George Eliot citations

Page 5

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

“Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.”

“She hates everything that is not what she longs for.”

“I protest against any absolute conclusion.”

“He distrusted her affection; and what loneliness is more lonely than distrust.”

“Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in her hand.”

“A man falling into dark waters seeks a momentary footing even on sliding stones.”

“Few things hold the perception more thoroughly captive than anxiety about what we have got to say”

“What a different result one gets by changing the metaphor!”

“Her own misery filled her heart—there was no room in it for other people's sorrow.”

“We all remember epochs in our experience when some dear expectation dies, or some new motive is born.”

“I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same kind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.”

“It's a father's duty to give his sons a fine chance.”

“Perfect love has a breath of poetry which can exalt the relations of the least-instructed human beings.”

“There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.”

“All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.”

“I am not quite sure whether clever men ever dance.”

“Consequences are unpitying. Our”

“Consequences are unpitying. Our deeds carry their terrible consequences, quite apart from any fluctuations that went before — consequences that are hardly ever confined to ourselves.”

“It seems to me now, if I was to find Father at home to-night, I should behave different; but there's no knowing — perhaps nothing 'ud be a lesson to us if it didn't come too late.”

“Howiver, I'm not denyin' the women are foolish: God Almighty made 'em to match the men.”

“While the arm is strong to strike and heave,
Let soul and arm give shape that will abide…”

“Fancy what a game at chess would be if all the chessmen had passions and intellects, more or less small and cunning; if you were not only uncertain about your adversary's men, but a little uncertain also about your own; if your knight could shuffle himself on to a new square by the sly; if your bishop, in disgust at your castling, could wheedle your pawns out of their places; and if your pawns, hating you because they are pawns, could make away from their appointed posts that you might get checkmate on a sudden. You might be the longest-headed of deducted reasoners, and yet you might be beaten by your own pawns. You would be especially likely to be beaten, if you depended arrogantly on your mathematical imagination, and regarded your passionate pieces with contempt.
Yet this imaginary chess is easy compared with the game a man has to play against his fellow-men with other fellow-men for his instruments. He thinks himself sagacious, perhaps, because he trusts no bond except that of self-interest; but the only self-interest he can safely rely on is what seems to be such to the mind he would use or govern. Can he ever be sure of knowing this?”

“It is true that an observer, under that softening influence of the fine arts which makes other people’s hardships picturesque, might have been delighted with this homestead called Freeman’s End.”

“But a morbid consciousness that others did not give him the place which he had not demonstrably merited—a perpetual suspicious conjecture that the views entertained of him were not to his advantage— a melancholy absence of passion in his efforts at achievement, and a passionate resistance to the confession that he had achieved nothing.”

“The beings closest to us, whether in love or hate, are often virtually our interpreters of the world, and some feather-headed gentleman or lady whom in passing we regret to take as legal tender for a human being may be acting as a melancholy theory of life in the minds of those who live with them — like a piece of yellow and wavy glass that distorts form and makes colour an affliction. Their trivial sentences, their petty standards, their low suspicions, their loveless ennui, may be making somebody else's life no better than a promenade through a pantheon of ugly idols.”

“Knightly love is blent with reverence
As heavenly air is blent with heavenly blue.”

“But what a voice! It was like the voice of a soul that had once lived in an Aeolian harp.”

“My own experience and development deepen everyday my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.”

“I suppose one reason why we are seldom able to comfort our neighbours with our words is that our goodwill gets adulterated, in spite of ourselves, before it can pass our lips. We can send black puddings and petticoes without giving them a flavour of our own egoism; but language is a stream that is almost sure to smack of a mingled soil. There was a fair proportion of kindness in Raveloe; but it was often of a beery and bungling sort, and took the shape least allied to the complimentary and hypocritical.”