Top 500 George Eliot Quotes (2025 Update)
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451. “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

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

— George Eliot

453. “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

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

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

456. “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

457. “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

458. “Kisses honeyed by oblivion.”

— George Eliot

459. “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

460. “Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it.”

— George Eliot

461. “In the first moments when we come away from the presence of death, every other relation to the living is merged, to our feeling, in the great relation of a common nature and a common destiny.”

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

463. “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

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

— George Eliot

465. “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

466. “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

467. “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

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

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

473. “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

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

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

477. “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

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

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

480. “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

481. “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

482. “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

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

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

485. “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

486. “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

487. “The half-indignant remonstrance that vibrated in Deronda’s voice came, as often happens, from the habit of inward argument with himself rather than from severity toward Gwendolen: but it had a more beneficial effect on her than any soothings. Nothing is feebler than the indolent rebellion of complaint; and to be roused into self-judgment is comparative activity. For the moment she felt like a shaken child – shaken out of its wailing into awe.”

— George Eliot

488. “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

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

— George Eliot

490. “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

491. “Religion, like all things, begins with self, And naught is known, until one knows himself.”

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

493. “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

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

— George Eliot

495. “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

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

— George Eliot

497. “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

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

— George Eliot

499. “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

500. “As the child’s mind was growing into knowledge, his mind was growing into memory: as her life unfolded, his soul, long stupefied in a cold, narrow prison, was unfolding too, and trembling gradually into full consciousness.”

— George Eliot