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
Errors look so very ugly in persons of small means - one feels that they are taking quite a liberty in going astray; whereas people of fortune may naturally indulge in a few delinquencies.
-- George Eliot
He said that he should prefer not to know the sources of the Nile, and that there should be some unknown regions preserved as hunting grounds for the poetic imagination.
-- George Eliot
O may I join the choir invisible of those immortal dead who live again in minds made better by their presence; live in pulses stirred to generosity, in deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn for miserable aims that end with self, in thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, and with their mild persistence urge men's search to vaster issues.
-- George Eliot
Nice distinctions are troublesome. It is so much easier to say that a thing is black, than to discriminate the particular shade of brown, blue, or green, to which it really belongs. It is so much easier to make up your mind that your neighbour is good for nothing, than to enter into all the circumstances that would oblige you to modify that opinion.
-- George Eliot
Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning; but give me the man who has pluck to fight when he's sure of losing. That's my way, sir; and there are many victories worse than a defeat.
-- George Eliot
Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.
-- 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
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
It's but little good you'll do a-watering the last year's crop.
-- George Eliot
Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state.
-- George Eliot
Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds . . .
-- George Eliot
Consequences are unpitying. Our deeds carry their terrible consequences, quite apart from any fluctuations that went before — consequences that are hardly ever confined to ourselves.
-- George Eliot
Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion; and ties us by our heart-strings to the beings that jar us at every movement.
-- George Eliot
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
The natur o' things doesn't change, though it seems as if one's own life was nothing but change. The square o' four is sixteen, and you must lengthen your lever in proportion to your weight, is as true when a man's miserable as when he's happy; and the best o' working is, it gives you a grip hold o' things outside your own lot.
-- George Eliot
People who love downy peaches are apt not to think of the stone, and sometimes jar their teeth terribly against it.
-- George Eliot
One can say everything best over a meal.
-- George Eliot
Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings — much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.
-- George Eliot
Human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty — it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it.
-- George Eliot
Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult.
-- 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
There are so many of us, and our lots are so different, what wonder that Nature's mood is often in harsh contrast with the great crisis of our lives? We are children of a large family, and must learn, as such children do, not to expect that our hurts will be made much of — to be content with little nurture and caressing, and help each other the more.
-- George Eliot
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 to have recovered hope.
-- George Eliot
There's no pleasure i' living if you're to be corked up for ever, and only dribble your mind out by the sly, like a leaky barrel.
-- George Eliot
It is well known to all experienced minds that our firmest convictions are often dependent on subtle impressions for which words are quite too coarse a medium.
-- George Eliot
I've never any pity for conceited people, because I think they carry their comfort about with them.
-- George Eliot
Childhood has no forebodings; but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.
-- George Eliot
We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it . . .
-- George Eliot
If a man means to be hard, let him keep in his saddle and speak from that height, above the level of pleading eyes, and with the command of a distant horizon.
-- George Eliot
High achievements demand some other unusual qualification besides an unusual desire for high prizes.
-- George Eliot
War, like other dramatic spectacles, might possibly cease for want of a "public."
-- George Eliot
If I got places, sir, it was because I made myself fit for 'em. If you want to slip into a round hole, you must make a ball of yourself; that's where it is.
-- George Eliot
Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.
-- George Eliot
Nature repairs her ravages, but not all. The uptorn trees are not rooted again; the parted hills are left scarred; if there is a new growth, the trees are not the same as the old, and the hills underneath their green vesture bear the marks of the past rending. To the eyes that have dwelt on the past, there is no thorough repair.
-- George Eliot
If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new.
-- George Eliot
What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?
-- George Eliot
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?
-- George Eliot
People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbors.
-- George Eliot
One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!
-- George Eliot
Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.
-- George Eliot
Some set out, like Crusaders of old, with a glorious equipment of hope and enthusiasm and get broken by the way, wanting patience with each other and the world.
-- George Eliot
What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other? I cannot be indifferent to the troubles of a man who advised me in my trouble, and attended me in my illness.
-- George Eliot
The best augury of a man's success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.
-- George Eliot
The beings closest to us, whether in love or hate, are often virtually our interpreters of the world, and some feather-headed gentleman or lady whom in passing we regret to take as legal tender for a human being may be acting as a melancholy theory of life in the minds of those who live with them — like a piece of yellow and wavy glass that distorts form and makes colour an affliction. Their trivial sentences, their petty standards, their low suspicions, their loveless ennui, may be making somebody else's life no better than a promenade through a pantheon of ugly idols.
-- George Eliot
A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.
-- George Eliot
Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return . . .
-- George Eliot
Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of of those who diffuse it: it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker.
-- George Eliot
Ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities.
-- George Eliot
I say that the strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.
-- George Eliot
You know nothing about Hope, that immortal, delicious maiden forever courted forever propitious, whom fools have called deceitful, as if it were Hope that carried the cup of disappointment, whereas it is her deadly enemy, Certainty, whom she only escapes by transformation.
-- George Eliot
There's no disappointment in memory, and one's exaggerations are always on the good side.
-- George Eliot
Do we not wile away moments of inanity or fatigued waiting by repeating some trivial movement or sound, until the repetition has bred a want, which is incipient habit?
-- George Eliot
The rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families...
-- George Eliot
The yoke a man creates for himself by wrong-doing will breed hate in the kindliest nature . . .
-- George Eliot
A man will tell you that he has worked in a mine for forty years unhurt by an accident as a reason why he should apprehend no danger, though the roof is beginning to sink . . .
-- George Eliot
When a man had deserved his good luck, it was the part of his neighbors to wish him joy.
-- George Eliot
My own experience and development deepen everyday my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.
-- George Eliot
Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.
-- George Eliot
Those who trust us educate us.
-- George Eliot
What we call despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.
-- George Eliot
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