Quotes from George Eliot

This was the Reverend Edward Casaubon, noted in the county as a man of profound learning, understood for many years to be engaged on a great work concerning religious history; also as a man of wealth enough to give lustre to his piety, and having views of his own which were to be more clearly ascertained on the publication of his book.

It is a wonderful subduer, this need of love,–this hunger of the heart,–as peremptory as that other hunger by which Nature forces us to submit to the yoke, and change the face of the world.

There was no reason why I should go anywhere. The world about me seemed like a vision that was hurrying by while I stood still with my pain.

In marriage, the certainty, 'She will never love me much,' is easier to bear than the fear, 'I shall love her no more.

She had a confused, dreamy notion that, if the creditors were all paid, her plate and linen ought to come back to her; but she had an inbred perception that while people owed money they were unable to pay, they couldn't rightly call anything their own.

There is a power in the direct glance of a sincere and loving human soul, which will do more to dissipate prejudice and kindle charity than the most elaborate arguments.

It is one of the secrets in that change of mental poise which has been fitly named conversion, that to many among us neither heaven nor earth has any revelation till some personality touches theirs with a peculiar influence, subduing them into receptiveness.

She was no longer wresting with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.

the true seeing is within; and painting stares at you with an insistent imperfection.

There is a sort of subjection which is the peculiar heritage of largeness and of love; and strength is often only another name for willing bondage to irremediable weakness.

felt a sort of pitying anguish over the pathos of my own lot—the lot of a being finely organised for pain, but with hardly any fibres that responded to pleasure—to whom the idea of future evil robbed the present of its joy, and for whom the idea of future good did not still the uneasiness of a present yearning or a present dread: I went dumbly through that stage of the poet's suffering, in which he feels the delicious pang of utterance, and makes an image of his sorrows.

animadversion from that small pipe—that capillary vessel, the Rev.

There's Jeremy Taylor's 'Holy Living and Dying' among 'em. I read

I long for life, and there is no help. I thirsted for the unknown: the thirst is gone. O God, let me stay with the known, and be weary of it: I am content. Agony of pain and suffocation — and all the while the earth

I like not only to be loved, but to be told i am loved

But the moment of vocation had come, and before he got down from the chair, the world was new to him by a presentment of endless processes filling the vast spaces planked out of his sight by that wordy ignorance which he had supposed was knowledge.

Sometimes Maggie thought she could have been contented with absorbing fancies; if she could have had all Scott's novels and all Byron's poems!–then, perhaps, she might have found happiness enough to dull her sensibility to her actual daily life.

Nevertheless the joy of being with Dinah would triumph - it was like the influence of climate, which no resistance can overcome.

Sometimes Maggie thought she could have been contented with absorbing fancies; if she could have had all Scott's novels and all Byron's poems!–then, perhaps, she might have found happiness enough to dull her sensibility to her actual daily life. And yet they were hardly what she wanted. She could make dream-worlds of her own, but no dream-world would satisfy her now.

a terrible scorching light showed him the hidden letters that changed the meaning of the past.

Often the soul is ripened into fuller goodness while age has spread an ugly film, so that mere glances can never divine the preciousness of the fruit

No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty.

The chief difference between the reality and the vision was that in his dream Hetty was continually coming before him in bodily presence — strangely mingling herself as an actor in scenes with which she had nothing to do.

it is art's duty to make us aware of realities which are not our own.