Quotes About George Eliot

In bitter manuscript remarks on other men's notions about solar deities, he had become indifferent to the sunlight.

I should never like scolding any one else so well; and that is a point to be thought of in a husband.

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some of them woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

No one knew where wandering men had their homes or their origin; and how was a man to be explained unless you at least knew somebody who knew his father and mother?

But we all know the wag's definition of a philanthropist: a man whose charity increases directly as the square of the distance.

You are a poem--and that is to be the best part of a poet--what makes up the poet's consciousness in his best moods.

She says, he is a great soul.—A great bladder for dried peas to rattle in!" said Mrs. Cadwallader.

The Vicar's talk was not always inspiriting: he had escaped being a Pharisee, but he had not escaped that low estimate of possibilities which we rather hastily arrive at as an inference from our own failure.

He has got no good red blood in his body, said Sir James.

Plainness has its peculiar temptations and vices quite as much as beauty; it is apt either to feign amiability, or not feigning it, to show all the repulsiveness of discontent.

Her shrewdness had a streak of satiric bitterness continually renewed and never carried utterly out of sight, except by a strong current of gratitude towards those who, instead of telling her that she ought to be contented, did something to make her so.

He has got no good red blood in his body," said Sir James. "No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses," said Mrs. Cadwallader.

to have a discussion coolly waived when you feel that justice is all on your own side is even more exasperating in marriage than in philosophy.

Having made his clerical toilet with due care in the morning, he was prepared only for those amenities of life which were suited to the well-adjusted stiff cravat of the period, and to a mind weighted with unpublished matter.

But womanly, I hope, said Mrs. Garth, half suspecting that Mrs. Casaubon might not hold the true principle of subordination.

Don't you think men overrate the necessity for humoring everybody's nonsense, till they get despised by the very fools they humor?

Oh, blameless people are always the most exasperating.

He once called her his basil plant;* and when she asked for an explanation, said that basil was a plant which had flourished wonderfully on a murdered man's brains.

there is no escape from sordidness but by being free from money-craving, with all its base hopes and temptations, its watching for death, its hinted requests.

Dodo! exclaimed Celia, looking after her in surprise. I never heard you make such a comparison before. Why should I make it before the occasion came? It is a good comparison: the match is perfect.

he was a likable man: sweet-tempered, ready-witted, frank, without grins of suppressed bitterness or other conversational flavors which make half of us an affliction to our friends.

Instead of getting a soft fence against the cold, shadowy, unapplausive audience of his life, had he only given it a more substantial presence?

Stone Court were scenting the air quite impartially, as if Mr. Raffles

character is not cut in marble—it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.