Quotes By George Eliot

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

That's what a man wants in a wife, mostly; he wants to make sure one fool tells him he's wise.

I like not only to be loved, but also to be told I am loved.

Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.

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.

Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.

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.

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.

The strongest principle of growth lies in the human choice.

We must not sit still and look for miracles; up and doing, and the Lord will be with thee. Prayer and pains, through faith in Christ Jesus, will do anything.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

I'm not denyin' the women are foolish. God Almighty made 'em to match the men.

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

I'm proof against that word failure. I've seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.

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

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?

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

You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.

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.

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.

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

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