Quotes from George Eliot

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

I don't mean your resentment toward them, said Philip... I mean your extending the enmity to a helpless girl, who has too much sense and goodness to share their narrow prejudices. She has never entered into the family quarrels. What does that signify? We don't ask what a woman does; we ask whom she belongs to. It's altogether a degrading thing to you, to think of marrying old Tulliver's daughter.

He was unique to her among men because he's impressed her as being not her admirer her superior. In some mysterious way he was becoming a part of her conscience as one woman who's nature is an object of reverential belief may become a new conscience to a man.

In every parting there is an image of death.

Dorothea was not only his wife: she was a personification of that shallow world which surrounds the appreciated or desponding author.

A perfectly sane intellect is hardly at home in this insane world.

To many among us neither heaven nor earth has any revelation till some personality touches theirs with a particular influence, subduing them into receptiveness.

You won't be giving me away, father,' she had said before they went to church; 'you'll only be taking Aaron to be a son to you.

it had already occurred to him that books were stuff, and that life was stupid.

He was conscious of being irritated by ridiculously small causes, which were half of his own creation. Why was he making any fuss about Mrs. Casaubon? And yet he felt as if something had happened to him with regard to her. There are characters which are continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them. Their susceptibilities will clash against objects that remain innocently quiet.

Don't judge a book by its cover.

Here and there a cygnet is reared uneasily among the ducklings in the brown pond, and never finds the living stream in fellowship with its own oary-footed kind.

You are a poem--and that is to be the best part of a poet--what makes up the poet's consciousness in his best moods.

A kind Providence furnishes the limpest personality with a little gum or starch in the form of tradition.

When he turned his head quickly his hair seemed to shake out light, and some persons thought they saw decided genius in this coruscation. Mr. Casaubon, on the contrary, stood rayless.

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

There is no sorrow I have thought about more than that - to love what is great, and try to reach it, and yet to fail.

We are poor plants buoyed up by the air-vessels of our own conceit: alas for us, if we get a few pinches that empty us of that windy self-subsistence.

Each lived in a world of which the other knew nothing.

Speech is but broken light upon the depth of the unspoken.

If a princess in the days of enchantment had seen a four-footed creature from among those which live in herds come to her once and again with a human gaze which rested upon her with choice and beseeching, what would she think of in her journeying, what would she look for when the herds passed her? Surely for the gaze which had found her, and which she would know again.

We know what a masquerade all development is, and what effective shapes may be disguised in helpless embryos.—In fact, the world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome dubious eggs called possibilities.

Men, like planets, have both a visible and invisible history.

Under the vague dullness of the gray hours, dissatisfaction seeks a definite object and finds it in the privation of an untried good.