George Eliot Quotes

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

By George Eliot

In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause.

By George Eliot

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.

By George Eliot

I desire no future that will break the ties with the past.

By George Eliot

Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.

By George Eliot

Certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we're so fond of it.

By George Eliot

Breed is stronger than pasture.

By George Eliot

But the mother's yearning, that completest type of the life in another life which is the essence of real human love, feels the presence of the cherished child even in the debased, degraded man.

By George Eliot

Children demand that their heroes should be freckleless, and easily believe them so: perhaps a first discovery to the contrary is less revolutionary shock to a passionate child than the threatened downfall of habitual beliefs which makes the world seem to totter for us in maturer life.

By George Eliot

'Tis God gives skill, but not without men's hand: He could not make Antonio Stradivarius's violins without Antonio.

By George Eliot

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

By George Eliot

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.

By George Eliot

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.

By George Eliot

When we get to wishing a great deal for ourselves, whatever we get soon turns into mere limitation and exclusion.

By George Eliot

When death comes it is never our tenderness that we repent from, but our severity.

By George Eliot

What quarrel, what harshness, what unbelief in each other can subsist in the presence of a great calamity, when all the artificial vesture of our life is gone, and we are all one with each other in primitive mortal needs?

By George Eliot

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

By George Eliot

We hand folks over to God's mercy, and show none ourselves.

By George Eliot

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

By George Eliot

There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.

By George Eliot

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.

By George Eliot

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.

By George Eliot

The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.

By George Eliot

The sense of an entailed disadvantage -- the deformed foot doubtfully hidden by the shoe, makes a restlessly active spiritual yeast, and easily turns a self-centered, unloving nature into an Ishmaelite. But in the rarer sort, who presently see their own frustrated claim as one among a myriad, the inexorable sorrow takes the form of fellowship and makes the imagination tender.

By George Eliot

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

By George Eliot

The best augury of a man's success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.

By George Eliot

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

By George Eliot

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

By George Eliot

The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another.

By George Eliot

The strongest principle of growth lies in the human choice.

By George Eliot