George Eliot quotes - page 20

George Eliot was an English novelist, poet, and journalist, celebrated for her insightful works such as "Middlemarch" and "Silas Marner." Her real name was Mary Ann Evans, and she adopted a male pen name to ensure her writings were taken seriously. She remains a towering figure in Victorian literature, known for her psychological depth and realism. Here are 538 of her quotes:

Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings - much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.

George Eliot

He never had a doubt that such gods were; He looked within, and saw them mirrored there.

George Eliot

Jubal had a frame Fashioned to finer senses, which became A yearning for some hidden soul of things.

George Eliot

Nice distinctions are troublesome.

George Eliot

Such patience have the heroes who begin, Sailing the first toward lands which others win.

George Eliot

While the heart beats, bruise it - it is your only opportunity; while the eye can still turn towards you with moist, timid entreaty, freeze it with an icy unanswering gaze; while the ear, that delicate messenger to the inmost sanctuary of the soul, can still take in the tones of kindness, put it off with hard civility, or sneering compliment, or envious affectation of indifference; while the creative brain can still throb with the sense of injustice, with the yearning for brotherly recognition - make haste - oppress it with your ill-considered judgements, your trivial comparisons, your careless misrepresentations.

George Eliot

It is so much easier to make up your mind that your neighbour is good for nothing, than to enter into all the circumstances that would oblige you to modify that opinion.

George Eliot

Jubal was not a name to wed with mockery. Two rushed upon him: two, the most devout In honor of great Jubal, thrust him out, And beat him with their flutes.

George Eliot

O may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence; live In pulses stirred to generosity, In deeds of daring rectitude...

George Eliot

If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

I am not quite sure whether clever men ever dance.

George Eliot

Apropos of the "The Lifted Veil," I think it will not be judicious to reprint it at present. I care for the idea which it embodies, and which justifies its painfulness. A motto which I wrote on it yesterday perhaps is a sufficient indication of that idea: - "Give me no light, great heaven, but such as turns To energy of human fellowship; No powers save the growing heritage That makes complete manhood." But it will be well to put the story in harness with some other productions of mine, and not send it forth in its dismal loneliness. There are many things in it which I would willingly say over again, and I shall never put them in any other form. But we must wait a little. The question is not in the least one of money, but of care for the best effect of writing, which often depends on circumstances, much as pictures depend on light and juxtaposition.

George Eliot

The immortal name of Jubal filled the sky, While Jubal lonely laid him down to die.

George Eliot

I see a face of love, Fair as sweet music when my heart was strong: Yea - art thou come again to me, great Song?

George Eliot

Where is the Life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

George Eliot

A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of earth, for the labours men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakeable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge: a spot where the definiteness of early memories may be inwrought with affection, and kindly acquaintance with all neighbours, even to the dogs and donkeys, may spread not by sentimental effort and reflection, but as a sweet habbit of the blood. At five years old, mortals are not prepared to be citizens of the world, to be stimulated by abstract nouns, to soar above preference into impartiality; and that prejudice in favour of milk with which we blindly begin, is a type of the way body and soul must get nourished at least for a time. The best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one's own homestead.

George Eliot

Our sense of duty must often wait for some work which shall take the place of dilettanteism and make us feel that the quality of our action is not a matter of indifference.

George Eliot

Errors look so very ugly in persons of small means one feels they are taking quite a liberty in going astray whereas people of fortune may naturally indulge in a few delinquencies.

George Eliot

I tell you there isn't a thing under the sun that needs to be done at all, but what a man can do better than a woman, unless it's bearing children, and they do that in a poor makeshift way it had better have been left to the men.

George Eliot

It is very hard to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.

George Eliot

There is much pain that is quite noiseless and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence.

George Eliot