Quotes from George Eliot

The vainest woman is never thoroughly conscious of her beauty till she is loved by the man who sets her own passion vibrating in return.

Man cannot choose his duties.

Meanwhile I am consoling myself for your absence by finding my advantage in it — shining like Hesperus when Hyperion has departed... I never held it my forte to be a severe reasoner, but I can see that if whatever is best is A, and B happens to be best, B must be A, however little you might have expected it beforehand.

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it...

"You must love this place very much," said Miss Fenn... "So many homes are like twenty others. But this is unique, and you seem to know every cranny of it. I dare say you could never love another home so well." "Oh, I carry it with me," said Deronda... "To most men their early home is no more than a memory of their early years... The image is never marred. There's no disappointment in memory, and one's exaggerations are always on the good side."

To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion — a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge. One may have that condition by fits only.

I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out.

A woman's rank Lies in the fulness of her womanhood: Therein alone she is royal.

It is a common enough case, that of a man being suddenly captivated by a woman nearly the opposite of his ideal.

Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster.

Women know no perfect love: Loving the strong, they can forsake the strong; Man clings because the being whom he loves Is weak and needs him.

Where women love each other, men learn to smother their mutual dislike.

Men and women make sad mistakes about their own symptoms, taking their vague uneasy longings, sometimes for genius, sometimes for religion, and oftener still for a mighty love.

In the ages since Adam's marriage, it has been good for some men to be alone, and for some women also.

... there is a lightness about the feminine mind--a touch and go--music, the fine arts, that kind of thing--they should study those up to a certain point, women should; but in a light way, you know.

On the other hand, she was disproportionately indulgent towards the failings of men, and was often heard to say that these were natural.

"Adam... My soul is so knit to yours that it is but a divided life I live without you. And this moment, now you are with me, and I feel that our hearts are filled with the same love..." What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life — to strengthen each other in all labour, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?

A man's a man. But when you see a king, you see the work of many thousand men.

Steady work turns genius to a loom.

Doubtless a great anguish may do the work of years, and we may come out from that baptism of fire with a soul full of new awe and new pity.

Every man's work, pursued steadily, tends to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

"It is never too late to be what you might have become."

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.