, you must make a ball of yourself; that's where it is.”

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss (1860)

“Human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty — it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it.”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

“The blessed work of helping the world forward, happily does not wait to be done by perfect men.”

George Eliot book Scenes of Clerical Life

"Janet's Repentance" Ch. 10 in Scenes of Clerical Life (1858); this has appeared in paraphrased form as: "The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men."
Scenes of Clerical Life (1858)

“The difficulty is, to decide how far resolution should set in the direction of activity rather than in the acceptance of a more negative state.”

George Eliot

Journal entry, December 31, 1877

“Examining the world in order to find consolation is very much like looking carefully over the pages of a great book in order to find our own name. … Whether we find what we want or not, our preoccupation has hindered us from a true knowledge of the contents.”

George Eliot book Impressions of Theophrastus Such

Part 1
Impressions of Theophrastus Such (1879)

“With thy coming Melody was come.
This was thy lot, to feel, create, bestow,
And that immeasurable life to know
From which the fleshly self falls shrivelled, dead,
A seed primeval that has forests bred.”

George Eliot

The Legend of Jubal (1869)

“Every man who is not a monster, a mathematician, or a mad philosopher, is the slave of some woman or other.”

George Eliot book Scenes of Clerical Life

"The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton" Ch. 4
Scenes of Clerical Life (1858)

“Marriage, which has been the bourne of so many narratives, is still a great beginning, as it was to Adam and Eve, who kept their honeymoon in Eden, but had their first little one among the thorns and thistles of the wilderness. It is still the beginning of the home epic — the gradual conquest or irremediable loss of that complete union which makes the advancing years a climax, and age the harvest of sweet memories in common.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Middlemarch (1871)

“If a man means to be hard, let him keep in his saddle and speak from that height, above the level of pleading eyes, and with the command of a distant horizon.”

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss (1860)

“How lovely the little river is, with its dark changing wavelets! It seems to me like a living companion while I wander along the bank, and listen to its low, placid voice...”

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss (1860)

“He had a sense that the old man meant to be good-natured and neighbourly; but the kindness fell on him as sunshine falls on the wretched — he had no heart to taste it, and felt that it was very far off him.”

George Eliot

Source: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Chapter 10 (at page 79)

“Ah," said Dolly, with soothing gravity, "it's like the night and the morning, and the sleeping and the waking, and the rain and the harvest — one goes and the other comes, and we know nothing how nor where. We may strive and scrat and fend, but it's little we can do arter all — the big things come and go wi' no striving o' our'n — they do, that they do; and I think you're in the right on it to keep the little un, Master Marner, seeing as it's been sent to you, though there's folks as thinks different.”

George Eliot

Source: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Chapter 14 (at page 121)

“Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Last lines
Middlemarch (1871)

“A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of earth, for the labours men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakeable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge: a spot where the definiteness of early memories may be inwrought with affection, and kindly acquaintance with all neighbours, even to the dogs and donkeys, may spread not by sentimental effort and reflection, but as a sweet habbit of the blood. At five years old, mortals are not prepared to be citizens of the world, to be stimulated by abstract nouns, to soar above preference into impartiality; and that prejudice in favour of milk with which we blindly begin, is a type of the way body and soul must get nourished at least for a time. The best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one's own homestead.”

George Eliot book Daniel Deronda

Daniel Deronda (1876)

“So our lives glide on: the river ends we don't know where, and the sea begins, and then there is no more jumping ashore.”

George Eliot book Felix Holt, the Radical

Source: Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Chapter 27 (at page 219)

“So soon as Squire Cass's standing dishes diminished in plenty and freshness, his guests had nothing to do but to walk a little higher up the village to Mr. Osgood's, at the Orchards, and they found hams and chines uncut, pork-pies with the scent of the fire in them, spun butter in all its freshness — everything, in fact, that appetites at leisure could desire, in perhaps greater perfection, though not in greater abundance, than at Squire Cass's.”

George Eliot

Source: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Chapter 3 (at page 24)

“[Mr Johnson] "You know what a Tory is – one who wants to drive the working men as he'd drive cattle."”

George Eliot book Felix Holt, the Radical

Source: Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Chapter 11 (at page 121)

“One gets a bad habit of being unhappy.”

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss (1860)

“Certain winds will make men's temper bad.”

George Eliot

Book 1
The Spanish Gypsy (1868)

“If boys and men are to be welded together in the glow of transient feeling, they must be made of metal that will mix, else they inevitably fall asunder when the heat dies out.”

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss (1860)

“We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it…”

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss (1860)

“His smile is sweetened by his gravity.”

George Eliot

Book 1
The Spanish Gypsy (1868)

“no sort of duplicity can long flourish without the help of vocal falsehoods”

George Eliot

Source: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Chapter 9 (at page 71)

“People who love downy peaches are apt not to think of the stone, and sometimes jar their teeth terribly against it.”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)