1,496 Quotes by George Eliot

But I hasten to finish my story. Brevity is justified at once to those who readily understand, and to those who will never understand.

You want to find out a mode of renunciation that will be an escape from pain. I tell you again, there is no such escape possible except by perverting or mutilating one's nature. What would become of me, if I tried to escape pain? Scorn and cynicism would be my only opium; unless I could fall into some kind of conceited madness, and fancy myself a favourite of Heaven because I am not a favourite with men.

The select natures who pant after the ideal, and find nothing in pantaloons or petticoats great enough to command their reverence and love, are curiously in unison with the narrowest and pettiest.

In bed our yesterdays are too oppressive: if a man can only get up, though it be but to whistle or to smoke, he has a present which offers some resistance to the past—sensations which assert themselves against tyrannous memories.

Her little butterfly soul fluttered incessantly between memory and dubious expectation.

I don't see how a man is to be good for much unless he has some one woman to love him dearly.

Doubtless a great anguish may do the work of years, and we may come out from that baptism of fire with a soul full of new awe and new pity.

I had some ambition. I meant everything to be different with me. I thought I had more strength and mastery. But the most terrible obstacles are such as nobody can see except oneself.

Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbor's buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.