George Eliot Quotes

No radiant angel came across the gloom with a clear message for her. In those times, as now, there were human beings who never saw angels or heard perfectly clear messages. Such truth as came to them was brought confusedly in the voices and deeds of men not at all like the seraphs of unfailing wing and piercing vision—men who believed falsities as well as truths, and did the wrong as well as the right. The helping hands stretched out to them were the hands of men who stumbled and often saw dimly, so that these beings unvisited by angels had no other choice than to grasp that stumbling guidance along the path of reliance and action which is the path of life, or else to pause in loneliness and disbelief, which is no path, but the arrest of inaction and death.

"This wonder which my soul hath found, This heart of music in the might of sound, Shall forthwith be the share of all our race, And like the morning gladden common space: The song shall spread and swell as rivers do, And I will teach our youth with skill to woo This living lyre, to know its secret will; Its fine division of the good and ill. So shall men call me sire of harmony, And where great Song is, there my life shall be." Thus glorying as a god beneficent, Forth from his solitary joy he went To bless mankind.

Sad as a wasted passion.

Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts — not to hurt others.

Knightly love is blent with reverence
As heavenly air is blent with heavenly blue.

Signs are small measurable things, but interpretations are illimitable, and in girls of sweet, ardent nature, every sign is apt to conjure up wonder, hope, belief, vast as a sky, and colored by a thimbleful of matter in the shape of knowledge....wrong reasoning sometimes lands poor mortals in right conclusions: starting a long way off the true point, and proceeding by loops and zigzags, we now and then arrive just where we ought to be. Just because Miss Brooke was hasty in her trust, it is not therefore clear that Mr. Casaubon was unworthy of it.

He distrusted her affection; and what loneliness is more lonely than distrust.

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.

So to live is heaven: To make undying music in the world, Breathing a beauteous order that controls With growing sway the growing life of man.

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

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

And Dorothea..she had no dreams of being praised above other women.

Feeling that there was always something better which she might have done if she had only been better and known better, her full nature spent itself in deeds which left no great name on the earth, but the effect of her being on those around her was incalculable.

For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts and on all those Dorotheas who life faithfully their hidden lives and rest in unvisited tombs.

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.

Selfish — a judgment readily passed by those who have never tested their own power of sacrifice.

You know nothing about Hope, that immortal, delicious maiden forever courted forever propitious, whom fools have called deceitful, as if it were Hope that carried the cup of disappointment, whereas it is her deadly enemy, Certainty, whom she only escapes by transformation.