Quotes from George Eliot

Hostesses who entertain much must make up their parties as ministers make up their cabinets, on grounds other than personal liking.

In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations.

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

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.

Maxims are texts to which we turn in danger or sorrow, and we often find what seems to have been expressly written for our use.

When we get to wishing a great deal for ourselves, whatever we get soon turns into mere limitation and exclusion.

I'm not denyin' the women are foolish. God Almighty made 'em to match the men.

There's no real making amends in this world, any more nor you can mend a wrong subtraction by doing your addition right.

There is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it.

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

Whether happiness may come or not, one should try and prepare one's self to do without it.

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

She thinks your lady-love will rule you as the moon rules the tides.

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

Yes, that's the worst of it. It's a desperately vexatious thing that, after all one's reflections and quiet determinations, we should be ruled by moods that one can't calculate on beforehand.

These fellow mortals, every one, must be accepted as they are.

I'm proof against that word failure. I've seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.

...that freshness of feeling, that delicate honor which shrinks from wounding even a sentiment...

The intense happiness of our union is derived in a high degree from the perfect freedom with which we each follow and declare our own impressions.

A woman's heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed recipe.

Death is the king of this world: 'Tis his park where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music for his banquet.

Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral.

If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us.

It's them that take advantage that get advantage i' this world.