Quotes from George Eliot

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

The tread Of coming footsteps cheats the midnight watcher Who holds her heart and waits to hear them pause, And hears them never pause, but pass and die.

Death was not to be a leap: it was to be a long descent under thickening shadows.

Death is the only physician, the shadow of his valley the only journeying that will cure us of age and the gathering fatigue of years.

Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral.

The years seem to rush by now, and I think of death as a fast approaching end of a journey-double and treble reason for loving as well as working while it is day.

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

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

Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.

All the learnin' my father paid for was a bit o' birch at one end and an alphabet at the other.

Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which there is much agreement, much disputation, and yet more personal liking

Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions; they pass no criticisms.

Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have wrinkles.

Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?

It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibers that knit us to the old.

All our ignorance brings us closer to death.

In the first moments when we come away from the presence of death, every other relation to the living is merged, to our feeling, in the great relation of a common nature and a common destiny.

I like not only to be loved, but also to be told I am loved.

In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations.

There is a chill air surrounding those who are down in the world, and people are glad to get away from them, as from a cold room.

Satan was a blunderer ... who made a stupendous failure. If he had succeeded, we should all have been worshipping him, and his portrait would have been more flattering.

In all failures, the beginning is certainly the half of the whole.

All the learnin' my father ever paid for was a bit o' birch at one end and the alphabet at th ' other.

It's a father's duty to give his sons a fine chance.