George Eliot

Renunciation remains sorrow, though a sorrow borne willingly.

— George Eliot

No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty.

— George Eliot

The beginning of an acquaintance whether with persons or things is to get a definite outline of our ignorance.

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

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.

— George Eliot

In the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little.

— George Eliot

Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age.

— George Eliot

It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.

— George Eliot

Breed is stronger than pasture.

— George Eliot

Animals are such agreeable friends, they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms.

— George Eliot

Great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion.

— George Eliot

Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning, but give me the man who has pluck to fight when he's sure of losing. That's my way, sir; and there are many victories worse than a defeat.

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

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.

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

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.

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

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.

— George Eliot

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.

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

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?

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

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.

— George Eliot

The desire to conquer is itself a sort of subjection.

— George Eliot

The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.

— George Eliot

Perhaps his might be one of the natures where a wise estimate of consequences is fused in the fires of that passionate belief which determines the consequences it believes in.

— George Eliot

When death comes it is never our tenderness that we repent from, but our severity.

— George Eliot

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

— George Eliot

Death is the king of this world: 'Tis his park where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music for his banquet

— George Eliot

How could a man be satisfied with a decision between such alternatives and under such circumstances? No more than he can be satisfied with his hat, which he's chosen from among such shapes as the resources of the age offer him, wearing it at best with a resignation which is chiefly supported by comparison.

— George Eliot

Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.

— George Eliot

Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.

— George Eliot

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

— George Eliot

To act with doubleness towards a man whose own conduct was double, was so near an approach to virtue that it deserved to be called by no meaner name than diplomacy.

— George Eliot

The sense of an entailed disadvantage -- the deformed foot doubtfully hidden by the shoe, makes a restlessly active spiritual yeast, and easily turns a self-centered, unloving nature into an Ishmaelite. But in the rarer sort, who presently see their own frustrated claim as one among a myriad, the inexorable sorrow takes the form of fellowship and makes the imagination tender.

— George Eliot

What quarrel, what harshness, what unbelief in each other can subsist in the presence of a great calamity, when all the artificial vesture of our life is gone, and we are all one with each other in primitive mortal needs?

— George Eliot

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 have recovered hope.

— George Eliot

It is never too late to be what you might have been.

— George Eliot

The reward of one's duty is the power to fulfill another.

— George Eliot

Those who trust us educate us.

— George Eliot

The egoism which enters into our theories does not affect their sincerity; rather, the more our egoism is satisfied, the more robust is our belief.

— George Eliot

You have such strong words at command, that they make the smallest argument seem formidable.

— George Eliot

No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.

— George Eliot

One soweth and another reapeth is a verity that applies to evil as well as good.

— George Eliot

The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character.

— George Eliot

Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.

— George Eliot

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

— George Eliot

But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.

— George Eliot

Is it not rather what we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other?

— George Eliot

Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.

— George Eliot

There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.

— George Eliot

Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.

— George Eliot

The only failure one should fear, is not hugging to the purpose they see as best.

— George Eliot

To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.

— George Eliot

I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.

— George Eliot

In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause.

— George Eliot

Would not love see returning penitence afar off, and fall on its neck and kiss it?

— George Eliot

Best friend, my well-spring in the wilderness!

— George Eliot

Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which there is much agreement, much disputation, and yet more personal liking.

— George Eliot

Friendships begin with liking or gratitude roots that can be pulled up.

— George Eliot

Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral. They have the same effect of grating incongruity as the sound of a coarse voice breaking the solemn silence of night.

— George Eliot

I desire no future that will break the ties with the past.

— George Eliot

Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.

— George Eliot

It's them as take advantage that get advantage in this world.

— George Eliot

A toddling little girl is a center of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other.

— George Eliot

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving.

— George Eliot

Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it: it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker.

— George Eliot

She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.

— George Eliot

The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.

— George Eliot

Children demand that their heroes should be freckleless, and easily believe them so: perhaps a first discovery to the contrary is less revolutionary shock to a passionate child than the threatened downfall of habitual beliefs which makes the world seem to totter for us in maturer life.

— George Eliot

A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

— George Eliot

Harold, like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas.

— George Eliot

For what we call illusions are often, in truth, a wider vision of past and present realities --a willing movement of a man's soul with the larger sweep of the world's forces --a movement towards a more assured end than the chances of a single life.

— George Eliot

Our impartiality is kept for abstract merit and demerit, which none of us ever saw.

— George Eliot

Strange, that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us.

— George Eliot

Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.

— George Eliot

There are some cases in which the sense of injury breeds -- not the will to inflict injuries and climb over them as a ladder, but -- a hatred of all injury.

— George Eliot

Of what use, however, is a general certainty that an insect will not walk with his head hindmost, when what you need to know is the play of inward stimulus that sends him hither and thither in a network of possible paths?

— George Eliot

Most of us who turn to any subject we love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love.

— George Eliot

Keep true, never be ashamed of doing right; decide on what you think is right and stick to it.

— George Eliot

Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire; it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.

— George Eliot

The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory.

— George Eliot

Kisses honeyed by oblivion.

— George Eliot

Of a truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what may be; whereas Ignorance is a blind giant who, let him but wax unbound, would make it a sport to seize the pillars that hold up the long-wrought fabric of human good, and turn all the places of joy as dark as a buried Babylon.

— George Eliot

Might, could, would --they are contemptible auxiliaries.

— George Eliot

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

— George Eliot

When one wanted one's interests looking after whatever the cost, it was not so well for a lawyer to be over honest, else he might not be up to other people's tricks.

— George Eliot

Life is too precious to be spent in this weaving and unweaving of false impressions, and it is better to live quietly under some degree of misrepresentation than to attempt to remove it by the uncertain process of letter-writing.

— George Eliot

What do we live for; if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?

— George Eliot

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.

— George Eliot

A supreme love, a motive that gives a sublime rhythm to a woman's life, and exalts habit into partnership with the soul's highest needs, is not to be had where and how she wills.

— George Eliot

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 literature and speech and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.

— George Eliot

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.

— George Eliot