1,496 Quotes by George Eliot

She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.

and we must learn to accommodate ourselves to the discovery that some of those cunningly-fashioned instruments called human souls have only a very limited range of music, and will not vibrate in the least under a touch that fills others with tremulous rapture or quivering agony.

Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.

I think any hardship is better than pretending to do what one is paid for, and never really doing it.

The worst of misery Is when a nature framed for noblest things Condemns itself in youth to petty joys, And, sore athirst for air, breathes scanty life Gasping from out the shallows.

there are two ways of speaking an audience will always like: one is, to tell them what they don't understand; and the other is, to tell them what they're used to.

I like not only to be loved, but to be told that I am loved; the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave.

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.

Few things hold the perception more thoroughly captive than anxiety about what we have got to say