Quotes from George Eliot

Husbands are an inferior class of men, who require keeping in order.

I hold it a blasphemy to say that a man ought not to fight against authority: there is no great religion and no great freedom that has not done it, in the beginning.

Human longings are perversely obstinate; and to the man whose mouth is watering for a peach, it is of no use to offer the largest vegetable marrow.

To men who only aim at escaping felony, nothing short of the prisoner's dock is disgrace.

That sort of reputation which precedes performance [is] often the larger part of a man's fame.

In the love of a brave and faithful man there is always a strain of maternal tenderness; he gives out again those beams of protecting fondness which were shed on him as he lay on his mother's knee.

Who can know how much of his most inward life is made up of the thoughts he believes other men to have about him, until that fabric of opinion is threatened with ruin?

There are but two sorts of government: one where men show their teeth at each other, and one where men show their tongues and lick the feet of the strongest.

The soul of man, when it gets fairly rotten, will bear you all sorts of poisonous toad-stools, and no eye can see whence came the seed thereof.

When we are dead : it is the living only who cannot be forgiven the living only from whom men's indulgence and reverence are held off, like the rain by the hard east wind .

Every man who is not a monster, a mathematician, or a mad philosopher, is the slave of some woman or other.

I trust you as holy men trust God; you could do nought that was not pure and loving, though the deed might pierce me unto death.

autobiography at least saves a man or woman that the world is curious about from the publication of a string of mistakes called 'Memoirs.

It is a sad weakness in us, after all, that the thought of a man's death hallows him anew to us; as if life were not sacred too.

Opinions: men's thoughts about great subjects. Taste: their thoughts about small ones: dress, behavior, amusements, ornaments.

When you get me a good man made out of arguments, I will get you a good dinner with reading you the cookery book.

If you are to rule men, you must rule them through their own ideas.

... we all know the wag's definition of a philanthropist: a man whose charity increases directly as the square of the distance.

Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning.

Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.

Education is an asset no man can take away.

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!

All things journey: sun and moon, Morning, noon, and afternoon, Night and all her stars; 'Twixt the east and western bars Round they journey, Come and go! We go with them!

A mother's yearning feels the presence of the cherished child even in the degraded man.