George Eliot Quotes

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes from the first moments of our first great sorrow when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and healed, to have despaired and recovered hope.

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.

That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, was certainly not the last of her kind. Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion.

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

Come in, Adam, and rest; it has been a hard day for thee.

I say that the strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.

I am not imposed upon by fine words; I can see what actions mean.

Her heart lived in no cherished secrets of its own, but in feelings which it longed to share with all the world.

That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil — widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.

The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.

I've never any pity for conceited people, because I think they carry their comfort about with them.

Then, as the metal shapes more various grew, And, hurled upon each other, resonance drew, Each gave new tones, the revelations dim Of some external soul that spoke for him: The hollow vessel's clang, the clash, the boom, Like light that makes wide spiritual room And skyey spaces in the spaceless thought, To Jubal such enlarged passion brought, That love, hope, rage, and all experience, Were fused in vaster being, fetching thence Concords and discords, cadences and cries That seemed from some world-shrouded soul-to rise, Some rapture more intense, some mightier rage, Some living sea that burst the bounds of man's brief age.

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.

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.

Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure.