Quotes By George Eliot

People who can't be witty exert themselves to be devout and affectionate.

All the learnin' my father paid for was a bit o' birch at one end and an alphabet at the other.

What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other?

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

I like trying to get pregnant. I'm not so sure about childbirth.

Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions; they pass no criticisms.

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

An ass may bray a good while before he shakes the stars down.

Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest.

A toddling little girl is a centre of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other.

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.

Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.

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

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!

The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.

Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down.

Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster.

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

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through.

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

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.

Conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course.

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.

Death is the king of this world: 'Tis his park where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music for his banquet.

The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory.

Life began with waking up and loving my mother's face.

Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.