George Eliot quotes
George Eliot (1819–1880): English novelist, essayist, poet and journalist. The library holds 230 quotes by George Eliot, drawn from Spanish Gypsy, Middlemarch, Agatha and other works. The 60 below are the most quoted; search the library in the maker for the rest.
Often about: life, faith, time, nature, kindness, family
The best-known George Eliot quotes
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What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?
Middlemarch -
The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.
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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.
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Childhood has no forebodings; but then it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.
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Our deeds determine us as much as we determine our deeds.
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I desire no future that will break the ties of the past.
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Hatred is like fire; it makes even light rubbish deadly.
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In every parting there is an image of death.
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Old men’s eyes are like old men’s memories; they are strongest for things a long way off.
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I could not live in peace if I put the shadow of a wilful sin between myself and God.
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The blessed work of helping the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.
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One couldn’t carry on life comfortably without a little blindness to the fact that everything has been said better than we can put it ourselves.
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Wine and the sun will make vinegar without any shouting to help them.
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I have a knack of hoping, which is as good as an estate in reversion, if one can keep from the temptation of turning it into certainty, which may spoil all.
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It is no wonder man’s religion has much suffering in it; no wonder he needs a suffering God.
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Scarceness is what there is the biggest stock of in the country.
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The mother’s yearning, that completest type of the life in another life which is the essence of real human love, feels the presence of the cherished child even in the base, degraded man.
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I’ve never any pity for conceited people, because I think they carry their comfort about with them.
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It’s no use filling your pocket full of money if you have got a hole in the corner.
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They say Fortune is a woman and capricious. But sometimes she is a good woman, and gives to those who merit.
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More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.
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There’s folks as make bad butter, and trusten to the salt t’ hide it.
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Angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.
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Don’t seem to be on the lookout for crows, else you’ll set other people watching.
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There’s folks ‘ud stand on their heads and then say the fault was in their boots.
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You make but a poor trap to catch luck if you go and bait it with wickedness.
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So our lives glide on; the river ends we don’t know where, and the sea begins, and then there is no more jumping ashore.
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Irritation, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress.
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The great river-courses which have shaped the lives of men have hardly changed.
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Leisure is gone; gone where the spinning-wheels are gone, and the pack-horses, and the slow wagons, and the peddlers who brought bargains to the door on sunny afternoons.
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To manage men one ought to have a sharp mind in a velvet sheath.
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Hope, folding her wings, looked backward and became regret.
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Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest.
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Roast meat at three fires; as soon as you’ve basted one, another’s burnin’.
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No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.
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That farewell kiss which resembles greeting, that last glance of love which becomes the sharpest pang of sorrow.
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What is a handful of reasonable men against a crowd with stones in their hands?
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We hand folks over to God’s mercy, and show none ourselves.
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The earliest and the longest has still the mastery over us.
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We know what a masquerade all development is, and what effective shapes may be disguised in helpless embryos. In fact, the world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome dubious eggs called possibilities.
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Any coward can fight a battle when he’s sure of winning; but give me the man who has pluck to fight when he’s sure of losing.
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Character is not cut in marble—it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.
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When what is good comes of age and is likely to live, there is reason for rejoicing.
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Melodies die out like the pipe of Pan, with the ears that love them and listen for them.
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Our deeds are like children born to us; they live and act apart from our own will. Children may be strangled, but deeds never.
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It’s them as take advantage that get advantage i’ this world, I think; folks have to wait long enough before it’s brought to ’em.
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It’s ill livin’ in a hen-roost for them as doesn’t like fleas.
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Love has a way of cheating itself consciously, like a child who plays at solitary hide-and-seek; it is pleased with assurances that it all the while disbelieves.
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Has any one ever pinched into its pilulous smallness the cobweb of pre-matrimonial acquaintanceship?
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When death comes, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.
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There’s nothing but what’s bearable as long as a man can work.
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An old friend is not always the person whom it is easiest to make a confidant of.
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If the chaff-cutter had the making of us, we should all be straw, I reckon.
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Our love is inwrought in our enthusiasm, as electricity is inwrought in the air, exalting its power by a subtle presence.
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It’s hard to tell which is Old Harry when everybody’s got boots on.
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I’m proof against that word failure. I’ve seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure in cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.
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Where’s the use of a woman’s having brains of her own if she’s tackled to a geck as everybody’s a-laughing at?
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Ignorance is not so damnable as humbug, but when it prescribes pills it may happen to do more harm.
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“I could n’t live in peace if I put the shadow of a wilful sin between myself and God.”
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To be a poet is to have a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.
Where these quotes come from
- Spanish Gypsy (12 quotes)
- Middlemarch (1 quote)
- Agatha (1 quote)
- Legend of Jubal (1 quote)
- Stradivarius (1 quote)
- The Spanish Gypsy (1 quote)
Every quote comes from a public-domain edition. How the library was made .