Quotes by Eliot, George

"Blows are sarcasm's turned stupid."

Eliot, George on sarcasm   

"In the schoolroom her quick mind had taken readily that strong starch of unexplained rules and disconnected facts which saves ignorance from any painful sense of limpness."

Eliot, George on school   

"It is, I fear, but a vain show of fulfilling the heathen precept, Know thyself, and too often leads to a self-estimate which will subsist in the absence of that fruit by which alone the quality of the tree is made evident."

Eliot, George on knowledge   

"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 best of us walk about well wadded with stupidity."

Eliot, George on sensitivity
5 fans of this quote   

"Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled egg; and when it takes to cackling will have nothing to announce but that addled delusion."

Eliot, George on silence   

"Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have wrinkles. What do we live for if not to make the world less difficult for each other?"

Eliot, George on smile
8 fans of this quote   

"There is a sort of subjection which is the peculiar heritage of largeness and of love; and strength is often only another name for willing bondage to irremediable weakness."

Eliot, George on submission   

"'Tis God gives skill, but not without men's hand: He could not make Antonio Stradivarius's violins without Antonio."

Eliot, George on action   

"It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees."

Eliot, George on action
3 fans of this quote   

"Human beings must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it."

Eliot, George on action   

"It is generally a feminine eye that first detects the moral deficiencies hidden under the dear deceit of beauty."

Eliot, George on beauty
3 fans of this quote   

"There are various orders of beauty, causing men to make fools of themselves in various styles... but there is one order of beauty which seems made to turn the heads not only of men, but of all intelligent mammals, even of women. It is a beauty like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle and to engage in conscious mischief --a beauty with which you can never be angry, but that you feel ready to crush for inability to comprehend the state of mind into which it throws you."

Eliot, George on beauty
6 fans of this quote   

"Human beliefs, like all other natural growths, elude the barrier of systems."

Eliot, George on belief   

"Who has not felt the beauty of a woman's arm? The unspeakable suggestions of tenderness that lie in the dimpled elbow, and all the varied gently-lessening curves, down to the delicate wrist, with its tiniest, almost imperceptible nicks in the firm softness."

Eliot, George on body   

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

Eliot, George on books - reading
3 fans of this quote   

"To be candid, in Middlemarch phraseology, meant, to use an early opportunity of letting your friends know that you did not take a cheerful view of their capacity, their conduct, or their position; and a robust candor never waited to be asked for its opinion."

Eliot, George on candor   

"He was at a starting point which makes many a man's career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swings and makes his point or else is carried headlong."

Eliot, George on careers   

"Life is measured by the rapidity of change, the succession of influences that modify the being."

Eliot, George on change   

"For character too is a process and an unfolding... among our valued friends is there not someone or other who is a little too self confident and disdainful; whose distinguished mind is a little spotted with commonness; who is a little pinched here and protuberant there with native prejudices; or whose better energies are liable to lapse down the wrong channel under the influence of transient solicitations?"

Eliot, George on character   

"What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?"

Eliot, George on suspicion
4 fans of this quote   

This quotation can be viewed in the context of a book

"Sympathetic people often don't communicate well, they back reflected images which hide their own depths."

Eliot, George on sympathy   

"It was not that she was out of temper, but that the world was not equal to the demands of her fine organism."

Eliot, George on temper   

This quotation can be viewed in the context of a book

"It is in these acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are forever wasted, until men and women look round with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste has made, and say, the earth bears no harvest of sweetness -- calling their denial knowledge."

Eliot, George on things and little things   

"Each thought is a nail that is driven In structures that cannot decay; And the mansion at last will be given To us as we build it each day."

Eliot, George on thoughts and thinking   

"Our virtues are dearer to us the more we have had to suffer for them. It is the same with our children. All profound affection entertains a sacrifice. Our thoughts are often worse than we are, just as they are often better."

Eliot, George on thoughts and thinking   

"Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans --which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi."

Eliot, George on travel   

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

Eliot, George on vanity   

This quotation can be viewed in the context of a book

"When we get to wishing a great deal for ourselves, whatever we get soon turns into mere limitation and exclusion."

Eliot, George on wish and wishing   

"People who can't be witty exert themselves to be devout and affectionate."

Eliot, George on wit
3 fans of this quote   

"That's what a man wants in a wife, mostly; he wants to make sure one fool tells him he's wise."

Eliot, George on wives   

"A woman's heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed receipt."

Eliot, George on women   

This quotation can be viewed in the context of a book

"The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history."

Eliot, George on women
4 fans of this quote   

This quotation can be viewed in the context of a book

"We women are always in danger of living too exclusively in the affections; and though our affections are perhaps the best gifts we have, we ought also to have our share of the more independent life -- some joy in things for their own sake. It is piteous to see the helplessness of some sweet women when their affections are disappointed -- because all their teaching has been, that they can only delight in study of any kind for the sake of a personal love. They have never contemplated an independent delight in ideas as an experience which they could confess without being laughed at. Yet surely women need this defense against passionate affliction even more than men."

Eliot, George on women
3 fans of this quote   

"Our words have wings, but fly not where we would."

Eliot, George on words
5 fans of this quote   

This quotation can be viewed in the context of a book

"I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence."

Eliot, George on writers and writing   

"Ignorance... is a painless evil; so, I should think, is dirt, considering the merry faces that go along with it."

Eliot, George on children   

"We hand folks over to God's mercy, and show none ourselves."

Eliot, George on passion   

"No compliment can be eloquent, except as an expression of indifference."

Eliot, George on compliments   

"I've never any pity for conceited people, because I think they carry their comfort about with them."

Eliot, George on conceit   

"It is possible to have a strong self-love without any self-satisfaction, rather with a self-discontent which is the more intense because one's own little core of egoistic sensibility is a supreme care."

Eliot, George on conceit