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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

“Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning; but give me the man who has pluck to fight when he's sure of losing. That's my way, sir; and there are many victories worse than a defeat.”

George Eliot book Scenes of Clerical Life

&quot; Janet&#x27;s Repentance http://classiq.net/george-eliot/janets-repentance/index.html&quot; Ch. 6 <br class="br">Scenes of Clerical Life (1858)

“In old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now. But yet men are led away from threatening destruction: a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may be a little child's.”

George Eliot

Source: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Chapter 14, end of (at page 131)

“Nature repairs her ravages, but not all. The uptorn trees are not rooted again; the parted hills are left scarred; if there is a new growth, the trees are not the same as the old, and the hills underneath their green vesture bear the marks of the past rending. To the eyes that have dwelt on the past, there is no thorough repair.”

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss (1860)

“But these things are often unknown to the world; for there is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence. There are glances of hatred that stab and raise no cry of murder; robberies that leave man or woman for ever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer – committed to no sound except that of low moans in the night, seen in no writing except that made on the face by the slow months of suppressed anguish and early morning tears. Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed in no human ear.”

George Eliot book Felix Holt, the Radical

Introductory chapter (at page 11-12 – page numbers per the 'Wordsworth Classics' edition 1997.)
Felix Holt, the Radical (1866)

“If art does not enlarge men's sympathies, it does nothing morally.”

George Eliot

Letter to Charles Bray (5 July 1859)

“Lamech's sons were heroes of their race:
Jubal, the eldest, bore upon his face
The look of that calm river-god, the Nile,
Mildly secure in power that needs not guile.”

George Eliot

The Legend of Jubal (1869)

“That big muscular frame of his held plenty of animal courage, but helped him to no decision when the dangers to be braved were such as could neither be knocked down nor throttled.”

George Eliot

Source: Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe (1861), Chapter 3 (at page 28)

“There is something strangely winning to most women in that offer of the firm arm; the help is not wanted physically at that moment, but the sense of help, the presence of strength that is outside them and yet theirs, meets a continual want of the imagination.”

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss (1860)

“You know nothing about Hope, that immortal, delicious maiden forever courted forever propitious, whom fools have called deceitful, as if it were Hope that carried the cup of disappointment, whereas it is her deadly enemy, Certainty, whom she only escapes by transformation.”

George Eliot book Daniel Deronda

Daniel Deronda (1876)

“Our life is determined for us — and it makes the mind very free when we give up wishing and only think of bearing what is laid upon us and doing what is given us to do.”

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

Book V, ch. i
The Mill on the Floss (1860)

“Who can prove
Wit to be witty when with deeper ground
Dulness intuitive declares wit dull?”

George Eliot book Scenes of Clerical Life

A College Breakfast-party, reported in Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919)
Scenes of Clerical Life (1858)

“[Most people] are neither extraordinarily silly, nor extraordinarily wicked, nor extraordinarily wise; their eyes are neither deep and liquid with sentiment, nor sparkling with suppressed witticisms; they have probably had no hairbreadth escapes or thrilling adventures; their brains are certainly not pregnant with genius, and their passions have not manifested themselves at all after the fashion of a volcano. … Depend upon it, you would gain unspeakably if you would learn with me to see some of the poetry and the pathos, the tragedy and the comedy, lying in the experience of a human soul that looks out through dull grey eyes, and that speaks in a voice of quite ordinary tones.”

George Eliot book Scenes of Clerical Life

"The Sad Fortunes of the Rev. Amos Barton" Ch. 5
Scenes of Clerical Life (1858)

“Come in, Adam, and rest; it has been a hard day for thee.”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

“Doubtless a great anguish may do the work of years, and we may come out from that baptism of fire with a soul full of new awe and new pity.”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

“High achievements demand some other unusual qualification besides an unusual desire for high prizes.”

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

The Mill on the Floss (1860)

“[Christian] … he felt very much like an uninitiated chess-player who sees that the pieces are in a peculiar position on the board, and might open the way for him to give checkmate, if he only knew how.”

George Eliot book Felix Holt, the Radical

Source: Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Chapter 25 (at page 210)

“There's folks as make bad butter and trusten to the salt t' hide it.”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Mrs Poyser
Adam Bede (1859)

“A serious ape whom none take seriously,
Obliged in this fool's world to earn his nuts
By hard buffoonery.”

George Eliot

Book 1
The Spanish Gypsy (1868)

“I think any hardship is better than pretending to do what one is paid for, and never really doing it.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Middlemarch (1871)

“Sad as a wasted passion.”

George Eliot

Book 1
The Spanish Gypsy (1868)

“Creeds of terror.”

George Eliot

Book 1
The Spanish Gypsy (1868)

“Deeds are the pulse of time. ”

George Eliot

“That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Middlemarch (1871)

“An ass may bray a good while before he shakes the stars down.”

George Eliot book Romola

Volume III, Chapter IV
Romola (1863)

“I see a face of love,
Fair as sweet music when my heart was strong:
Yea — art thou come again to me, great Song?”

George Eliot

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.
The Legend of Jubal (1869)

“This is life to come, —
Which martyred men have made more glorious
For us who strive to follow. May I reach
That purest heaven, — be to other souls
The cup of strength in some great agony,
Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love,
Beget the smiles that have no cruelty,
Be the sweet presence of a good diffused,
And in diffusion ever more intense!
So shall I join the choir invisible
Whose music is the gladness of the world.”

George Eliot

O May I Join the Choir Invisible (1867)

“O may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence; live
In pulses stirred to generosity,
In deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn
For miserable aims that end with self,
In thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars,
And with their mild persistence urge men's search
To vaster issues.”

George Eliot

O May I Join the Choir Invisible (1867)

“The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.”

George Eliot book The Mill on the Floss

Book VI, ch. iii
The Mill on the Floss (1860)