Quotes by George Eliot

After all, people may really have in them some vocation which is not quite plain to themselves, may they not? They may seem idle and weak because they are growing. We should be very patient with each other, I think.

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

When a homemaking aunt scolds a niece for following her evangelistic passion instead of domestic pursuits, her reply is interesting. First, she clarifies that Gods individual call on her doesnt condemn those in more conventional roles. Then, she says she can no more ignore the cry of the lost than her aunt can the cry of her child.

She handled it (her trade) with all the grace that belongs to mastery.

She hates everything that is not what she longs for.

mysterious money had stood to him as the symbol of earthly good, and the immediate object of toil. He had seemed to love it little in the years when every penny had its purpose for him; for he loved the purpose then. But now, when all purpose was gone, that habit of looking towards the money and grasping it with a sense of fulfilled effort made a loam that was deep enough for the seeds of desire.

Dont judge a book by its cover

Sane people did what their neighbours did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.

I’ve always felt that your belongings have never been on a level with you.

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

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

We all remember epochs in our experience when some dear expectation dies, or some new motive is born.

Those slight words and looks and touches are part of the souls language; and the finest language, I believe, is chiefly made up of unimposing words, such as light, sound, stars, music—words really not worth looking at, or hearing, in themselves, any more than chips or sawdust. It is only that they happen to be the signs of something unspeakably great and beautiful. I am of opinion that love is a great and beautiful thing too, and if you agree with me, the smallest signs of it will not be chips and sawdust to you: they will rather be like those little words, light and music, stirring the long-winding fibres of your memory and enriching your present with your most precious past.

Her anger said, as anger is apt to say, that God was with her— that all heaven, though it were crowded with spirits watching them, must be on her side.

Timid people always reek their peevishness on the gentle.

When a tender affection has been storing itself in us through many of our years, the idea that we could accept any exchange for it seems to be a cheapening of our lives. And we can set a watch over our affections and our constancy as we can over other treasures.

We learn to restrain ourselves as we get older. We keep apart when we have quarrelled, express ourselves in well-bred phrases, and in this way preserve a dignified alienation, showing much firmness on one side, and swallowing much grief on the other. We no longer approximate in our behaviour to the mere impulsiveness of the lower animals, but conduct ourselves in every respect like members of a highly civilised society.

The dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters the desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic.

My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.

What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined to strengthen each other, to be at one with each other in silent unspeakable memories