George Eliot quotes - page 17

A supreme love, a motive that gives a sublime rhythm to a woman's life, and exalts habit into partnership with the soul's highest needs, is not to be had where and how she wills. (George Eliot)
One soweth and another reapeth is a verity that applies to evil as well as good. View quote
George Eliot
Each thought is a nail that is driven In structures that cannot decay And the mansion at last will be given To us as we build it each day. View quote
George Eliot
Sympathetic people often don't communicate well, they back reflected images which hide their own depths. View quote
George Eliot
Our passions do not live apart in locked chambers but dress in their small wardrobe of notions, bring their provisions to a common table and mess together, feeding out of the common store according to their appetite. View quote
George Eliot
In the schoolroom her quick mind had taken readily that strong starch of unexplained rules and disconnected facts which saves ignorance from any painful sense of limpness. View quote
George Eliot
Who has not felt the beauty of a woman's arm The unspeakable suggestions of tenderness that lie in the dimpled elbow, and all the varied gently-lessening curves, down to the delicate wrist, with its tiniest, almost imperceptible nicks in the firm softness. View quote
George Eliot
We must not inquire too curiously into motives... They are apt to become feeble in the utterance the aroma is mixed with the grosser air. We must keep the germinating grain away from the light. View quote
George Eliot
There are answers which, in turning away wrath, only send it to the other end of the room, and 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. View quote
George Eliot
No man is matriculated to the art of life till he has been well tempted. View quote
George Eliot
Perhaps his might be one of the natures where a wise estimate of consequences is fused in the fires of that passionate belief which determines the consequences it believes in. (George Eliot)
There is hardly any mental misery worse than that of having our own serious phrases, our own rooted beliefs, caricatured by a charlatan or a hireling. View quote
George Eliot
Children demand that their heroes should be fleckless, and easily believe them so ... View quote
George Eliot
Our virtues are dearer to us the more we have had to suffer for them. It is the same with our children. All profound affection entertains a sacrifice. Our thoughts are often worse than we are, just as they are often better. View quote
George Eliot
Boots and shoes are the greatest trouble of my life. Everything else one can turn and turn about, and make old look like new but there's no coaxing boots and shoes to look better than they are. View quote
George Eliot
But what we strive to gratify, though we may call it a distant hope, is an immediate desire the future estate for which men drudge up city alleys exists already in their imagination and love. View quote
George Eliot
Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures. View quote
George Eliot
What is opportunity to the man who can't use it An unfecundated egg, which the waves of time wash away into nonentity. View quote
George Eliot
Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi. View quote
George Eliot
It is only a poor sort of happiness that could ever come by caring very much about our own pleasures. We can only have the highest happiness such as goes along with being a great man, by having wide thoughts and much feeling for the rest of the world as well as ourselves. View quote
George Eliot
Habit is the beneficent harness of routine which enables silly men to live respectfully and unhappy men to live calmly. (George Eliot)
It is a vain thought to flee from the work that God appoints us, for the sake of finding a greater blessing instead of seeking it where alone it is to be found in loving obedience. View quote
George Eliot
Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance. View quote
George Eliot
Sir Joshua would have been glad to take her portrait and he would have had an easier task than the historian at least in this, that he would not have had to represent the truth of change only to give stability to one beautiful moment. View quote
George Eliot
Of a truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what may be.... View quote
George Eliot