Quotes By George Eliot

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Adventure is not outside man; it is within.

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.