Quotes from George Eliot

In our springtime every day has its hidden growths in the mind, as it has in the earth when the little folded blades are getting ready to pierce the ground.

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.

But I think it is hardly an argument against a man's general strength of character, that he should be apt to be mastered by love. A fine constitution doesn't insure one against small-pox or any other of those inevitable diseases. A man may be very firm in other matters, and yet be under a sort of witchery from a woman.

Be courteous, be obliging, but don't give yourself over to be melted down for the benefit of the tallow trade.

Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us worthy evidence of the fact.

Can any man or woman choose duties? No more that they can choose their birthplace, or their father or mother.

Comprehensive talkers are apt to be tiresome when we are not athirst for information; but, to be quite fair, we must admit that superior reticence is a good deal due to lack of matter. Speech is often barren, but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled nest-egg; and, when it takes to cackling, will have nothing to announce but that addled delusion.

No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence.

Perhaps his might be one of the natures where a wise estimate of consequences is fused in the fires of that passionate belief which determines the consequences it believes in.

The scornful nostril and the high head gather not the odors that lie on the track of truth.

The tendancy of liberals is to create bodies of men and women-of all classes-detached from tradition, alienated from religion, and susceptible to mass suggestion-mob rule. And a mob will be no less a mob if it is well fed, well clothed, well housed, and well disciplined.

there's folks 'ud stand on their heads and then say the fault was I' their boots.

To judge wisely, we must know how things appear to the unwise.

We hand folks over to God's mercy, and show none ourselves.

We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.

It is never too late to be what you might have been.

What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult 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.

It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.

It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses, we must plant more roses.

It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.

It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are still alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger for them.

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

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; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our hurts— not to hurt others.