Quotes from George Eliot

Happily she never attempted to joke, and this perhaps was the most decisive mark of her cleverness

For that fine madness still he did maintain,   Which always should possess the poet's brain.

And all we've got to do is to trusten, Master Marner - to do the right thing as fur as we know and to trusten. For if us as knows so little can see a bit o' good and rights, we may be sure as there's a good and a rights bigger not what we can know - I feel it i' my own inside as it must be so.

A pair of church pigeons for a couple of wicked Spanish fowls that eat their own eggs!

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. And the other is, you must not be ashamed of your work, and think it would be more honorable to you to be doing something else. You must have a pride in your own work and in learning to do it well, and not be always saying, There's this and there's that — if I had

The weavers and tanners of Middlemarch, unlike Mr. Mawmsey, had never thought of Mr. Brooke as a neighbour and were not more attached to him than if he had been sent in a box from London.

There is correct English: that is not slang. I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.

We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, "Oh, nothing!

Three nails driven into the head commemorated as many crises in Maggie's nine years of earthly struggle; that luxury of vengeance having been suggested to her by the picture of Jael destroying Sisera in the old Bible.

Si les choses n'ont pas, pour vous et moi, tourné aussi mal qu'elles l'auraient pu, c'est en grande partie grâce à ces êtres qui ont vécu loyalement une existence discrète et reposent dans des tombes délaissées.

Trust to me, my boy, trust to me. I've got no wife to worm it out of me and then run out and cackle it in everybody's hearing. If you trust a man, let him be a bachelor—let him be a bachelor.

If you think it incredible that to imagine Lydgate as a man of family could cause thrills of satisfaction which had anything to do with the sense that she was in love with him, I will ask you to use your power of comparison a little more effectively, and consider whether red cloth and epaulets have never had an influence of that sort. Our

and in the long valley of her life, which looked so flat and empty of way-marks, guidance would come as she walked along the road, and saw her fellow-passengers by the way.

He would never have contradicted her, and when a woman is not contradicted, she has no motive for obstinacy in her absurdities.

no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind.

it is astonishing how pleasantly conscience takes our encroachments on those who never complain or have nobody to complain for them.

I should like to make life beautiful – I mean everybody's life. And then all this immense expense of art, that seems somehow to lie outside life and make it no better for the world, pains one. It spoils my enjoyment of anything when I am made to think that most people are shut out from it.

Don't you think men overrate the necessity for humoring everybody's nonsense, till they get despised by the very fools they humor? said Lydgate, moving to Mr. Farebrother's side, and looking rather absently at the insects ranged in fine gradation, with names subscribed in exquisite writing. The shortest way is to make your value felt, so that people must put up with you whether you flatter them or not.

But Duty has a trick of behaving unexpectedly—something like a heavy friend whom we have amiably asked to visit us and who breaks his leg within our gates.

A boy's sheepishness is by no means a sign of overmastering reverence; and while you are making encouraging advances to him under the idea that he is overwhelmed by a sense of your age and wisdom, ten to one he is thinking you extremely queer. The only consolation I can suggest to you is, that the Greek boys probably thought the same of Aristotle.

We learn to restrain ourselves as we get older. We keep apart when we have quarrelled, express ourselves in well-bred phrases, and in this way preserve a dignified alienation, showing much firmness on one side, and swallowing much grief on the other. We no longer approximate in our behaviour to the mere impulsiveness of the lower animals, but conduct ourselves in every respect like members of a highly civilised society.

If you like to swallow him, for his sister's sake, you may; but I've no sauce that will make him go down.

She did not want to deck herself with knowledge—to wear it loose from the nerves and blood that fed her action

Caleb was in a difficulty known to any person attempting in dark times and unassisted by miracle to reason with rustics who are in possession of an undeniable truth which they know through a hard process of feeling, and can let it fall like a giant's club on your neatly carved argument for a social benefit which they do not feel.