George Eliot citations

Page 3

“Il n'est jamais trop tard pour être ce que vous auriez pu être.”

“Adventure is not outside man; it is within.”

“Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.”

“Selfish— a judgment readily passed by those who have never tested their own power of sacrifice.”

“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.”

“For pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion.”

“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.”