George Eliot: Quotes about love

George Eliot was English novelist, journalist and translator. Explore interesting quotes on love.

George Eliot: 600 quotes53 likes

“Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return...”

George Eliot book Daniel Deronda

Daniel Deronda (1876)

“The mother's yearning, that completest type of the life in another life which is the essence of real human love, feels the presence of the cherished child even in the debased, degraded man.”

George Eliot book Daniel Deronda

Bk. 2, Ch. 13
Daniel Deronda (1876)

“I suppose a woman is never in love with any one she has always known— ever since she can remember; as a man often is. It is always some new fellow who strikes a girl.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Middlemarch (1871)

“"Jubal," the face said, "I am thy loved Past,
The soul that makes thee one from first to last.
I am the angel of thy life and death,
Thy outbreathed being drawing its last breath.
Am I not thine alone, a dear dead bride
Who blest thy lot above all men's beside?”

The Legend of Jubal (1869)

“She nursed him, she read to him, she anticipated his wants, and was solicitous about his feelings; but there had entered into the husband’s mind the certainty that she judged him, and that her wifely devotedness was like a penitential expiation of unbelieving thoughts—was accompanied with a power of comparison by which himself and his doings were seen too luminously as a part of things in general. His discontent passed vaporlike through all her gentle loving manifestations, and clung to that unappreciative world which she had only brought nearer to him.”

George Eliot book Middlemarch

Middlemarch (1871)

“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)

“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.”

The Legend of Jubal (1869)

“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)

“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)

“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.”

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

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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)

“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.
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.”

O May I Join the Choir Invisible (1867)