Quotes from George Eliot

One has to spend many years in learning how to be happy.

Surely there was something taught her by this experience of great need; and she must be learning a secret of human tenderness and long-suffering, that the less erring could hardly know?

Perhaps the wind Wails so in winter for the summers dead, And all sad sounds are nature's funeral cries For what has been and is not.

It must be sad to outlive aught we love.

Alas! the scientific conscience had got into the debasing company of money obligation and selfish respects.

What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity.

I could not without vile hypocrisy and a miserable truckling to the smile of the world ... profess to join in worship which I wholly disapprove.

These gems have life in them: their colors speak, say what words fail of.

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.

It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.

I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.

What to one man is the virtue which he has sunk below the possibility of aspiring to, is to another the backsliding by which he forfeits his spiritual crown.

bad literature of the sort called amusing is spiritual gin.

The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.

Hopes have precarious life. They are oft blighted, withered, snapped sheer off In vigorous growth and turned to rottenness.

Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life.

One couldn't carry on life comfortably without a little blindness to the fact that everything has been said better than we can put it ourselves.

I think what we call the dullness of things is a disease in ourselves. Else how could anyone find an intense interest in life? And many do.

There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.

Life is measured by the rapidity of change, the succession of influences that modify the being.