Quotes By George Eliot

The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.

You may try but you can never imagine what it is to have a man's form of genius in you, and to suffer the slavery of being a girl.

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.

The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty.

He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.

There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire; it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.

There are some cases in which the sense of injury breeds not the will to inflict injuries and climb over them as a ladder, but a hatred of all injury.

Might, could, would - they are contemptible auxiliaries.

Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.

It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibers that knit us to the old.

Is it not rather what we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other?

A woman's heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed recipe.

I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.

In every parting there is an image of death.

Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life.

Hostesses who entertain much must make up their parties as ministers make up their cabinets, on grounds other than personal liking.

No compliment can be eloquent, except as an expression of indifference.

There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.

That's what a man wants in a wife, mostly; he wants to make sure one fool tells him he's wise.

Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which there is much agreement, much disputation, and yet more personal liking.

But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.

Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.

More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.

Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.

An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.

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.

The strongest principle of growth lies in the human choice.

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.

Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral. They have the same effect of grating incongruity as the sound of a coarse voice breaking the solemn silence of night.