Top 500 George Eliot Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “Selfish – a judgment readily passed by those who have never tested their own power of sacrifice.”

— George Eliot

52. “So our lives glide on: the river ends we don’t know where, and the sea begins, and then there is no more jumping ashore.”

— George Eliot

53. “Education is an asset no man can take away.”

— George Eliot

54. “I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.”

— George Eliot

55. “Sweet Truth is a queen proud and mighty – Her throne is in heaven above.”

— George Eliot

56. “Decide on what you think is right, and stick to it.”

— George Eliot

57. “After all, people may really have in them some vocation which is not quite plain to themselves, may they not? They may seem idle and weak because they are growing. We should be very patient with each other, I think.”

— George Eliot

58. “The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another.”

— George Eliot

59. “Don’t you meddle with me, and I won’t meddle with you.”

— George Eliot

60. “These gems have life in them: their colors speak, say what words fail of.”

— George Eliot

61. “It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees.”

— George Eliot

62. “If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.”

— George Eliot

63. “Affection is the broadest basis of a good life.”

— George Eliot

64. “And, of course men know best about everything, except what women know better.”

— George Eliot

65. “Was never true love loved in vain, For truest love is highest gain.”

— George Eliot

66. “We don’t ask what a woman does; we ask whom she belongs to.”

— George Eliot

67. “Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state. Suffering can be likened to a baptism – the passing over the threshold of pain and grief and anguish to claim a new state of being.”

— George Eliot

68. “Speech is but broken light upon the depth Of the unspoken.”

— George Eliot

69. “She was no longer struggling against the perception of facts, but adjusting herself to their clearest perception.”

— George Eliot

70. “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!”

— George Eliot

71. “The responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision.”

— George Eliot

72. “I flutter all ways, and fly in none.”

— George Eliot

73. “Effective magic is transcendent nature.”

— George Eliot

74. “When God makes His presence felt through us, we are like the burning bush: Moses never took any heed what sort of bush it was – he only saw the brightness of the Lord.”

— George Eliot

75. “There is so much to read and the days are so short! I get more hungry for knowledge every day, and less able to satisfy my hunger.”

— George Eliot

76. “It’s but little good you’ll do a-watering the last year’s crops.”

— George Eliot

77. “What’s broke can never be whole again.”

— George Eliot

78. “Receptiveness is a rare and massive power, like fortitude.”

— George Eliot

79. “Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them: they can be injured by us, they can be wounded; they know all our penitence, all our aching sense that their place is empty, all the kisses we bestow on the smallest relic of their presence.”

— George Eliot

80. “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? I know no speck so troublesome as self.”

— George Eliot

81. “Nothing at times is more expressive than silence.”

— George Eliot

82. “An ingenious web of probabilities is the surest screen a wise man can place between himself and the truth.”

— George Eliot

83. “We judge other according to results; how else? – not knowing the process by which results are arrived at.”

— George Eliot

84. “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

85. “In our spring-time every day has its hidden growths in the mind, as it has in the earth when the little folded blades are getting ready to pierce the ground.”

— George Eliot

86. “I will to make life less bitter for a few within my reach.”

— George Eliot

87. “Every man’s work, pursued steadily, tends to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life.”

— George Eliot

88. “Time, like money, is measured by our needs.”

— George Eliot

89. “You must love your work and not always be looking over the edge of it wanting your play to begin.”

— George Eliot

90. “The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.”

— George Eliot

91. “Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure.”

— George Eliot

92. “Plainness has its peculiar temptations quite as much as beauty.”

— George Eliot

93. “The human heart finds nowhere shelter but in human kind.”

— George Eliot

94. “The pride of the body is a barrier against the gifts that purify the soul.”

— George Eliot

95. “Joy and sorrow are both my perpetual companions, but the joy is called Past and the sorrow Present.”

— George Eliot

96. “A peasant can no more help believing in a traditional superstition than a horse can help trembling when be sees a camel.”

— George Eliot

97. “There is one order of beauty which seems made to turn heads. It is a beauty like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle.”

— George Eliot

98. “It is one of the secrets in that change of mental poise which has been fitly named conversion, that to many among us neither heaven nor earth has any revelation till some personality touches theirs with a peculiar influence, subduing them into receptiveness...”

— George Eliot

99. “That golden sky, which was the doubly blessed symbol of advancing day and of approaching rest.”

— George Eliot

100. “Childhood has no forebodings; but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.”

— George Eliot