Quotes from George Eliot

I am just and honest, not because I expect to live in another world, but because, having felt the pain of injustice and dishonesty towards myself, I have a fellow-felling with other men, who would suffer the same pain if I were unjust or dishonest towards them. It is a pang to me to witness the suffering of a fellow-being, and I feel his suffering the more acutely because he is mortal—because his life is so short, and I would have it, is possible, filled with happiness and not misery

hatred is like fire—it makes even light rubbish deadly.

he was one of those men who can be prompt without being rash, because their motives run in fixed tracks, and they have no need to reconcile conflicting aims.

Aunt Glegg always spoke to them in this loud, emphatic way, as if she considered them deaf, or perhaps rather idiotic; it was a means, she thought, of making them feel that they were accountable creatures, and might be a salutary check on naughty tendencies. Bessy's children were so spoiled–they'd need have somebody to make them feel their duty.

History, we know, is apt to repeat herself, and to foist very old incidents upon us with only a slight change of costume.

O father, said Eppie, what a pretty home ours is! I think nobody could be happier than we are.

Silas Marner was the third novel written by George Eliot and it was first published in 1861 by William Blackwood and Sons, of Edinburgh and London. It has been a highly successful book, demonstrated by the many adaptations it has generated through the years. As early as 1876 saw the release of the play Danl'l Druce, Blacksmith, by W.S Gilbert, which was clearly influenced by Eliot's novel with a similar beginning and end

and the other a man of atrabiliar aspect, with lank black hair, and a redundance of limp cravat — in fact, the sort of thing you might expect in men who distributed the publications of the Religious Tract Society, and introduced Dissenting hymns into the Church.

This was a puzzling world, as he often said, and if you drive your wagon in a hurry, you may light on an awkward corner. Mr. Riley, meanwhile, was not impatient.

Naming the emptiness where thought is not

It is probable that no speculative or theological hatred would be ultimately strong enough to resist the persuasive power of convenience:

What are we here for if not to make life easier for each other?

I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same mind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear. — George Eliot, from a Letter to Georgiana Burne-Jones, wife of the artist Edward Burne-Jones (1875)

The daylight changes the aspect of misery to us, as of everything else. In the night it presses on our imagination—the forms it takes are false, fitful, exaggerated; in broad day it sickens our sense with the dreary persistence of definite measurable reality. The man who looks with ghastly horror on all his property aflame in the dead of night, has not half the sense of destitution he will have in the morning, when he walks over the ruins lying blackened in the pitiless sunshine.

I care only to know, if possible, the lasting meaning that lies in all religious doctrine from the beginning till now.

I thought we should never part with that while we lived; everything is going away from us; the end of our lives will have nothing in it like the beginning!

It is so with emotional natures whose thoughts are no more than the fleeting shadows cast by feeling: to them words are facts, and even when known to be false, have a mastery over their smiles and tears.

the involuntary loss of any familiar object almost always brings a chill as from an evil omen; it seems to be the first finger-shadow of advancing death. From

Em nós trazemos sempre o que fizemos, E do que fomos faz-se o nosso ser.

sacred is the task of the artist when he undertakes to paint the life of the People. Falsification here is far more pernicious than in the more artificial aspects of life.

Arthur would so gladly have persuaded himself that he had done no harm! And if no one had told him the contrary, he could have persuaded himself so much better. Nemesis can seldom forge a sword for herself out of our consciences—out of the suffering we feel in the suffering we may have caused: there is rarely metal enough there to make an effective weapon.

Tal como Vesálio, não posso impedir a ignorância e o rancor das pessoas. Não podemos orientar o nosso comportamento em função das tolices dos outros, que são sempre imprevisíveis.

Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa,' has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walk- ing forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors?

to bring a furrin child into the coonthry; an' depend on't, whether you an' me lives to see't or noo, it'll coom to soom harm. The first sitiation iver I held—it was a hold hancient habbey, wi' the biggest orchard o' apples an' pears you ever see—there was a French valet, an' he stool silk stoockins, an' shirts, an' rings, an' iverythin' he could ley his hands on, an' run awey at last wi' th' missis's jewl-box. They're all alaike, them furriners. It roons i' th' blood.