1,496 Quotes by George Eliot

If we had lost our own chief good, other people’s good would remain, and that is worth trying for.

What a different result one gets by changing the metaphor!

Men outlive their love, but they don’t outlive the consequences of their recklessness.

A man vows, and yet will not east away the means of breaking his vow. Is it that he distinctly means to break it? Not at all; but the desires which tend to break it are at work in him dimly, and make their way into his imagination, and relax his muscles in the very moments when he is telling himself over again the reasons for his vow.

It was one of those dangerous moments when speech is at once sincere and deceptive, when feeling, rising high above its average depth, leaves flood-marks which are never reached again.

I cannot imagine myself without some opinion, but I wish to have good reasons for them.

We are overhasty to speak as if God did not manifest himself by our silent feeling, and make his love felt through ours.

He had no ideal world of dead heroes; he knew little of the life of men in the past; he must find the beings to whom he could cling with loving admiration among those who came within speech of him.

The Vicar’s talk was not always inspiriting: he had escaped being a Pharisee, but he had not escaped that low estimate of possibilities which we rather hastily arrive at as an inference from our own failure.