Quotes from George Eliot

Iteration, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress.

Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.

A toddling little girl is a centre of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other.

The responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision.

When death comes it is never our tenderness that we repent from, but our severity.

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.

All passion becomes strength when it has an outlet.

It is not true that a man's intellectual power is, like the strength of a timber beam, to be measured by its weakest point.

Strong souls Live like fire-hearted suns to spend their strength In farthest striving action; breathe more free In mighty anguish than in trivial ease.

The bow always strung ... will not do.

No matter whether failure came A thousand different times, For one brief moment of success, Life rang its golden chimes.

Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning; but give me the man who has the pluck to fight when he's sure of losing.

Hold up your head! You were not made for failure, you were made for victory. Go forward with a joyful confidence.

The best augury of a man's success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.

Whatever may be the success of my stories, I shall be resolute in preserving my incognito, having observed that a nom de plume secures all the advantages without the disagreeables of reputation.

The sweetest of all success is that which one wins by hard exertion.

Even success needs its consolations.

Under every guilty secret there is hidden a brood of guilty wishes, whose unwholesome infecting life is cherished by the darkness.

The idea of duty--that recognition of something to be lived for beyond the mere satisfaction of self--is to the moral life what the addition of a great central ganglion is to animal life.

Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear.

Life is so complicated a game that the devices of skill are liable to be defeated at every turn by air-blown chances, incalculable as the descent of thistle-down.

We have had an unspeakably delightful journey, one of those journeys which seem to divide one's life in two, by the new ideas they suggest and the new views of interest they open.

Our life is determined for us--and it makes the mind very free when we give up wishing, and only think of bearing what is laid upon us, and doing what is given us to do.

We learn words by rote, but not their meaning; that must be paid for with our life-blood, and printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves.