George Eliot Quotes

We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.

There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.

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

Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through.

The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory.

An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.

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.

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!

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

A woman’s heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed recipe.

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

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

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.

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.

Iteration, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress.

Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour’s buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.

He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.