Top 500 George Eliot Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Fine old Christmas, with the snowy hair and ruddy face, had done his duty that year in the noblest fashion, and had set off his rich gifts of warmth and color with all the heightening contrast of frost and snow.”

— George Eliot

102. “I would not creep along the coast but steer Out in mid-sea, by guidance of the stars.”

— George Eliot

103. “Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.”

— George Eliot

104. “A patronizing disposition always has its meaner side.”

— George Eliot

105. “Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.”

— George Eliot

106. “A good horse makes short miles.”

— George Eliot

107. “Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.”

— George Eliot

108. “Leisure is gone, – gone where the spinning-wheels are gone, and the pack-horses, and the slow wagons, and the peddlers, who brought bargains to the door on sunny afternoons.”

— George Eliot

109. “Strong souls Live like fire-hearted suns to spend their strength In farthest striving action; breathe more free In mighty anguish than in trivial ease.”

— George Eliot

110. “Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult. Even with no motive to be false, it is very hard to say the exact truth.”

— George Eliot

111. “It is a wonderful subduer, this need of love-this hunger of the heart-as peremptory as that other hunger by which Nature forces us to submit to the yoke, and change the face of the world.”

— George Eliot

112. “Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.”

— George Eliot

113. “For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.”

— George Eliot

114. “I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same mind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.”

— George Eliot

115. “Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it: it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker.”

— George Eliot

116. “A proud woman who has learned to submit carries all her pride to the reinforcement of her submission, and looks down with severe superiority on all feminine assumption as unbecoming.”

— George Eliot

117. “To manage men one ought to have a sharp mind in a velvet sheath.”

— George Eliot

118. “In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause.”

— George Eliot

119. “Every man who is not a monster, a mathematician, or a mad philosopher, is the slave of some woman or other.”

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

121. “Rome – the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.”

— George Eliot

122. “Vague memories hang about the mind like cobwebs.”

— George Eliot

123. “The beginning of hardship is like the first taste of bitter food – it seems for a moment unbearable; yet, if there is nothing else to satisfy our hunger, we take another bite and find it possible to go on.”

— George Eliot

124. “People are almost always better than their neighbors think they are.”

— George Eliot

125. “A proud heart and a lofty mountain are never fruitful.”

— George Eliot

126. “Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in her hand.”

— George Eliot

127. “All passion becomes strength when it has an outlet.”

— George Eliot

128. “But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.”

— George Eliot

129. “The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.”

— George Eliot

130. “Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.”

— George Eliot

131. “Justice is like the kingdom of God – it is not without us as a fact, it is within us as a great yearning.”

— George Eliot

132. “We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, “Oh, nothing!” Pride helps; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our hurts – not to hurt others.”

— George Eliot

133. “I desire no future that will break the ties with the past.”

— George Eliot

134. “Conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course.”

— George Eliot

135. “Perhaps the wind Wails so in winter for the summers dead, And all sad sounds are nature’s funeral cries For what has been and is not.”

— George Eliot

136. “I’ve never any pity for conceited people, because I think they carry their comfort about with them.”

— George Eliot

137. “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 have recovered hope.”

— George Eliot

138. “We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.”

— George Eliot

139. “Under every guilty secret there is hidden a brood of guilty wishes, whose unwholesome infecting life is cherished by the darkness.”

— George Eliot

140. “The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.”

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

142. “I carry my unwritten poems in cipher on my face!”

— George Eliot

143. “The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.”

— George Eliot

144. “The yoke a man creates for himself by wrong-doing will breed hate in the kindliest nature.”

— George Eliot

145. “One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!”

— George Eliot

146. “There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire; it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.”

— George Eliot

147. “I always think the flowers can see us, and know what we are thinking about.”

— George Eliot

148. “Nature repairs her ravages, – repairs them with her sunshine and with human labor.”

— George Eliot

149. “There is hardly any contact more depressing to a young ardent creature than that of a mind in which years full of knowledge seem to have issued in a blank absence of interest or sympathy.”

— George Eliot

150. “We learn words by rote, but not their meaning; that must be paid for with our life-blood, and printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves.”

— George Eliot