1,496 Quotes by George Eliot

Selfish— a judgment readily passed by those who have never tested their own power of sacrifice.

One can begin so many things with a new person! - even begin to be a better man.

A man's mind must be continually expanding and shrinking between the whole human horizon and the horizon of an object-glass.

No man can begin to mould himself on a faith or an idea without rising to a higher order of experience.

Consequences are unpitying. Our deeds carry their terrible consequences, quite apart from any fluctuations that went before—consequences that are hardly ever confined to ourselves. And it is best to fix our minds on that certainty, instead of considering what may be the elements of excuse for us.

I should never have been happy in any profession that did not call forth the highest intellectual strain, and yet keep me in good warm contact with my neighbors. There is nothing like the medical profession for that: one can have the exclusive scientific life that touches the distance and befriend the old fogie in the parish too.

I wonder if any other girl thinks her father the best man in the world!""Nonsense, child; you'll think your husband better.""Impossible," said Mary, relapsing into her usual tone; "husbands are an inferior class of men, who require keeping in order.

Young love-making--that gossamer web! Even the points it clings to--the things whence its subtle interlacing are swung--are scarcely perceptible; momentary touches of finger-tips, meetings of rays from blue and dark orbs, unfinished phrases, lightest changes of cheek and lip, faintest tremors. The web itself is made of spontaneous beliefs and indefinable joys, yearnings of one life to another, visions of completeness, indefinite trust.

Strange, that some of us, with quick alternative vision, see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us.