Quotes By George Eliot

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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 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.

I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.

In every parting there is an image of death.

Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life.

More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.

Hostesses who entertain much must make up their parties as ministers make up their cabinets, on grounds other than personal liking.

Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which there is much agreement, much disputation, and yet more personal liking.

No compliment can be eloquent, except as an expression of indifference.

An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.