George Eliot Quotes

The terror of being judged sharpens the memory: it sends an inevitable glare over that long-unvisited past which has been habitually recalled only in general phrases. Even without memory, the life is bound into one by a zone of dependence in growth and decay; but intense memory forces a man to own his blameworthy past. With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man’s past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.

It's but little good you'll do a-watering the last year's crop.

but very little achievement is required in order to pity another man's shortcomings.

Her own misery filled her heart — there was no room in it for other people's sorrow.

But a morbid consciousness that others did not give him the place which he had not demonstrably merited—a perpetual suspicious conjecture that the views entertained of him were not to his advantage— a melancholy absence of passion in his efforts at achievement, and a passionate resistance to the confession that he had achieved nothing.

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.

I began ... to watch with peculiar alarm lest what I called my philosophic estimate of the human lot in general, should be a mere prose lyric expressing my own pain and consequent bad temper.

I suppose one reason why we are seldom able to comfort our neighbours with our words is that our goodwill gets adulterated, in spite of ourselves, before it can pass our lips. We can send black puddings and petticoes without giving them a flavour of our own egoism; but language is a stream that is almost sure to smack of a mingled soil. There was a fair proportion of kindness in Raveloe; but it was often of a beery and bungling sort, and took the shape least allied to the complimentary and hypocritical.

Every man who is not a monster, a mathematician, or a mad philosopher, is the slave of some woman or other.

It’s rather a strong check to one’s self-complacency to find how much of one’s right doing depends on not being in want of money.

Pride only helps us to be generous; it never makes us so, any more than vanity makes us witty.

When a man has seen the woman whom he would have chosen if he had intended to marry speedily, his remaining a bachelor will usually depend on her resolution rather than on his.

"The clergy are, practically, the most irresponsible of all talkers.

["Evangelical Teaching: Dr. Cumming," The Westminster Review, 1885.]"

A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

We see human heroism broken into units and say, this unit did little – might as well not have been. But in this way we might break up a great army into units; in this way we might break the sunlight into fragments, and think that this and the other might be cheaply parted with. Let us rather raise a monument to the soldiers whose brave hearts only kept the ranks unbroken and met death – a monument to the faithful who were not famous, and who are precious as the continuity of the sunbeams is precious, though some of them fall unseen and on barrenness.