George Eliot Quotes

And, of course men know best about everything, except what women know better.

One has to spend many years in learning how to be happy.

History repeats itself.

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!

Impatient people, according to Bacon, are like the bees, and kill themselves in stinging others.

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

Of new acquaintances one can never be sure because one likes them one day that it will be so the next. Of old friends one is sure that it will be the same yesterday, today, and forever.

The right to rebellion is the right to seek a higher rule, and not to wander in mere lawlessness.

Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.

No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.

Our impartiality is kept for abstract merit and demerit, which none of us ever saw.

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.

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

How will you find good? It is not a thing of choice; it is a river that flows from the foot of the Invisible Throne and flows by the path of obedience.

It is a wonderful subduer, this need of love-this hunger of the heart-as peremptory as that other hunger by which Nature forces us to submit to the yoke, and change the face of the world.

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.

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.

Iteration, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress.

Hobbies are apt to run away with us, you know; it doesn't do to be run away with. We must keep the reins.

No man can be wise on an empty stomach.

What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity.

We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.

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

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

It is always good to know, if only in passing, charming human beings. It refreshes one like flowers and woods and clear brooks.

It is good to be helpful and kindly, but don't give yourself to be melted into candle grease for the benefit of the tallow trade.

Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.

I like not only to be loved, but to be told that I am loved; the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave.

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

There are many victories worse than a defeat.

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

Whether happiness may come or not, one should try and prepare one's self to do without it.

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.

There is a chill air surrounding those who are down in the world, and people are glad to get away from them, as from a cold room.

Hold up your head! You were not made for failure, you were made for victory. Go forward with a joyful confidence.

Justice is like the kingdom of God--it is not without us as a fact, it is within us as a great yearning.

One can say everything best over a meal.

Can any man or woman choose duties? No more than they can choose their birthplace or their father and mother.

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

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

I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out.

Eros has degenerated; he began by introducing order and harmony, and now he brings back chaos.

Consequences are unpitying.

There is no killing the suspicion that deceit has once begotten.

It is never too late to become the person you always thought you could be.

Vague memories hang about the mind like cobwebs.

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

To manage men one ought to have a sharp mind in a velvet sheath.

Your trouble's easy borne when everybody gives it a lift for you.

That farewell kiss which resembles greeting, that last glance of love which becomes the sharpest pang of sorrow.