Quotes from George Eliot

Imagination is a licensed trespasser: it has no fear of dogs, but may climb over walls and peep in at windows with impunity.

It is always good to know, if only in passing, charming human beings. It refreshes one like flowers and woods and clear brooks.

We are all of us imaginative in some form or other, for images are the brood of desire.

Do we not all agree to call rapid thought and noble impulse by the name of inspiration?

Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.

To have suffered much is like knowing many languages. Thou hast learned to understand all.

Uncomfortable thoughts must be got rid of by good intentions for the future.

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

Consequences are unpitying.

The right word is always a power, and communicates its definiteness to our action.

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.

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.

That farewell kiss which resembles greeting, that last glance of love which becomes the sharpest pang of sorrow.

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.

One of the tortures of jealousy is, that it can never turn away its eyes from the thing that pains it.

Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.

In the man whose childhood has known caresses and kindness, there is always a fiber of memory that can be touched to gentle issues.

"Heaven help us," said the old religion; the new one, from its very lack of that faith, will teach us all the more to help one another.

A woman mixed of such fine elements That were all virtue and religion dead She'd make them newly, being what she was.

There is so much to read and the days are so short! I get more hungry for knowledge every day, and less able to satisfy my hunger.

Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing was, than simply to know it; for conjecture soon became more confident than knowledge, and had a more liberal allowance for the incompatible.

What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known, and loved because it is known?

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 nothing will kill a man so soon as having nobody to find fault with but himself.