George Eliot quotes:

Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions; they pass no criticisms.

It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibers that knit us to the old.

Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.

A woman's heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed recipe.

Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.

No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.

Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral. They have the same effect of grating incongruity as the sound of a coarse voice breaking the solemn silence of night.

The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory.

What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined - to strengthen each other - to be at one with each other in silent unspeakable memories.

The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.

Little children are still the symbol of the eternal marriage between love and duty.

Death is the king of this world: 'Tis his park where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music for his banquet.

Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations.

Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.

Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?

We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.

There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.

We hand folks over to God's mercy, and show none ourselves.

The best augury of a man's success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.

The only failure one should fear, is not hugging to the purpose they see as best.

We must not sit still and look for miracles; up and doing, and the Lord will be with thee. Prayer and pains, through faith in Christ Jesus, will do anything.

The intense happiness of our union is derived in a high degree from the perfect freedom with which we each follow and declare our own impressions.

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.

He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.

In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause.

Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest.

I like trying to get pregnant. I'm not so sure about childbirth.

I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out.

What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other?

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!

The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

The beginning of an acquaintance whether with persons or things is to get a definite outline of our ignorance.

It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.

Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.

The strongest principle of growth lies in the human choice.

But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

No compliment can be eloquent, except as an expression of indifference.

Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity.

It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees.

Rome - the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

In every parting there is an image of death.

After all, people may really have in them some vocation which is not quite plain to themselves, may they not? They may seem idle and weak because they are growing. We should be very patient with each other, I think.

What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life--to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?

I would rather not be engaged. When people are engaged, they begin to think of being married soon, and I should like everything to go on for a long while just as it is.

A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards.

The fact is unalterable, that a fellow-mortal with whose nature you are acquainted solely through the brief entrances and exits of a few imaginative weeks called courtship, may, when seen in the continuity of married companionship, be disclosed as something better or worse than what you have preconceived, but will certainly not appear altogether the same.

There are answers which, in turning away wrath, only send it to the other end of the room, and to have a discussion coolly waived when you feel that justice is all on your own side is even more exasperating in marriage than in philosophy.

She felt that she enjoyed it [horseback riding] in a pagan, sensuous way, and always looked forward to renouncing it.

They had entered the thorny wilderness, and the golden gates of their childhood had for ever closed behind them.

Has any one ever pinched into its pilulous smallness the cobweb of pre-matrimonial acquaintanceship?

People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbors."

A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards."

Passion is of the nature of seed, and finds nourishment within, tending to a predominance which determines all currents towards itself, and makes the whole life its tributary."

True, he had dreamy visions of possibilities: there is no human being who having both passions and thoughts does not think in consequence of his passions - does not find images rising in his mind which soothe the passion with hope or sting it with dread."

[She was] a creature full of eager, passionate longings for all that was beautiful and glad; thirsty for all knowledge; with an ear straining after dreamy music that died away and would not come near to her; with a blind unconscious yearning for something that would link together the wonderful impressions of this mysterious life, and give her soul a sense of home in it."

It seemed to him as if he were beholding in a magic panorama a future where he himself was sliding into that pleasureless yielding to the small solicitations of circumstance, which is a commoner history of perdition than any single momentous bargain."

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."

Who with repentance is not satisfied, is not of heaven, nor earth."

After all has been said that can be said about the widening influence of ideas, it remains true that they would hardly be such strong agents unless they were taken in a solvent of feeling. The great world-struggle of developing thought is continually foreshadowed in the struggle of the affections, seeking a justification for love and hope."

Where lies the power, there let the blame lie too."Nay, power is relative; you cannot frightThe coming pest with border fortresses,Or catch your carp with subtle argument.All force is twain in one: cause is not causeUnless effect be there; and action's selfMust needs contain a passive. So commandExists but with obedience."

The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.

Confound you handsome young fellows! You think of having it all your own way in the world. You don't understand women. They don't admire you half so much as you admire yourselves.

Adventure is not outside man; it is within.

Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.

Would not love see returning penitence afar off, and fall on its neck and kiss it?

People who can't be witty exert themselves to be devout and affectionate.

I can't bear fishing. I think people look like fools sitting watching a line hour after hour-or else throwing and throwing, and catching nothing.

It is the moment when our resolution seems about to become irrevocable--when the fatal iron gates are about to close upon us--that tests our strength. Then, after hours of clear reasoning and firm conviction, we snatch at any sophistry that will nullify our long struggles, and bring us the defeat that we love better than victory.

Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.

Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which there is much agreement, much disputation, and yet more personal liking.

I don't mind how many letters I receive from one who interests me as much as you do. The receptive part of correspondence I can carry on with much alacrity. It is writing answers that I groan over.

But what we strive to gratify, though we may call it a distant hope, is an immediate desire; the future estate for which men drudge up city alleys exists already in their imagination and love.

I'm not denyin' the women are foolish. God Almighty made 'em to match the men.

All the learnin' my father paid for was a bit o' birch at one end and an alphabet at the other.

The world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities.

Breed is stronger than pasture.

Tis God gives skill, but not without men's hand: He could not make Antonio Stradivarius's violins without Antonio.

Things are achieved when they are well begun. The perfect archer calls the deer his own While yet the shaft is whistling.

We must not inquire too curiously into motives. they are apt to become feeble in the utterance: the aroma is mixed with the grosser air. We must keep the germinating grain away from the light.

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.

What to one man is the virtue which he has sunk below the possibility of aspiring to, is to another the backsliding by which he forfeits his spiritual crown.

The most solid comfort one can fall back upon is the thought that the business of one's life is to help in some small way to reduce the sum of ignorance, degradation and misery on the face of this beautiful earth.

Sir Joshua would have been glad to take her portrait; and he would have had an easier task than the historian at least in this, that he would not have had to represent the truth of change - only to give stability to one beautiful moment.

There are few of us that are not rather ashamed of our sins and follies as we look out on the blessed morning sunlight, which comes to us like a bright-winged angel beckoning us to quit the old path of vanity that stretches its dreary length behind us.

People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbors.

You may try but you can never imagine what it is to have a man's form of genius in you, and to suffer the slavery of being a girl.

Life began with waking up and loving my mother's face.

Poor dog! I've a strange feeling about the dumb things as if they wanted to speak, and it was a trouble to 'em because they couldn't. I can't help being sorry for the dogs always, though perhaps there's no need. But they may well have more in them than they know how to make us understand, for we can't say half what we feel, with all our words.

There's things to put up wi' in ivery place, an' you may change an' change an' not better yourself when all's said an' done.

There is one order of beauty which seems made to turn heads. It is a beauty like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle.

Can any man or woman choose duties? No more that they can choose their birthplace, or their father or mother.

There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire; it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.

Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person; having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but to pour them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, knowing that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then, with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.

When we are suddenly released from an acute absorbing bodily pain, our heart and senses leap out in new freedom; we think even the noise of streets harmonious, and are ready to hug the tradesman who is wrapping up our change.

There is a sort of subjection which is the peculiar heritage of largeness and of love; and strength is often only another name for willing bondage to irremediable weakness.

There is no hour that has not its births of gladness and despair, no morning brightness that does not bring new sickness to desolation as well as new forces to genius and love. There are so many of us, and our lots are so different, what wonder that Nature's mood is often in harsh contrast with the great crisis of our lives?

Hostesses who entertain much must make up their parties as ministers make up their cabinets, on grounds other than personal liking.

Love is frightened at the intervals of insensibility and callousness that encroach by little and little on the domain of grief, and it makes efforts to recall the keenness of the first anguish.

Life would be no better than candlelight tinsel and daylight rubbish if our spirits were not touched by what has been.

To be candid, in Middlemarch phraseology, meant, to use an early opportunity of letting your friends know that you did not take a cheerful view of their capacity, their conduct, or their position; and a robust candor never waited to be asked for its opinion.

Love has a way of cheating itself consciously, like a child who plays at solitary hide-and-seek; it is pleased with assurances that it all the while disbelieves.

A toddling little girl is a centre of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other.

There is hardly any mental misery worse than that of having our own serious phrases, our own rooted beliefs, caricatured by a charlatan or a hireling.

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.

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.

No matter whether failure came A thousand different times, For one brief moment of success, Life rang its golden chimes.

There is heroism even in the circles of hell for fellow-sinners who cling to each other in the fiery whirlwind and never recriminate.

There are some cases in which the sense of injury breeds not the will to inflict injuries and climb over them as a ladder, but a hatred of all injury.

It is impossible, to me at least, to be poetical in cold weather.

My childhood was full of deep sorrows - colic, whooping-cough, dread of ghosts, hell, Satan, and a Deity in the sky who was angry when I ate too much plumcake.

Friendship is the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words.