Top 500 George Eliot Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “Looking at the mother, you might hope that the daughter would become like her, which is a prospective advantage equal to a dowry – the mother too often standing behind the daughter like a malignant prophecy – “Such as I am, she will shortly be.”

— George Eliot

452. “A medical man likes to make psychological observations, and sometimes in the pursuit of such studies is too easily tempted into momentous prophecy which life and death easily set at nought.”

— George Eliot

453. “Wine and the sun will make vinegar without any shouting to help them.”

— George Eliot

454. “I like trying to get pregnant. I’m not so sure about childbirth.”

— George Eliot

455. “Errors look so very ugly in persons of small means -one feels they are taking quite a liberty in going astray; whereas people of fortune may naturally indulge in a few delinquencies.”

— George Eliot

456. “If you deliver an opinion at all, it is mere stupidity not to do it with an air of conviction and well-founded knowledge. You make it your own in uttering it, and naturally get fond of it.”

— George Eliot

457. “Oh, child, men’s men: gentle or simple, they’re much of a muchness...”

— George Eliot

458. “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

459. “I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.”

— George Eliot

460. “If we use common words on a great occasion, they are the more striking, because they are felt at once to have a particular meaning, like old banners, or everyday clothes, hung up in a sacred place.”

— George Eliot

461. “Who can know how much of his most inward life is made up of the thoughts he believes other men to have about him, until that fabric of opinion is threatened with ruin?”

— George Eliot

462. “One can say everything best over a meal.”

— George Eliot

463. “When gratitude has become a matter of reasoning there are many ways of escaping from its bonds.”

— George Eliot

464. “There are robberies that leave man or woman forever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer.”

— George Eliot

465. “To think of the part one little woman can play in the life of a man, so that to renounce her may be a very good imitation of heroism, and to win her may be a discipline.”

— George Eliot

466. “The scornful nostril and the high head gather not the odors that lie on the track of truth.”

— George Eliot

467. “Music sweeps by me as a messenger – Carrying a message that is not for me.”

— George Eliot

468. “Well, well, my boy, if good luck knocks at your door, don’t you put your head out at window and tell it to be gone about its business, that’s all.”

— George Eliot

469. “I trust you as holy men trust God; you could do nought that was not pure and loving, though the deed might pierce me unto death.”

— George Eliot

470. “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

471. “When a tender affection has been storing itself in us through many of our years, the idea that we could accept any exchange for it seems to be a cheapening of our lives.”

— George Eliot

472. “Opinions: men’s thoughts about great subjects. Taste: their thoughts about small ones: dress, behavior, amusements, ornaments.”

— George Eliot

473. “A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.”

— George Eliot

474. “What is your religion? I mean-not what you know about religion but the belief that helps you most?”

— George Eliot

475. “I hold it a blasphemy to say that a man ought not to fight against authority: there is no great religion and no great freedom that has not done it, in the beginning.”

— George Eliot

476. “Whether happiness may come or not, one should try and prepare one’s self to do without it.”

— George Eliot

477. “Unwonted circumstances may make us all rather unlike ourselves: there are conditions under which the most majestic person is obliged to sneeze, and our emotions are liable to be acted on in the same incongruous manner.”

— George Eliot

478. “Her own misery filled her heart – there was no room in it for other people’s sorrow.”

— George Eliot

479. “Our vanities differ as our noses do: all conceit is not the same conceit, but varies in correspondence with the minutiae of mental make in which one of us differs from another.”

— George Eliot

480. “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

481. “Steady work turns genius to a loom.”

— George Eliot

482. “Every year strips us of at least one vain expectation, and teaches us to reckon some solid good in its stead.”

— George Eliot

483. “A man carries within him the germ of his most exceptional action; and if we wise people make eminent fools of ourselves on any particular occasion, we must endure the legitimate conclusion that we carry a few grains of folly to our ounce of wisdom.”

— George Eliot

484. “The commonest man, who has his ounce of sense and feeling, is conscious of the difference between a lovely, delicate woman and a coarse one. Even a dog feels a difference in her presence.”

— George Eliot

485. “A blush is no language; only a dubious flag – signal which may mean either of two contradictories.”

— George Eliot

486. “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

487. “Much of our waking experience is but a dream in the daylight.”

— George Eliot

488. “Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.”

— George Eliot

489. “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.”

— George Eliot

490. “There was no gleam, no shadow, for the heavens, too, were one still, pale cloud; no sound or motion in anything but the dark river that flowed and moaned like an unresting sorrow.”

— George Eliot

491. “What a different result one gets by changing the metaphor!”

— George Eliot

492. “Unhappily the habit of being offensive ‘without meaning it’ leads usually to a way of making amends which the injured person cannot but regard as a being amiable without meaning it.”

— George Eliot

493. “But certain winds will make men’s temper bad.”

— George Eliot

494. “Death is the only physician, the shadow of his valley the only journeying that will cure us of age and the gathering fatigue of years.”

— George Eliot

495. “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

496. “Memory, when duly impregnated with ascertained facts, is sometimes surprisingly fertile.”

— George Eliot

497. “I am not resigned: I am not sure life is long enough to learn that lesson.”

— George Eliot

498. “Until every good man is brave, we must expect to find many good women timid – too timid even to believe in the correctness of their own best promptings, when these would place them in a minority.”

— George Eliot

499. “He distrusted her affection; and what loneliness is more lonely than distrust.”

— George Eliot

500. “A bachelor’s children are always young: they’re immortal children – always lisping, waddling, helpless, and with a chance of turning out good.”

— George Eliot