Quotes from George Eliot

Indeed, she herself was accustomed to think that entire freedom from the necessity of behaving agreeably was included in the Almighty's intentions about families.

Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings—much harder than to say something fine about them which is NOT the exact truth.

I am sorry to add that she was sobbing bitterly, with such abandonment to this relief of an oppressed heart as a woman habitually controlled by pride on her own account and thoughtfulness for others will sometimes allow herself when she feels securely alone.

To people accustomed to reason about the forms in which their religious feeling has incorporated itself, it is difficult to enter into that simple, untaught state of mind in which the form and the feeling have never been severed by an act of reflection.

She filled up all blanks with unmanifested perfections, interpreting him as she interpreted the works of Providence, and accounting for seeming discords by her own deafness to the higher harmonies. And there are many blanks left in the weeks of courtship, which a loving faith fills with happy assurance.

In the early ages of the world, we know, it was believed that each territory was inhabited and ruled by its own divinities, so that a man could cross the bordering heights and be out of the reach of his native gods, whose presence was confined to the streams and the groves and the hills among which he had lived from his birth.

Bulstrode, after a moment's hesitation, took his hat from the floor and slowly rose

He could perhaps have given no precise form to the reasons that determined this conclusion, but it is well known to all experienced minds that our firmest convictions are often dependent on subtle impressions for which words are quite too coarse a medium.

Explain my preference! I never had a preference for her, any more than I have a preference for breathing.

by their brevity when Dorothea had to

Surely the golden hours are turning gray And dance no more, and vainly strive to run: I see their white locks streaming in the wind— Each face is haggard as it looks at me, Slow turning in the constant clasping round Storm-driven.

She controlled herself by the help of an inward defiance, and without other sign of emotion than this lip-paleness turned to her play. But Deronda's gaze seemed to have acted as an evil eye. Her stake was gone.

When you get me a good man made out of arguments, I will get you a good dinner with reading you the cookery-book.

They had gone forth together into their life of sorrow, and they would never more see the sunshine undimmed by remembered cares. They had entered the thorny wilderness, and the golden gates of their childhood had forever closed behind them.

it came with the vibrations from a woman's glance.

These irregularities of judgment, I imagine, are found even in riper minds than Mary Garth's: our

That is a rare and blessed lot which some greatest men have not attained, to know ourselves guiltless before a condemning crowd -- to be sure that what we are denounced for is solely the good in us.

Fate has carried me 'Mid the thick arrows: I will keep my stand-- Not shrink and let the shaft pass by my breast To pierce another.

H]e was in another sort of contemplative mood perhaps more common in the young men of our day — that of questioning whether it were worth while to take part in the battle of the world: I mean, of course, the young men in whom the unproductive labor of questioning is sustained by three or five per cent on capital which somebody else has battled for.

Far off in the bending sky was the pearly light; and she felt the largeness of the world and the manifold wakings of men to labor and endurance. She was a part of that involuntary, palpitating life, and could neither look out on it from her luxurious shelter as a mere spectator, nor hide her eyes in selfish complaining.

You're like a tipsy man as thinks everybody's had too much but himself.

She seems to have what I never saw in any woman before—a fountain of friendship towards men—a

But why should you regret it more because I am a woman? Perhaps because we need that you should be better than we are. But suppose _we_ need that men should be better than we are, said Gwendolen with a little air of check! That is rather a difficulty, said Deronda, smiling. I suppose I should have said, we each of us think it would be better for the other to be good.

But to minds strongly marked by the positive and negative qualities that create severity,— strength of will, conscious rectitude of purpose, narrowness of imagination and intellect, great power of self-control, and a disposition to exert control over others,— prejudices come as the natural food of tendencies which can get no sustenance out of that complex, fragmentary, doubt-provoking knowledge which we call truth.