George Eliot

But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.

— George Eliot

Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest.

— George Eliot

Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

Men's men: gentle or simple, they're much of a muchness.

— George Eliot

And when a woman's will is as strong as the man's who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment.

— George Eliot

I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out.

— George Eliot

I tell you there isn't a thing under the sun that needs to be done at all, but what a man can do better than a woman, unless it's bearing children, and they do that in a poor make-shift way; it had better ha been left to the men.

— George Eliot

Where women love each other, men learn to smother their mutual dislike.

— George Eliot

Errors look so very ugly in persons of small means --one feels they are taking quite a liberty in going astray; whereas people of fortune may naturally indulge in a few delinquencies.

— George Eliot

A mother's yearning feels the presence of the cherished child even in the degraded man.

— George Eliot

But the mother's yearning, that completest type of the life in another life which is the essence of real human love, feels the presence of the cherished child even in the debased, degraded man.

— George Eliot

Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster.

— George Eliot

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistorical acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

— George Eliot

Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.

— George Eliot

Certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we're so fond of it.

— George Eliot

But most of us are apt to settle within ourselves that the man who blocks our way is odious, and not to mind causing him a little of the disgust which his personality excites in ourselves.

— George Eliot

You may try but you can never imagine what it is to have a man's form of genius in you, and to suffer the slavery of being a girl.

— George Eliot

There is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence. There are glances of hatred that stab and raise no cry of murder; robberies that leave man or woman for ever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer --committed to no sound except that of low moans in the night, seen in no writing except that made on the face by the slow months of suppressed anguish and early morning tears. Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear.

— George Eliot

Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.

— George Eliot

Our passions do not live apart in locked chambers but dress in their small wardrobe of notions, bring their provisions to a common table and mess together, feeding out of the common store according to their appetite.

— George Eliot

With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.

— George Eliot

The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.

— George Eliot

I'm proof against that word failure. I've seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.

— George Eliot

Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.

— George Eliot

More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.

— George Eliot

In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations.

— George Eliot

Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy: --in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures.

— George Eliot

Sir Joshua would have been glad to take her portrait; and he would have had an easier task than the historian at least in this, that he would not have had to represent the truth of change --only to give stability to one beautiful moment.

— George Eliot

It is seldom that the miserable of the world can help regarding their misery as a wrong inflicted by those who are less miserable.

— George Eliot

There is nothing that will kill a man so soon as having nobody to find fault with but himself.

— George Eliot

There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.

— George Eliot

The best augury of a man's success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.

— George Eliot

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.

— George Eliot

Prophecy is the most gratuitous form of error.

— George Eliot

Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.

— George Eliot

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.

— George Eliot

The only failure a man ought to fear is failure in cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.

— George Eliot

In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness.

— George Eliot

Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?

— George Eliot

We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.

— George Eliot

One way of getting an idea of our fellow-countrymen's miseries is to go and look at their pleasures.

— George Eliot

The intense happiness of our union is derived in a high degree from the perfect freedom with which we each follow and declare our own impressions.

— George Eliot

Iteration, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress.

— George Eliot

Blows are sarcasm's turned stupid.

— George Eliot

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.

— George Eliot

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.

— George Eliot

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.

— George Eliot

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.

— George Eliot

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?

— George Eliot

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.

— George Eliot

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

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.

— George Eliot

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.

— George Eliot

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.

— George Eliot

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.

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

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.

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

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.

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

We must not inquire too curiously into motives. they are apt to become feeble in the utterance: the aroma is mixed with the grosser air. We must keep the germinating grain away from the light.

— George Eliot

An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.

— George Eliot

You are lonely; I love you; I want you to consent to be my wife; I will wait, but I want you to promise that you will marry me--no one else.

— George Eliot

I would rather not be engaged. When people are engaged, they begin to think of being married soon, . . . and I should like everything to go on for a long while just as it is.

— George Eliot

Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion; and ties us by our heartstrings to the beings that jar us at every movement.

— George Eliot

For everybody's family doctor was remarkably clever, and was understood to have immeasurable skill in the management and training of the most skittish or vicious diseases. The evidence of his cleverness was of the higher intuitive order, lying in his lady-patients' immovable conviction, and was unassailable by any objection except that their intuitions were opposed by others equally strong; each lady who saw medical truth in Wrench and "the strengthening treatment" regarding Toller and "the lowering system" as medical perdition. . . . The strengtheners and the lowerers were all "clever" men in somebody's opinion, which is really as much as can be said for any living talents.

— George Eliot

Great was the clatter of knives and pewter-plates and tin-cans when Adam entered the house-place, but there was no hum of voices to this accompaniment: the eating of excellent roast-beef, provided free of expense, was too serious a business to those good farm-labourers to be performed with a divided attention, even if they had had anything to say to each other,--which they had not.

— George Eliot

It would be a poor result of all our anguish and our wrestling, if we won nothing but our old selves at the end of it--if we could return to the same blind loves, the same self-confident blame, the same light thoughts of human suffering, the same frivolous gossip over blighted human loves, the same feeble sense of that Unknown towards which we have sent forth irrepressible cries in our loneliness. Let us rather be thankful that our sorrow lives in us as an indestructible force, only changing its form, as forces do, and passing from pain into sympathy--the one poor word which includes all our best insight and our best love.

— George Eliot

I suppose all phrases of mere compliment have their turn to be true. A man is occasionally grateful when he says "Thank you."

— George Eliot

In all failures, the beginning is certainly the half of the whole.

— George Eliot

We are all very much alike when we are in our first love.

— George Eliot

What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life--to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?

— George Eliot

People are not expected to be large in proportion to the houses they live in, like snails.

— George Eliot

Marriage is always bad then [when one chooses the wrong man], first or second. Priority is a poor recommendation in a husband if he has got no other. I would rather have a good second husband than an indifferent first.

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

The years seem to rush by now, and I think of death as a fast approaching end of a journey—double and treble reason for loving as well as working while it is day.

— George Eliot

Hostesses who entertain much must make up their parties as ministers make up their cabinets, on grounds other than personal liking.

— George Eliot

What a wretched lot of old shriveled creatures we shall be by-and-by. Never mind—the uglier we get in the eyes of others, the lovelier we shall be to each other; that has always been my firm faith about friendship.

— George Eliot

It’s but a little good you’ll do a-watering the last year’s crop.

— George Eliot

Truth has rough flavors if we bite it through.

— 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 was a pity he couldna be hatched o’er again, an’ hatched different.

— George Eliot

Particular lies may speak a general truth.

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

The best augury of a man’s success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.

— George Eliot