Eliot George Quotes & Sayings

Boots and shoes are the greatest trouble of my life — George Eliot

Described by Harold Bloom as "the beginning of the end of the traditional novel of social morality" (xii), George Eliot's Middlemarch is nonetheless replete with a kind of authorial intervention that modern readers might find tiresome. Readers today are accustomed to the contemporary fictional maxim of "show, don't tell" but Eliot had different aesthetic ideas, for she always tells us right away who we are dealing with. At the beginning of Middlemarch, the character of one of its protagonists, Dorothea Brooke, is laid out. Eliot writes, — George Eliot

Pray tell me what it is," said Dorothea, anxiously, also rising and going to the open window, where Monk was looking in, panting and wagging his tail. She leaned her back against the window-frame, and laid her hand on the dog's head; for though, as we know, she was not fond of pets that must be held in the hands or trodden on, she was always attentive to the feelings of dogs, and very polite if she had to decline their advances. — George Eliot

A woman's lot is made for her by the love she accepts. — George Eliot

I don't see how a man is to be good for much unless he has some one woman to love him dearly.' 'I think the goodness should come before he expects that. — George Eliot

Also, the high standard held up to the public mind by the College of which which gave its peculiar sanction to the expensive and highly rarefied medical instruction obtained by graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, did not hinder quackery from having an excellent time of it; for since professional practice chiefly consisted in giving a great many drugs, the public inferred that it might be better off with more drugs still, if they could only be got cheaply, and hence swallowed large cubic measures of physic prescribed by unscrupulous ignorance which had taken no degrees. — George Eliot

Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest. — George Eliot

But if Maggie had been that young lady, you would probably have known nothing about her: her life would have had so few vicissitudes that it could hardly have been written; for the happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history. — George Eliot

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

Things look dim to old folks: they'd need have some young eyes about 'em, to let 'em know the world's the same as it used to be. — George Eliot

There is a chill air surrounding those who are down in the world, and people are glad to get away from them, as from a cold room. — George Eliot

The group I am moving towards is at Caleb Garth's breakfast-table in the large parlor where the maps and desk were: father, mother, and five of the children. Mary was just now at home waiting for a situation, while Christy, the boy next to her, was getting cheap learning and cheap fare in Scotland, having to his father's disappointment taken to books instead of that sacred calling "business. — George Eliot

For me to help him," said Dorothea, ardently. "You have quite made up your mind, I see. Well, my dear, the fact is, I have a letter for you in my pocket." Mr. Brooke handed the letter to Dorothea, but as she rose to go away, he added, "There is not too much — George Eliot

But her feeling towards the vulgar rich was a sort of religious hatred: they had probably made all their money out of high prices for everything that was not paid in kind at the Rectory: such people were no part of God's plan in making the world; and their accent was an affliction to the ears. A town where such monsters abounded was hardly more than a sort of low comedy, which could not be taken account of in a well-bred scheme of the universe. — George Eliot

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

Everything is all one - that is the beginning and end with you. — George Eliot

My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes. — Joyce Carol Oates

what secular avocation on earth was there for a young man (whose friends could not get him an 'appointment') which was at once gentlemanly, lucrative, and to be followed without special knowledge? — George Eliot

when you are among the fields and hedgerows, it is impossible to maintain a consistent superiority to simple natural pleasures. — George Eliot

At home, at school, among acquaintances, she had been used to have her conscious superiority admitted; and she had moved in a society where everything, from low arithmetic to high art, is of the amateur kind politely supposed to fall short of perfection only because gentlemen and ladies are not obliged to do more than they like - otherwise they would probably give forth abler writings and show themselves more commanding artists than any the world is at present obliged to put up with. — George Eliot

the devil will be having his finger in what we call our duties as well as our sins. Mayhap — George Eliot

The calendar hath not an evil day
For souls made one by love, and even death
Were sweetness, if it came like rolling waves
While they two clasped each other, and foresaw
No life apart. — George Eliot

A pretty building I'm making, without either bricks or timber. I'm up i' the garret a'ready, and haven't so much as dug the foundation. — George Eliot

The prevarication and white lies which a mind that keeps itself ambitiously pure is as uneasy under as a great artist under the false touches that no eye detects but his own, are worn as lightly as mere trimming when once the actions have become a lie. — George Eliot

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

He had no longer free energy enough for spontaneous research and speculative thinking, but by the bedside of patients the direct external calls on his judgment and sympathies brought the added impulse needed to draw him out of himself. It was not simply that beneficent harness of routine which enables silly men to live respectably and unhappy men to live calmly - it was a perpetual claim on the immediate fresh application of thought, and on the consideration of another's need and trial. Many of us looking back through life would say that the kindest man we have ever known has been a medical man, or perhaps that surgeon whose fine tact, directed by deeply-informed perception, has come to us in our need with a more sublime beneficence than that of miracle-workers. Some of that twice-blessed mercy was always with Lydgate in his work at the Hospital or in private houses, serving better than any opiate to quiet and sustain him under anxieties and his sense of mental degeneracy. — George Eliot

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

Dark the Night, with breath all flowers,
And tender broken voice that fills
With ravishment the listening hours,
Whisperings, wooings,
Liquid ripples, and soft ring-dove cooings
In low-toned rhythm that love's aching stills!
Dark the night
Yet is she bright,
For in her dark she brings the mystic star,
Trembling yet strong, as is the voice of love,
From some unknown afar. — George Eliot

A fool or idiot is one who expects things to happen that never can happen. — George Eliot

Eulogy - especially from a young lass who, as he informed his mother that evening, had such uncommon eyes, they looked somehow as they made him feel nohow. — George Eliot

The best fire doesna flare up the soonest. — George Eliot

It is never too late to become the person you always thought you could be. — George Eliot

Women were expected to have weak opinions; but the great safeguard of society and of domestic life was, that opinions were not acted on. — George Eliot

In a paradise with sweet laughs for bird-notes, and blue eyes for a heaven. — George Eliot

He held it one of the prettiest attitudes of the feminine mind to adore a man's pre-eminence without too precise a knowledge of what it consisted in. — George Eliot

Trouble's made us kin. — 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. — George Eliot

In bed our yesterdays are too oppressive: if a man can only get up, though it be but to whistle or to smoke, he has a present which offers some resistance to the past - sensations which assert themselves against tyrannous memories. — George Eliot

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. — George Eliot

There was no keenness in the eyes; they seemed rather to be shedding love than making observations; they had the liquid look which tells that the mind is full of what it has to give out, rather than impressed by external objects. — George Eliot

Happy husbands and wives can hear each other say the same thing over and over again without being tired. — George Eliot

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. — William Butler Yeats

In poor Rosamond's mind there was not room enough for luxuries to look small in. — George Eliot

Only in another sort of pinfold than that from which she had been released. Lydgate's advice — George Eliot

Our deeds determine us, as long as we determine our deeds — George Eliot

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

She seems to have what I never saw in any woman before - a fountain of friendship towards men - a — George Eliot

These fellow-mortals, every one, must be accepted as they are: you can neither straighten their noses, nor brighten their wit, nor rectify their dispositions; and it is these people
amongst whom your life is passed
that it is needful you should tolerate, pity, and love: it is these more or less ugly, stupid, inconsistent people, whose movements of goodness you should be able to admire
for whom you should cherish all possible hopes, all possible patience. — George Eliot

In an Empire that was simply stagnant, neither being developed nor falling to pieces, and in an England ruled by people whose chief asset was their stupidity, to be 'clever' was to be suspect. If you had the kind of brain that could understand the poems of T.S. Eliot or the theories of Karl Marx, the higher-ups would see to it that you were kept out of any important job. — George Orwell

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

All people of broad, strong sense have an instinctive repugnance to the men of maxims; because such people early discern that the mysterious complexity of our life is not to be embraced by maxims, and that to lace ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to repress all the divine promptings and inspirations that spring from growing insight and sympathy. And the man of maxims is the popular representative of the minds that are guided in their moral judgment solely by general rules, thinking that these will lead them to justice by a ready-made patent method, without the trouble of exerting patience, discrimination, impartiality, without any care to assure themselves whether they have the insight that comes from a hardly-earned estimate of temptation, or from a life vivid and intense enough to have created a wide fellow-feeling with all that is human. — George Eliot

Duty has a trick of behaving unexpectedly
something like a heavy friend whom we have amiably asked to visit us, and who breaks his leg within our gates. — George Eliot

If a princess in the days of enchantment had seen a four-footed creature from among those which live in herds come to her once and again with a human gaze which rested upon her with choice and beseeching, what would she think of in her journeying, what would she look for when the herds passed her? Surely for the gaze which had found her, and which she would know again. — George Eliot

The intensest form of hatred is that rooted in fear. — George Eliot

I suppose it's the name: there's a deal in the name of a tune. — George Eliot

Net the large fish and you are sure to have the small fry. — George Eliot

Vague memories hang about the mind like cobwebs. — George Eliot

The men are mostly so slow, their thoughts overrun 'em, an' they can only catch 'em by the tail. I can count a stocking-top while a man's getting's tongue ready; an' when he outs wi' his speech at last, there's little broth to be made on't. It's your dead chicks take the longest hatchin'. — George Eliot

There's folks 'ud stand on their heads and then say the fault was i' their boots. — George Eliot

I don't mind [being ugly], do you? — George Eliot

The dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters the desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic. — George Eliot

My professional and human obsession is the nature of language, and my best relationships are with other writers. In many ways, I know George Eliot better than I know my husband. — A.S. Byatt

Habit is the beneficent harness of routine which enables silly men to live respectfully and unhappy men to live calmly — George Eliot

When I married Humphrey I made up my mind to like sermons, and I set out by liking the end very much. That soon spread to the middle and the beginning, because I couldn't have the end without them. — George Eliot

To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion. — George Eliot

Gwendolen would not have liked to be an object of disgust to this husband whom she hated: she liked all disgust to be on her side. — George Eliot

For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little. The story of their coming to be shapen after the average and fit to be packed by the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhaps their ardour in generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the ardour of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked like a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly. — George Eliot

Brothers are so unpleasant. — George Eliot

The stars are golden fruit upon a tree all out of reach. — George Eliot

As soon as we lay ourselves entirely at His feet, we have enough light given to us to guide our own steps. We are like the foot soldiers, who hear nothing of the councils that determine the course of the great battle they are in, but hear plainly enough the word of command that they must themselves obey. — George Eliot

The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down. — George Eliot

He did not shrug his shoulders; and for want of that muscular outlet he thought the more irritably of beautiful lips kissing holy skulls and other emptinesses ecclesiastically enshrined. — George Eliot

Surely it is not true blessedness to be free of sorrow while there is sorrow and sin in the world. Sorrow is a part of love and love does not seek to throw it off. — George Eliot

The religion of personal fear remains nearly at the level of the savage. — George Eliot

The old Squire was an implacable man: he made resolutions in violent anger, and he was not to be moved from them after his anger had subsided - as fiery volcanic matters cool and harden into rock. Like many violent and implacable men, he allowed evils to grow under favour of his own heedlessness, till they pressed upon him with exasperating force, and then he turned round with fierce severity and became unrelentingly hard ... Godfrey knew all this, and felt it with the greater force because he had constantly suffered annoyance from witnessing his father's sudden fits of unrelentingness, for which his own habitual irresolution deprived him of all sympathy. (He was not critical on the faulty indulgence which preceded these fits; that seemed to him natural enough.) — George Eliot

The promise was void, like so many other sweet, illusory promises of our childhood; void as promises made in Eden before the seasons were divided, and when the starry blossoms grew side by side with the ripening peach, - impossible to be fulfilled when the golden gates had been passed. — George Eliot

When our life is a continuous trial, the moments of respite seem only to substitute the heaviness of dread for the heaviness of actual suffering; the curtain of cloud seems parted an instant only that we may measure all its horror as it hangs low, black, and imminent, in contrast with the transient brightness; the waterdrops that visit the parched lips in the desert bear with them only the keen imagination of thirst. — George Eliot

The disappointments of life can never, any more than its pleasures, be estimated singly; and the healthiest and most agreeable of men is exposed to that coincidence of various vexations, each heightening the effect of the other, which may produce in him something corresponding to the spontaneous and externally unaccountable moodiness of the morbid and disagreeable. — George Eliot

No man can be wise on an empty stomach. — George Eliot

What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult to others? — George Eliot

And to me it is one of the most odious things in a girl's life, that there must always be some supposition of falling in love coming between her and any man who is kind her, and to whom she is grateful. — George Eliot

A mother's yearning feels the presence of the cherished child even in the degraded man. — George Eliot

Perhaps we don't always discriminate between sense and nonsense. — George Eliot

There are robberies that leave man or woman forever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer. — George Eliot

Maggie in her crude form, with her hair down her back, and altogether in a state of dubious promise, was a most undesirable niece; but now she was capable of being at once ornamental and useful. — George Eliot

Great Love has many attributes, and shrines For varied worshippers, but his force divine Shows most its many-named fulness in the man Whose nature multitudinously mixed
Each ardent impulse grappling with a thought
Resists all easy gladness, all content Save mystic rapture, where the questioning soul Flooded with consciousness of good that is Finds life one bounteous answer. — George Eliot

I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. — George Eliot

It is the way with half the truth amidst which we live, that it only haunts us and makes dull pulsations that are never born into sound. — George Eliot

We are not apt to fear for the fearless, when we are companions in their danger. — George Eliot

The words of genius have a wider meaning than the thought that prompted them. — George Eliot

In old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now. But yet men are led away from threatening destruction: a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may be a little child's. — George Eliot

Miss Brooke's large eyes seemed, like her religion, too unusual and striking. — George Eliot

It's never too late to be the person you might have been. ~George Eliot — A.J. Warner

A peasant can no more help believing in a traditional superstition than a horse can help trembling when be sees a camel. — George Eliot

There is no compensation for the woman who feels that the chief relation of her life has been no more than a mistake. She has lost her crown. The deepest secret of human blessedness has half whispered itself to her, and then forever passed her by. — George Eliot

In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations. — George Eliot

how hard it is to walk always in fear of hurting another who is tied to us. — George Eliot

No one who has ever known what it is to lose faith in a fellow-man whom he has profoundly loved and reverenced, will lightly say that the shock can leave the faith in the Invisible Goodness unshaken. With the sinking of high human trust, the dignity of life sinks too; we cease to believe in our own better self, since that also is part of the common nature which is degraded in our thought; and all the finer impulses of the soul are dulled. — 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. — George Eliot

Let my body dwell in poverty, and my hands be as the hands of the toiler; but let my soul be as a temple of remembrance where the treasures of knowledge enter and the inner sanctuary is hope. — George Eliot