Quotes from George Eliot

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

scepticism, as we know, can never be thoroughly applied, else life would come to a standstill

it seemed to him as if he were beholding in a magic panorama a future where he himself was sliding into that pleasureless yielding to the small solicitations of circumstance, which is a commoner history of perdition than any single momentous bargain.

A map was a fine thing to study when you were disposed to think of something else, being made up of names that would turn into a chime if you went back upon them.

It's ill guessing what the bats are flying after.

We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, 'Oh, nothing!' Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts - not to hurt others.

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!

I magnified, as usual, the impression any word or deed of mine could produce on others.

I thirsted for the unknown: the thirst is gone. O God, let me stay with the known, and be weary of it: I am content.

Each position has its corresponding duties.

Gwendolen would not have liked to be an object of disgust to this husband whom she hated: she liked all disgust to be on her side.

Our sense of duty must often wait for some work which shall take the place of dilettanteism and make us feel that the quality of our action is not a matter of indifference.

We are overhasty to speak as if God did not manifest himself by our silent feeling, and make his love felt through ours.

Though there's reasons in things as nobody knows on---- that's pretty much what I've made out; yet some folks are so wise they'll find you fifty reasons straight off, and all the while the real reason's winking at 'em in the corner, and they niver see't.

Mrs. Deane was a thin-lipped woman, who made small well-considered speeches on peculiar occasions, repeating them afterwards to her husband, and asking him if she had not spoken very properly.

In bitter manuscript remarks on other men's notions about solar deities, he had become indifferent to the sunlight.

There is no escaping the fact that want of sympathy condemns us to a corresponding stupidity.

It did occur to him that he could perhaps get some help by praying for it; but as the prayers he said every evening were forms learned by heart, he rather shrank from the novelty and irregularity of introducing an extempore passage on a topic of petition for which he was not aware of any precedent.

I shall be so glad if you will tell me what to read. I have been looking into all the books in the library at Offendene, but there is nothing readable. The leaves all stick together and smell musty. I wish I could write books to amuse myself, as you can! How delightful it must be to write books after one's own taste instead of reading other people's! Home-made books must be so nice.

In my opinion, legal training only makes a man more incompetent in questions that require knowledge of another kind. People talk about evidence as if it could really be weighed in scales by a blind Justice. No man can judge what is good evidence on any particular subject, unless he knows that subject well. A lawyer is no better than an old woman at a post-mortem examination.

I should never like scolding any one else so well; and that is a point to be thought of in a husband.

Expenditure–like ugliness and errors–becomes a totally new thing when we attach our own personality to it, and measure it by that wide difference which is manifest (in our own sensations) between ourselves and others.

He had no ideal world of dead heroes; he knew little of the life of men in the past; he must find the beings to whom he could cling with loving admiration among those who came within speech of him.

So much of our early gladness vanishes utterly from our memory: we can never recall the joy with which we laid our heads on our mother's bosom or rode on our father's back in childhood. Doubtless that joy is wrought up into our nature, as the sunlight of long-past mornings is wrought up in the soft mellowness of the apricot, but it is gone for ever from our imagination, and we can only BELIEVE in the joy of childhood.