1,496 Quotes by George Eliot

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.

I've seen pretty clear, ever since I was a young un, as religion's something else besides notions. It isn't notions sets people doing the right things--it's feelings. It's the same with the notions in religion as it is with math'matics--a man may be able to work problems straight off in's head as he sits by the fire and smokes his pipe; but if he has to make a machine or a building, he must have a will and a resolution, and love something else better than his own ease.

What furniture can give such finish to a room as a tender woman's face? And is there any harmony of tints that has such stirring of delight as the sweet modulation of her voice?

Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.

Nice distinctions are troublesome. It is so much easier to say that a thing is black, than to discriminate the particular shade of brown, blue, or green, to which it really belongs. It is so much easier to make up your mind that your neighbour is good for nothing, than to enter into all the circumstances that would oblige you to modify that opinion.

What business has an old bachelor like that to marry?' said Sir James. 'He has one foot in the grave.' 'He means to draw it out again, I suppose.

You know nothing about Hope, that immortal, delicious maiden forever courted forever propitious, whom fools have called deceitful, as if it were Hope that carried the cup of disappointment, whereas it is her deadly enemy, Certainty, whom she only es

A girl of eighteen imagines the feelings behind the face that has moved her with its sympathetic youth as easily as primitive people imagined the humors of the gods in fair weather. What is she to believe in if not in this vision woven from within?

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.