Quotes from George Eliot

No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.

Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral. They have the same effect of grating incongruity as the sound of a coarse voice breaking the solemn silence of night.

There are many victories worse than a defeat.

To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.

I shall never love anybody. I can't love people. I hate them.' 'The time will come, dear, the time will come.

It's but little good you'll do a-watering the last year's crops

Time, like money, is measured by our needs.

In our spring-time every day has its hidden growths in the mind, as it has in the earth when the little folded blades are getting ready to pierce the ground.

It is time the clergy are told that thinking men, after a close examination of that doctrine, pronounce it to be subversive of true moral development and, therefore, positively noxious.

Childhood is only the beautiful and happy time in contemplation and retrospect: to the child it is full of deep sorrows, the meaning of which is unknown.

The days were longer then (for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings.

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.

It is not true that love makes all things easy; it makes us choose what is difficult.

There are natures in which, if they love us, we are conscious of having a sort of baptism and consecration.

Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.

Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.

It always remains true that if we had been greater, circumstance would have been less strong against us.

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.

Rome - the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

In travelling I shape myself betimes to idleness And take fools' pleasure

The best travel is that which one can take by one's own fireside. In memory or imagination.

The stars are golden fruit upon a tree all out of reach.

It cuts one sadly to see the grief of old people; they've no way o' working it off; and the new spring brings no new shoots out on the withered tree.

No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence.