Quotes from George Eliot

The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.

I like breakfast-time better than any other moment in the day. No dust has settled on one's mind then, and it presents a clear mirror to the rays of things.

What is opportunity to the man who can't use it? An unfecundated egg, which the waves of time wash away into nonentity.

It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much.

And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it.

People are almost always better than their neighbors think they are.

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.

Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.

I desire no future that will break the ties of the past.

If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new. We are told that the oldest inhabitants in Peru do not cease to be agitated by the earthquakes, but they probably see beyond each shock, and reflect that there are plenty more to come.

We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.

Confound you handsome young fellows! You think of having it all your own way in the world. You don't understand women. They don't admire you half so much as you admire yourselves.

Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure.

What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self.

For pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion.

The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots.

Those who trust us educate us.

For what is love itself, for the one we love best? - an enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.

No anguish I have had to bear on your account has been too heavy a price to pay for the new life into which I have entered in loving you.

Blameless people are always the most exasperating.

There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.

Those bitter sorrows of childhood!-- when sorrow is all new and strange, when hope has not yet got wings to fly beyond the days and weeks, and the space from summer to summer seems measureless.

The clergy are, practically, the most irresponsible of all talkers. [ Evangelical Teaching: Dr. Cumming, The Westminster Review, 1885. ]

Hurt, he'll never be hurt--he's made to hurt other people.