Quotes from George Eliot

Young reverence for one who is also young is the most coercive of all: there is the same level of temptation, and the higher motive is believed in as a fuller force--not suspected to be a mere residue from weary experience. But the coercion is often stronger on the one who takes the reverence. Those who trust us educate us. And perhaps in that ideal consecration of Gwendolen's, some education was being prepared for Deronda.

But as to listening to what one lawyer says without asking another—I wonder at a man o' your cleverness, Mr. Dill. It's well known there's always two sides, if no more; else who'd go to law, I should like to know?

We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, 'Oh, nothing!' Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts – not to hurt others.

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

Me naiset emme voi lähteä seikkailemaan - etsimään luoteisväylää tai Niilin lähteitä, tai itään metsästämään tiikereitä. Meidän täytyy pysyä siellä missä kasvamme, tai minne puutarhurit meidät haluavat siirtää. Meidät kasvatetaan kuin kukat: näytämme niin sieviltä kuin voimme, emmekä valita, vaikka pitkästyisimme. (Daniel Deronda s. 152-153)

I was dead to worldly ambitions, to social vanities, to all the incentives within the compass of her narrow imagination, and I lived under influences utterly invisible to her.

Even in 1831 Lowick was at peace, not more agitated by Reform than by the solemn tenor of the Sunday sermon. The

Young women of such birth, living in a quiet country-house, and attending a village church hardly larger than a parlor, naturally regarded frippery as the ambition of a huckster's daughter.

For a long while she lived in the hope that my evident wretchedness would drive me to the commission of suicide; but suicide was not in my nature. I was too completely swayed by the sense that I was in the grasp of unknown forces, to believe in my power of self-release.

I would rather touch her hand if it were dead, than I would touch any other woman's living.

O que chamamos de nosso desespero é, muitas vezes, apenas a dolorosa ansiedade de uma esperança não alimentada.

Kun annetaan valmis malli - 'tällainen on juutalainen nainen, tällainen sinun pitää olla, tällaiseen sinua tarvitaan, naisen sydämen on oltava sen ja sen kokoinen eikä yhtään suurempi, muuten se rusennetaan pieneksi kuin kiinalaiset jalat; naisen onni tehdään kuin kakku, aina saman reseptin mukaan. S. 693

For continual suffering had annihilated religious faith within me: to the utterly miserable –the unloving and the unloved –there is no religion possible, no worship but a worship of devils.

denn das Wachstum des Guten in der Welt hängt in gewissem Grade von unhistorischen Taten ab, und daß die Dinge für dich und mich nicht so schlecht bestellt sind, wie sie es hätten sein können, verdanken wir zum großen Teil jenen, die getreulich ein Leben im verborgenen gelebt haben und in Gräbern ruhen, die niemand besucht.

how was a man to be explained unless you at least knew somebody who knew his father and mother?

The tenacity with which he strove to hide this inward drama made it the more vivid for him; as we hear with the more keenness what we wish others not to hear.

Even Caesar's fortune at one time was, but a grand presentiment. 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.

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

A man's mind–what there is of it–has always the advantage of being masculine,–as the smallest birch-tree is of a higher kind than the most soaring palm,–and even his ignorance is of a sounder quality.

it had already occurred to him that books were stuff, and that life was stupid. His school studies had not much modified that opinion...

In young, childish, ignorant souls there is constantly this blind trust in some unshapen chance: it is as hard to a boy or girl to believe that a great wretchedness will actually befall them as to believe that they will die.

If any one will here contend that there must have been traits of goodness in old Featherstone, I will not presume to deny this; but I must observe that goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much privacy, elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance. In

I am telling the history of very simple people, who had never had any illuminating doubts as to personal integrity and honor.

If art does not enlarge men's sympathies, it does nothing morally.