Quotes from George Eliot

You have been reproaching other people all your life - you have been always sure you yourself are right: it is because you have not a mind large enough to see that there is anything better than your own conduct and your own petty aims.

What can promote innocent mirth, and I may say virtue, more than a good riddle?

For the most glutinously indefinite minds enclose some hard grains of habit...

But now, since they had been in Rome, with all the depths of her emotion roused to tumultuous activity, and with life made a new problem by new elements, she had been becoming more and more aware, with a certain terror, that her mind was continually sliding into inward fits of anger and repulsion, or else into forlorn weariness.

Love seeketh not itself to please, Nor for itself hath any care But for another gives its ease And builds a heaven in hell's despair Love seeketh only self to please, To bind another to its delight, Joys in another's loss of ease, And builds a hell in heaven's despite." —W. Blake: Songs of Experience

husbands are an inferior class of men, who require keeping in order.

It is a mere cowardice to seek safety in negations. No character becomes strong in that way. You will be thrown into the world some day and then every rational satisfaction your nature that you deny now will assault like a savage appetite.

Our consciences are not all of the same pattern, an inner deliverance of fixed laws: they are the voice of sensibilities as various as our memories.

But we all know the wag's definition of a philanthropist: a man whose charity increases directly as the square of the distance.

We are angered even by the full acceptance of our humiliating confessions—how much more by hearing in hard distinct syllables from the lips of a near observer, those confused murmurs which we try to call morbid, and strive against as if they were the oncoming of numbness!

Love is natural; but surely pity and faithfulness and memory are natural too. And they would live in me still, and punish me if I did not obey them. I should be haunted by the suffering I had caused. Our love would be poisoned.

Any one observing him would have seen a change in his complexion, in the adjustment of his facial muscles, in the vividness of his glance, which might have made them imagine that every molecule in his body had passed the message of a magic touch. And so it had.

Oh, you dear good father! cried Mary, putting her hands round her father's neck, while he bent his head placidly, willing to be caressed. 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.

A man with an affectionate disposition, who finds a wife to concur with his fundamental idea of life, easily comes to persuade himself that no other woman would have suited him so well, and does a little daily snapping and quarreling without any sense of alienation.

But oppositions have the illimitable range of objections at command, which need never stop short at the boundary of knowledge, but can draw forever on the vasts of ignorance.

Ay, ay; you want to coax me into thinking him a fine match. No, indeed, father. I don't love him because he is a fine match. What for, then? Oh, dear, because I have always loved him. I should never like scolding any one else so well; and that is a point to be thought of in a husband.

Things look dim to old folks: they'd need have some young eyes about 'em, to let 'em know the world's the same as it used to be.

His faith wavered, but not his speech: it is the lot of every man who has to speak for the satisfaction of the crowd, that he must often speak in virtue of yesterday's faith, hoping it will come back to-morrow.

Minds that have been unhinged from their old faith and love, have perhaps sought this Lethean influence of exile, in which the past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all vanished, and the present too is dreamy because it is linked with no memories.

There was a peculiar fascination for Dorothea in this division of property intended for herself, and always regarded by her as excessive. She was blind, you see, to many things obvious to others - likely to tread in the wrong places, as Celia had warned her; yet her blindness to whatever did not lie in her own pure purpose carried her safely by the side of precipices where vision would have been perilous with fear.

Our vanities differ as our noses do: all conceit is not the same conceit, but varies in correspondence with the minutiae of mental make in which one of us differs from another.

Esther always avoided asking questions of Lydley, who found an answer as she found a key, by pouring out a pocketful of miscellanies.

I at least have so much to do in unravelling 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.

Those who have been indulged by fortune and have always thought of calamity as what happens to others, feel a blind incredulous rage at the reversal of their lot, and half believe that their wild cries will alter the course of the storm.