Quotes from George Eliot

Marriage, which has been the bourne of so many narratives is a still a great beginning, as it was to Adam and Eve, who kept their honeymoon in Eden, but had their first little one among thorns and thistles of the wilderness. It is still the beginning of the home epic-the gradual conquest or irremediable loss of that complete union which makes the advancing years a climax, and age the harvest of sweet memories in common.

We cannot help the way in which people speak of us . . .

A hidden soul seemed to be flowing forth from Rosamund's fingers, and so indeed it was, since souls live on in perpetual echoes, and to all fine expression there goes somewhere an originating activity, if it be only that of an interpreter.

Let any lady who is inclined to be hard on Mrs. Cadwallader inquire into the comprehensiveness of her own beautiful views and be quite sure that they afford accommodation for all the lives which have the honour to coexist with hers.

Whatever else she might be, she was not disagreeable. She was not coldly clever and indirectly satirical, but adorably simple and full of feeling. She was an angel beguiled. It would be a unique delight to wait and watch for the melodious fragments in which her heart and soul came forth so directly and ingenuously.

At all events, it is certain that if any medicinal man had come to Middlemarch with the reputation of having very definite religious views, of being given to prayer, and of otherwise showing an active piety, there would have been a general presumption against his medical skill.

I am not sure that the greatest man of his age, if ever that solitary superlative existed, could escape these unfavourable reflections of himself in various small mirrors; and even Milton, looking for his portrait in a spoon, must submit to have the facial angle of a bumpkin.

You must be sure of two things: you must love your work, and not be always looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin.

Even much stronger mortals than Fred Vincy hold half their rectitude in the mind of the being they love best.

Miss Brooke's large eyes seemed, like her religion, too unusual and striking.

The only conscience we can trust to is the massive sense of wrong in a class, and the best wisdom that will work is the wisdom of balancing claims. That's my text—which side is injured? I support the man who supports their claims, not the virtuous upholder of the wrong.

It is offensive to tell a lady when she is expressing her amazement at your skill, that she is altogether mistaken and rather foolish in her amazement.

He has got no good red blood in his body, said Sir James.

Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel; and, fed from within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self.

Yes, that's the worst of it. It's a desperately vexatious thing, that after all one's reflections and quiet determinations, we should be ruled by moods that one can't calculate on beforehand.

She felt that she was beginning to know the pang of disappointed love, and that no other man could be the occasion of such delightful aerial building as she had been enjoying for the last six months.

I am afraid of nothing but that we should miss the passing of our lives together.

Plainness has its peculiar temptations and vices quite as much as beauty; it is apt either to feign amiability, or not feigning it, to show all the repulsiveness of discontent.

It is just that I don't know how I could live without the hope of her. It would be like learning to live with wooden legs.

What have you been doing lately?' 'I? Oh, minding the house–pouring out syrup–pretending to be amiable and contented–learning to have a bad opinion of everybody.

Having once embarked on your marital voyage, it is impossible not to be aware that you make no way and that the sea is not within sight—that, in fact, you are exploring an enclosed basin.

soul of man, when it gets fairly rotten, will bear you all sorts of poisonous toad-stools, and no eye can see whence came the seed thereof.

At last Godfrey turned his head towards her, and their eyes met, dwelling in that meeting without any movement on either side. That quiet mutual gaze of a trusting husband and wife is like the first moment of rest or refuge from a great weariness or a great danger—not to be interfered with by speech or action which would distract the sensations from the fresh enjoyment of repose.

The intensity of her religious disposition, the coercion it exercised over her life, was but one aspect of a nature altogether ardent, theoretic, and intellectually consequent: and with such a nature, struggling in the bonds of a narrow teaching, hemmed in by a social life which seemed nothing but a labyrinth of petty courses, a walled-in maze of small paths that led no whither, the outcome was sure to strike others as at once exaggeration and inconsistency.