Quotes About George Eliot

George Eliot's villainous character, Grandcourt, "did not care a languid curse for anyone's admiration; but this state of non-caring, just as much as desire, required its related object-namely, a world of admiring and envying spectators: for if you are fond of looking stonily at smiling persons, the persons must be there and they must smile

... it is seldom a medical man has true religious views--there is too much pride of intellect.

A child, more than all other gifts That earth can offer to declining man, Brings hope with it, and forward-looking thoughts." —WORDSWORTH.

autobiography at least saves a man or woman that the world is curious about from the publication of a string of mistakes called 'Memoirs.

"Abroad," that large home of ruined reputations.

what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

Do we not all agree to call rapid thought and noble impulse by the name of inspiration?

Uncomfortable thoughts must be got rid of by good intentions for the future.

Middlemarch offers what George Eliot calls, in a wonderfully suggestive turn of phrase, "the home epic"- the momentous, ordinary journey traveled by most of us who have not even thought of aspiring to sainthood. The home epic has its own nostalgia - not for a country left behind but for a childhood landscape lost.

I just love the way those old-time authors like Mr. Dickens or George Eliot (who was actually a woman, in case you didn't know) stop smack-dab in the middle of the story and say stuff like, "patient reader," and then give some little side comment.

Great literature has always been written in a like spirit, and is, indeed, the Forgiveness of Sin, and when we find it becoming the Accusation of Sin, as in George Eliot, who plucks her Tito in pieces with as much assurance as if he had been clockwork, literature has begun to change into something else.

But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

When I say that George Eliot has long been my hero, I mean to include those aspects of her thought and temperament that have been disparaged or dismissed or ignored. She was, after all, a novelist who did not eschew politics or polemics - sometimes silently though defiantly, as in her relationship with George Henry Lewes.

Blameless people are always the most exasperating.

A prig is a fellow who is always making you a present of his opinions.

A prig is a fellow who is always making you a present of his opinions.

Power of generalizing gives men so much the superiority in mistake over the dumb animals.

Pity that consequences are determined not by excuses but by actions!

No chemical process shows a more wonderful activity than the transforming influence of the thoughts we imagine to be going on in another.

What right have such men to represent Christianity—as if it were an institution for getting up idiots genteelly?

Will was not without his intentions to be always generous, but our tongues are little triggers which have usually been pulled before general intentions can be brought to bear.

I have never done you injustice. Please remember me," said Dorothea, repressing a rising sob. "Why should you say that?" said Will, with irritation. "As if I were not in danger of forgetting everything else.

Probabilities—the surest screen a wise man can place between himself and the truth.

still—it could not be fairly called wooing a woman to tell her that he would never woo her. It must be admitted to be a ghostly kind of wooing.