George Eliot famous quotes

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

#Inspirational #Life #Motivational

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

#Spiritual #Nature #True Friend

Adventure is not outside man; it is within.
-- George Eliot

#Wisdom #Travel #Adventure

The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another.
-- George Eliot

#Teacher #Responsibility #Power

Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.
-- George Eliot

#Love #Inspirational #Friendship

With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.
-- George Eliot

#Time #Memories #Men

It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees.
-- George Eliot

#Inspirational #Rain #Flower

The strongest principle of growth lies in the human choice.
-- George Eliot

#Inspirational #Motivational #Sympathy

It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.
-- George Eliot

#Beautiful #Witty #Giving Up

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.
-- George Eliot

#Childhood #Earth #Wells

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

#Love #Life #Valentines Day

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.
-- George Eliot

#Life #Motivation #Literature

Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have wrinkles.
-- George Eliot

#Friendship #Happiness #Smile

Her little butterfly soul fluttered incessantly between memory and dubious expectation.
-- George Eliot

#Memories #Butterfly #Expectations

To manage men one ought to have a sharp mind in a velvet sheath.
-- George Eliot

#Inspirational #Men #Mind

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.
-- George Eliot

#Keys #Mystery #Wonder

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

#Friendship #Cute Friendship #Agreement

She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.
-- George Eliot

#Sad #Grief #Wrestling

It is always good to know, if only in passing, charming human beings. It refreshes one like flowers and woods and clear brooks.
-- George Eliot

#Inspirational #Flower #Woods

The best travel is that which one can take by one's own fireside. In memory or imagination.
-- George Eliot

#Memories #Imagination

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!
-- George Eliot

#Luxury #Giving #Charity

Imagination is a licensed trespasser: it has no fear of dogs, but may climb over walls and peep in at windows with impunity.
-- George Eliot

#Dog #Wall #Imagination

Death is the king of this world: 'Tis his park where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music for his banquet.
-- George Eliot

#Life #Death #Kings

Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster.
-- George Eliot

#Women #Monsters #Literature

It is a common sentence that knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what ignorance in an hour pulls down.
-- George Eliot

#Ignorance #Common #Hours

The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.
-- George Eliot

#Inspirational #Motivational #Work

Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it: it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker.
-- George Eliot

#Dirty #Gossip #Taste

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

#Inspirational #Names #Noble

Consequences are unpitying.
-- George Eliot

#Consequence

We want people to feel with us more than to act for us.
-- George Eliot

#People #Want #Feels

Friendship is the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words.
-- George Eliot

#Best Friend #Feelings #Comfort

Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.
-- George Eliot

#Inspirational #Education #Wisdom

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

#Long #Soul #Reverence

Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.
-- George Eliot

#Love #Jealousy #Anger

Effective magic is transcendent nature.
-- George Eliot

#Magic

Our deeds are like children that are born to us; they live and act apart from our own will. Nay, children may be strangled, but deeds never: they have an indestructible life both in and out of our consciousness.
-- George Eliot

#Children #Deeds #May

Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.
-- George Eliot

#Happiness #Inspiring #Perseverance

Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning.
-- George Eliot

#Fighting #Winning #Coward

Little children are still the symbol of the eternal marriage between love and duty.
-- George Eliot

#Family #Children #Littles

Women should be protected from anyone's exercise of unrighteous power... but then, so should every other living creature.
-- George Eliot

#Exercise #Animal #Humanity

The right to rebellion is the right to seek a higher rule, and not to wander in mere lawlessness.
-- George Eliot

#Lawlessness #Revolution #Rebellion

What sunshine is to flowers, smiles are to humanity.
-- George Eliot

#Famous Inspirational #Flower #Sunshine

What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other?
-- George Eliot

#Inspirational #Life #Motivational

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.
-- George Eliot

#Fall #Autumn #Bird

The world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities.
-- George Eliot

#Beauty #Eggs #Hopeful

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.
-- George Eliot

#Journey #Thinking #Years

It's no use filling your pocket with money if you have got a hole in the corner.
-- George Eliot

#Pockets #Use #Holes

The responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision.
-- George Eliot

#Lying #Responsibility #Tolerance

These gems have life in them: their colors speak, say what words fail of.
-- George Eliot

#Color #Jewelry #Speak

For what we call illusions are often, in truth, a wider vision of past and present realities - a willing movement of a man's soul with the larger sweep of the world's forces - a movement towards a more assured end than the chances of a single life.
-- George Eliot

#Past #Reality #Men

It is not ignoble to feel that the fuller life which a sad experience has brought us is worth our personal share of pain. The growth of higher feeling within us is like the growth of faculty, bringing with it a sense of added strength. We can no more wish to return to a narrower sympathy than painters or musicians can wish to return to their cruder manner, or philosophers to their less complete formulas.
-- George Eliot

#Pain #Sadness #Feelings

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.
-- George Eliot

#Heart #Squirrels #History

One couldn't carry on life comfortably without a little blindness to the fact that everything has been said better than we can put it ourselves.
-- George Eliot

#Littles #Facts #Originality

Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.
-- George Eliot

#Relationship #Jealousy #Heart

To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion--a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.
-- George Eliot

#Hands #Soul #Feelings

..the rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families...
-- George Eliot

#Gout #Rich #Accepting

Those who trust us educate us.
-- George Eliot

#Education #Fathers Day #Teaching

Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure.
-- George Eliot

#Art #Sacred

You have such strong words at command, that they make the smallest argument seem formidable.
-- George Eliot

#Strong #Argument #Command

I am not resigned: I am not sure life is long enough to learn that lesson.
-- George Eliot

#Life #Long #Lessons

When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.
-- George Eliot

#Life #Wisdom #Peace

What is opportunity to a man who can't use it.
-- George Eliot

#Opportunity #Men #Use

It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.
-- George Eliot

#Music

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.
-- George Eliot

#Missing #Dresses #Relief

There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.
-- George Eliot

#Inspirational #Life #Inspiring

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

#God #Religious #Hands

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.
-- George Eliot

#Self #Objectivity #Vision

I'm proof against that word failure. I've seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.
-- George Eliot

#Perseverance #Fear #Failure

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.
-- George Eliot

#Spiritual #Country #Anger

Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.
-- George Eliot

#Order #Play #Quality

A friend is one to whom one may pour out the contents of one's heart, chaff and grain together, knowing that gentle hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.
-- George Eliot

#Friendship #Best Friend #Kindness

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
-- George Eliot

#Life #Numbers #Owing

A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some area of native land where it may get the love of tender kinship from the earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge. The best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one's own homestead.
-- George Eliot

#Stars #Home #Men

That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil -- widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.
-- George Eliot

#Struggle #Light #Evil

I like not only to be loved, but to be told that I am loved; the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave.
-- George Eliot

#Marriage #Silence #Enough

correct English is the slang of prigs ...
-- George Eliot

#Language #Slang

It is very difficult to be learned; it seems as if people were worn out on the way to great thoughts, and can never enjoy them because they are too tired.
-- George Eliot

#Tired #People #Way

My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.
-- George Eliot

#Compassion #Joy #Suffering

The darkest night that ever fell upon the earth never hid the light , never put out the stars . It only made the stars more keenly, kindly glancing, as if in protest against the darkness .
-- George Eliot

#Stars #Night #Light

May every soul that touches mine - be it the slightest contact - get there from some good; some little grace; one kindly thought; one aspiration yet unfelt; one bit of courage for the darkening sky; one gleam of faith to brave the thickening ills of life; one glimpse of brighter skies beyond the gathering mists - to make this life worthwhile.
-- George Eliot

#Sky #Brave #Grace

One can say everything best over a meal.
-- George Eliot

#Food #Meals

Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning; but give me the man who has the pluck to fight when he's sure of losing.
-- George Eliot

#Inspirational #Success #Courage

We have had an unspeakably delightful journey, one of those journeys which seem to divide one's life in two, by the new ideas they suggest and the new views of interest they open.
-- George Eliot

#Travel #Journey #Views

Life is measured by the rapidity of change, the succession of influences that modify the being.
-- George Eliot

#Change #Life Is #Influence

Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.
-- George Eliot

#Limits #Wells

Shall we, because we walk on our hind feet, assume to ourselves only the privilege of imperishability?
-- George Eliot

#Animal #Feet #Privilege

People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbors.
-- George Eliot

#People #Bravery #Might

Oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person; having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but to pour them all out, just as they are, chaff and grain together, knowing that a faithful hand will take and sift them, keep what is worth keeping, and then, with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.
-- George Eliot

#Love #Friendship #Relationship

How is it that the poets have said so many fine things about our first love, so few about our later love? Are their first poems their best? or are not those the best which come from their fuller thought, their larger experience, their deeper-rooted affections? The boy's flute-like voice has its own spring charm; but the man should yield a richer, deeper music.
-- George Eliot

#Spring #First Love #Boys

We learn words by rote, but not their meaning; that must be paid for with our life-blood, and printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves.
-- George Eliot

#Blood #Nerves #Subtle

One can begin so many things with a new person! - even begin to be a better man.
-- George Eliot

#New Beginnings #Men #Finding Yourself

If Art does not enlarge men's sympathies, it does nothing morally.
-- George Eliot

#Art #Men #Doe

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

#Father #Son #Giving

I've never any pity for conceited people, because I think they carry their comfort about with them.
-- George Eliot

#Conceited #Thinking #People

Pride only helps us to be generous; it never makes us so, any more than vanity makes us witty.
-- George Eliot

#Witty #Pride #Vanity

I like trying to get pregnant. I'm not so sure about childbirth.
-- George Eliot

#Pregnancy #Trying #Childbirth

Most of us who turn to any subject we love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love.
-- George Eliot

#Love #Morning #Book

The best augury of a man's success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.
-- George Eliot

#Success #Congratulations #Men

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.
-- George Eliot

#Wisdom #Disappointment #Memorable

More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.
-- George Eliot

#Wisdom #Simple #Compassion