Quotes from George Eliot

A prig is a fellow who is always making you a present of his opinions.

After all, the true seeing is within.

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.

Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.

For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.

Let my body dwell in poverty, and my hands be as the hands of the toiler; but let my soul be as a temple of remembrance where the treasures of knowledge enter and the inner sanctuary is hope.

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.

Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts—not to hurt others.

Explain! Tell a man to explain how he dropped into hell! Explain my preference! I never had a preference for her, any more than I have a preference for breathing. No other woman exists by the side of her. I would rather touch her hand if it were dead, than I would touch any other woman's living.

Certainly the determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and novel impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion.

When a man has seen the woman whom he would have chosen if he had intended to marry speedily, his remaining a bachelor will usually depend on her resolution rather than on his.

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

I had some ambition. I meant everything to be different with me. I thought I had more strength and mastery. But the most terrible obstacles are such as nobody can see except oneself.

Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult....Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings -- much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.

The responsibility of tolerance lies in those who have the wider vision.

She thought it was part of the hardship of her life that there was laid upon her the burthen of larger wants than others seemed to feel – that she had to endure this wide hopeless yearning for that something, whatever it was, that was greatest and best on this earth.

When death, the great Reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.

It is very hard to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings – much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.

Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life??the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within??can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

The memory has as many moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery like a diorama.

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

Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.

Pride only helps us to be generous; it never makes us so, any more than vanity makes us witty.

If you deliver an opinion at all, it is mere stupidity not to do it with an air of conviction and well-founded knowledge. You make it your own in uttering it, and naturally get fond of it.