Quotes By George Eliot

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined - to strengthen each other - to be at one with each other in silent unspeakable memories.

When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.

Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.

Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.

In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness.

To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.

The responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision.

Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.

A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

Harold, like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas.

Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.

Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity.

The world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities.

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

Breed is stronger than pasture.

And when a woman's will is as strong as the man's who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment.

But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.

Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.

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

We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.

It is never too late to be what you might have been.

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

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.

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.

Adventure is not outside man; it is within.

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.

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.

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