George Eliot citations

Page 4

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

“Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.”

“Blameless people are always the most exasperating.”

“Let my body dwell in poverty, and my hands be as the hands of the toiler; but let my soul be as a temple of remembrance where the treasures of knowledge enter and the inner sanctuary is hope.”

“I think I dislike what I don't like more than I like what I like.”

“When a man has seen the woman whom he would have chosen if he had intended to marry speedily, his remaining a bachelor will usually depend on her resolution rather than on his.”

“After all, the true seeing is within.”

“It is a common sentence that knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what ignorance in an hour pulls down.”

“Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts—not to hurt others.”

“A prig is a fellow who is always making you a present of his opinions.”

“Character is not cut in marble - it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.”

“The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.”

“No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it
are no longer the same interpreters.”

“I had some ambition. I meant everything to be different with me. I thought I had more strength and mastery. But the most terrible obstacles are such as nobody can see except oneself.”

“For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.”

“Pride only helps us to be generous; it never makes us so, any more than vanity makes us witty.”

“When death, the great Reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.”

“If you deliver an opinion at all, it is mere stupidity not to do it with an air of conviction and well-founded knowledge. You make it your own in uttering it, and naturally get fond of it.”

“Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.”

“People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbors.”

“Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets.”

“Love has a way of cheating itself consciously, like a child who plays at solitary hide-and-seek; it is pleased with assurances that it all the while disbelieves.”

“I flutter all ways, and fly in none.”

“Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand - …”

“She was no longer struggling against the perception of facts, but adjusting herself to their clearest perception.”

“Men outlive their love, but they don’t outlive the consequences of their recklessness.”

“The most solid comfort one can fall back upon is the thought that the business of one's life is to help in some small way to reduce the sum of ignorance, degradation and misery on the face of this beautiful earth.”

“If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?”

“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.”

“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.”