Quotes from George Eliot

The best piety is to enjoy - when you can. You are doing the most then to save the earth's character as an agreeable planet. And enjoyment radiates. It is of no use to try and take care of all the world; that is being taken care of when you feel delight- in art or in anything else.

Yes, but not my style of woman: I like a woman who lays herself out a little more to please us. There should be a little filigree about a woman--something of the coquette. A man likes a sort of challenge. The more of a dead set she makes at you the better.

What has that to do with Miss Brooke's marrying him? She does not do it for my amusement.' '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 parentheses,' said Mrs Cadwallader.

I think his own feelings at that moment were perfect, for we mortals have our divine moments, when love is satisfied in the completeness the beloved object.

His confession was silent, and her promise of faithfulness was silent.

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 quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.

Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning.

I sow all sorts of seeds, and get no great harvest from any one of them. I am cursed with susceptibility in every direction, and effective faculty in none. I care for painting and music; I care for classic literature, and mediæval literature, and modern literature; I flutter all ways, and fly in none.

John considered a young master as the natural enemy of an old servant, and young people in general as a poor contrivance for carrying on the world.

Poor child! it was very early for her to know one of those supreme moments in life when all we have hoped or delighted in, all we can dread or endure, falls away from our regard as insignificant; is lost, like a trivial memory, in that simple, primitive love which knits us to the beings who have been nearest to us, in their times of helplessness or of anguish.

The younger had always worn a yoke; but is there any yoked creature without its private opinions?

i am always bored. (gwendolen harleth)

It always remains true that if we had been greater, circumstance would have been less strong against us.

A human being in this aged nation of ours is a very wonderful whole, the slow creation of long interchanging influences; and charm is a result of two such wholes, the one loving and the one loved.

This awakening of a new interest—this passing from the supposition that we hold the right opinions on a subject we are careless about, to a sudden care for it, and a sense that our opinions were ignorance—is an effectual remedy for ennui, which, unhappily, cannot be secured on a physician's prescription;

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

In my opinion, said Lydgate, legal training only makes a man more incompetent in questions that require knowledge of another kind.

Poor Maggie sat down again, with the music all chased out of her soul, and the seven small demons all in again.

But the first glad moment in our first love is a vision which returns to us to the last, and brings with it a thrill of feeling intense and special as the recurrent sensation of a sweet odour breathed in a far off hour of happiness. It is a memory that gives a more exquisite touch to tenderness, that feeds the madness of jealousy, and adds the last keenness to the agony of despair.

we begin by knowing little and believing much, and we sometimes end by inverting the quantities.

There are faces which charge with a meaning and pathos not belonging to the single human soul that flutters beneath them, but speaking the joys and sorrows of foregone generations -- eyes that tell of deep love which doubtless has been and is somewhere, but not paired with these eyes -- perhaps paired with pale eyes that can say nothing; just as a national language may be instinct with poetry unfelt by the lips that use it.

On the contrary, having the amiable vanity which knits us to those who are fond of us, and disinclines us to those who are indifferent, and also a good grateful nature, the mere idea that a woman had a kindness towards him spun little threads of tenderness from out his heart towards hers.

Trouble is so hard to bear, is it not?—How can we live and think that any one has trouble—piercing trouble—and we could help them, and never try?

The calendar hath not an evil day For souls made one by love, and even death Were sweetness, if it came like rolling waves While they two clasped each other, and foresaw No life apart.