George Eliot quotes - page 9

It is the glory of the heritage Thy life has left, that makes thy outcast age: Thy limbs shall lie dark, tombless on this sod, Because thou shinest in man's soul, a god, Who found and gave new passion and new joy That nought but Earth's destruction can destroy. Thy gifts to give was thine of men alone: 'Twas but in giving that thou couldst atone For too much wealth amid their poverty. (George Eliot)
He seemed to weave, like the spider, from pure impulse, without reflection. Every man's work, pursued steadily, tends in this way to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life. View quote
George Eliot
"Jubal," the face said, "I am thy loved Past, The soul that makes thee one from first to last. I am the angel of thy life and death, Thy outbreathed being drawing its last breath. Am I not thine alone, a dear dead bride Who blest thy lot above all men's beside? View quote
George Eliot
... that modern sect of Flagellants who make a ritual of lashing - not themselves but - all their neighbours. View quote
George Eliot
. . . "there's allays two 'pinions; there's the 'pinion a man has of himsen, and there's the 'pinion other folks have on him. There'd be two 'pinions about a cracked bell, if the bell could hear itself." View quote
George Eliot
She nursed him, she read to him, she anticipated his wants, and was solicitous about his feelings; but there had entered into the husband's mind the certainty that she judged him, and that her wifely devotedness was like a penitential expiation of unbelieving thoughts-was accompanied with a power of comparison by which himself and his doings were seen too luminously as a part of things in general. His discontent passed vaporlike through all her gentle loving manifestations, and clung to that unappreciative world which she had only brought nearer to him. View quote
George Eliot
He said within his soul, "'This is the end: O'er all the earth to where the-heavens bend And hem men's travel, I have breathed my soul: I lie here now the remnant of that whole, The embers of a life, a lonely pain; As far-off rivers to my thirst were vain, So of my mighty years nought comes to me again." View quote
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?" The face bent over him like silver night In long-remembered summers; that calm light Of days which shine in firmaments of thought, That past unchangeable, from change still wrought. View quote
George Eliot
With thy coming Melody was come. This was thy lot, to feel, create, bestow, And that immeasurable life to know From which the fleshly self falls shrivelled, dead, A seed primeval that has forests bred. View quote
George Eliot
Ah," said Dolly, with soothing gravity, "it's like the night and the morning, and the sleeping and the waking, and the rain and the harvest - one goes and the other comes, and we know nothing how nor where. We may strive and scrat and fend, but it's little we can do arter all - the big things come and go wi' no striving o' our'n - they do, that they do; and I think you're in the right on it to keep the little un, Master Marner, seeing as it's been sent to you, though there's folks as thinks different. View quote
George Eliot
[Mr Johnson] "You know what a Tory is – one who wants to drive the working men as he'd drive cattle." (George Eliot)
Lamech's sons were heroes of their race: Jubal, the eldest, bore upon his face The look of that calm river-god, the Nile, Mildly secure in power that needs not guile. View quote
George Eliot
A serious ape whom none take seriously, Obliged in this fool's world to earn his nuts By hard buffoonery. View quote
George Eliot
It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much. View quote
George Eliot
The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down. View quote
George Eliot
What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self. View quote
George Eliot
Life seems to go on without effort when I am filled with music. View quote
George Eliot
It is a common sentence that knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what ignorance in an hour pulls down. View quote
George Eliot
Hold up your head! You were not made for failure, you were made for victory. Go forward with a joyful confidence. View quote
George Eliot
And, of course men know best about everything, except what women know better. View quote
George Eliot
After all, the true seeing is within. (George Eliot)
It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them. View quote
George Eliot
The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots. View quote
George Eliot
Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life. View quote
George Eliot
Rome - the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar. View quote
George Eliot