Quotes from George Eliot

Love has a way of cheating itself consciously, like a child who plays at solitary hide-and-seek; it is pleased with assurances that it all the while disbelieves.

It is a wonderful subduer-this need of love, this hunger of the heart.

Love supreme defies all sophistry.

Those only can thoroughly feel the meaning of death who know what is perfect love.

Anger seek it prey,-- Something to tear with sharp-edged tooth and claw, Like not to go off hungry, leaving Love To feast on milk and honeycomb at will.

A woman's lot is made for her by the love she accepts.

Melodies die out, like the pipe of Pan, with the ears that love them and listen for them.

Love is frightened at the intervals of insensibility and callousness that encroach by little and little on the domain of grief, and it makes efforts to recall the keenness of the first anguish.

Love at its highest flood rushes beyond its object, and loses itself in the sense of divine mystery.

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

No compliment can be eloquent, except as an expression of indifference.

An ingenious web of probabilities is the surest screen a wise man can place between himself and the truth.

There's truth in wine, and there may be some in gin and muddy beer; but whether it's truth worth my knowing, is another question.

Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through.

Those old stories of visions and dreams guiding men have their truth; we are saved by making the future present to ourselves.

Falsehood is easy, truth so difficult.

It is the way with half the truth amidst which we live, that it only haunts us and makes dull pulsations that are never born into sound.

Veracity is a plant of paradise, and the seeds have never flourished beyond the walls.

The worst service, I fancy, that anyone can do for truth, is to set silly people writing on its behalf.

Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult. Even with no motive to be false, it is very hard to say the exact truth.

A woman's heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed recipe.

Say "I love you" to those you love. The eternal silence is long enough to be silent in, and that awaits us all.

The mother's love is at first an absorbing delight, blunting all other sensibilities; it is an expansion of the animal existence.

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