George Eliot Quotes

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

Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure.

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

For pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion.

The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots.

It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self — never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardor of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted.

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.

Those bitter sorrows of childhood! — when sorrow is all new and strange, when hope has not yet got wings to fly beyond the days and weeks, and the space from summer to summer seems measureless.

Those who trust us educate us.

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.

Blameless people are always the most exasperating.

No anguish I have had to bear on your account has been too heavy a price to pay for the new life into which I have entered in loving you.

You must love your work, and not be always looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin. And the other is, you must not be ashamed of your work, and think it would be more honorable to you to be doing something else. You must have a pride in your own work and in learning to do it well, and not be always saying, There’s this and there’s that — if I had this or that to do, I might make something of it. No matter what a man is — I wouldn’t give twopence for him’ — here Caleb’s mouth looked bitter, and he snapped his fingers — ‘whether he was the prime minister or the rick-thatcher, if he didn’t do well what he undertook to do.

There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.

Hurt, he'll never be hurt — he's made to hurt other people.