1,496 Quotes by George Eliot

She hates everything that is not what she longs for.

Hurt, he'll never be hurt--he's made to hurt other people.

Oh, you dear good father!" cried Mary, putting her hands round her father´s neck, while he bent his head placidly, willing to be caressed. "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.

Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Animals are such agreeable friends―they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms.

A deistical prater, fit to sit in the chimney-corner of a pot-house, and make blasphemous comments on the one greasy newspaper fingered by beer-swilling tinkers.

It is a common sentence that knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what ignorance in an hour pulls down.

Those bitter sorrows of childhood!-- when sorrow is all new and strange, when hope has not yet got wings to fly beyond the days and weeks, and the space from summer to summer seems measureless.

It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self—never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardor of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted.