Quotes from George Eliot

Has any one ever pinched into its pilulous smallness the cobweb of pre-matrimonial acquaintanceship?

I am not quite sure whether clever men ever dance.

The existence of insignificant people has very important consequences in the world. It can be shown to affect the price of bread and the rate of wages, to call forth many evil tempers from the selfish and many heroisms from the sympathetic, and, in other ways, to play no small part in the tragedy of life.

So I am content to tell my simple story, without trying to make things seem better than they were; dreading nothing, indeed, but falsity, which, in spite of one's best efforts, there is reason to dread.

I wonder if any other girl thinks her father the best man in the world! Nonsense, child; you'll think your husband better. Impossible, said Mary, relapsing into her usual tone; husbands are an inferior class of men, who require keeping in order.

He has got no good red blood in his body, said Sir James. No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass, and it was all semicolons and parenthesis, said Mrs. Cadwallader.

Society never made the preposterous demand that a man should think as much about his own qualifications for making a charming girl happy as he thinks of hers for making himself happy. As if a man could choose not only his wife but his wife's husband!

What we call the 'just possible' is sometimes true and the thing we find it easier to believe is grossly false.

To the receptive soul the river of life pauseth not, nor is diminished.

There is no hour that has not its births of gladness and despair, no morning brightness that does not bring new sickness to desolation as well as new forces to genius and love. There are so many of us, and our lots are so different, what wonder that Nature's mood is often in harsh contrast with the great crisis of our lives?

He loved also to think, I did it! And I believe the only people who are free from that weakness are those who have no work to call their own.

You want to find out a mode of renunciation that will be an escape from pain. I tell you again, there is no such escape possible except by perverting or mutilating one's nature. What would become of me, if I tried to escape pain? Scorn and cynicism would be my only opium; unless I could fall into some kind of conceited madness, and fancy myself a favourite of Heaven because I am not a favourite with men.

In our instinctive rebellion against pain, we are children again, and demand an active will to wreak our vengeance on.

For getting a fine flourishing growth of stupidity there is nothing like pouring out on a mind a good amount of subjects in which it feels no interest.

he was gradually discovering the delight there is in frank kindness and companionship between a man and a woman who have no passion to hide or confess.

It is our habit to say that while the lower nature can never understand the higher, the higher nature commands a complete view of the lower. But I think the higher nature has to learn this comprehension, as we learn the art of vision, by a good deal of hard experience, often with bruises and gashes incurred in taking things up by the wrong end, and fancying our space wider than it is.

Anxiety is good for nothing if we can't turn it into a defense.

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.

Author describes one character's optimism as, that quiet well-being which perhaps you and I have felt on a sunny afternoon when, in our brightest youth and health, life has opened a new vista for us, and long to-morrows of activity have stretched before us like a lovely plain which there was no need for hurrying to look at, because it was all our own.

For the fragment of a life, however typical, is not the sample of an even web: promises may not be kept, and an ardent outset may be followed by declension; latent powers may find their long-awaited opportunity; a past error may urge a grand retrieval.

Even when she was speaking, her soul was in prayer reposing on an unseen support.

A man's mind must be continually expanding and shrinking between the whole human horizon and the horizon of an object-glass.

Do we not wile away moments of inanity or fatigued waiting by repeating some trivial movement or sound, until the repetition has bred a want, which is incipient habit?

It had seemed to him as if they were like two creatures slowly turning to marble in each other's presence, while their hearts were conscious and their eyes were yearning.