Top 500 George Eliot Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “I always think the flowers can see us, and know what we are thinking about.”

— George Eliot

152. “It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.”

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

154. “Love has a way of cheating itself consciously, like a child who plays at solitary hide-and-seek; it is pleased with assurances that it all the while disbelieves.”

— George Eliot

155. “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

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “The beginning of an acquaintance whether with persons or things is to get a definite outline of our ignorance.”

— George Eliot

160. “The desire to conquer is itself a sort of subjection.”

— George Eliot

161. “If troubles were put up to market, I’d sooner buy old than new. It’s something to have seen the worst.”

— George Eliot

162. “Friendships begin with liking or gratitude- roots that can be pulled up.”

— George Eliot

163. “There is a mercy which is weakness, and even treason against the common good.”

— George Eliot

164. “There are many victories worse than a defeat.”

— George Eliot

165. “Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life.”

— George Eliot

166. “Let my body dwell in poverty, and my hands be as the hands of the toiler; but let my soul be as a temple of remembrance where the treasures of knowledge enter and the inner sanctuary is hope.”

— George Eliot

167. “It is hard to believe long together that anything is “worth while,” unless there is some eye to kindle in common with our own, some brief word uttered now and then to imply that what is infinitely precious to us is precious alike to another mind.”

— George Eliot

168. “Plain women he regarded as he did the other severe facts of life, to be faced with philosophy and investigated by science.”

— George Eliot

169. “Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.”

— George Eliot

170. “Death was not to be a leap: it was to be a long descent under thickening shadows.”

— George Eliot

171. “A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards.”

— George Eliot

172. “Character is not cut in marble – it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.”

— George Eliot

173. “The egoism which enters into our theories does not affect their sincerity; rather, the more our egoism is satisfied, the more robust is our belief.”

— George Eliot

174. “We have all got to exert ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same names as other people call them by.”

— George Eliot

175. “The best augury of a man’s success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.”

— George Eliot

176. “There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.”

— George Eliot

177. “Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for 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

178. “In so complex a thing as human nature, we must consider it is hard to find rules without exception.”

— George Eliot

179. “Half the sorrows of women would be averted if they could repress the speech they know to be useless-nay, the speech they have resolved not to utter.”

— George Eliot

180. “The early months of marriage often are times of critical tumult, – whether that of a shrimp pool or of deeper water, – which afterwards subside into cheerful peace.”

— George Eliot

181. “There is nothing that will kill a man so soon as having nobody to find fault with but himself.”

— George Eliot

182. “It is always chilling, in friendly intercourse, to say you have no opinion to give.”

— George Eliot

183. “I don’t want the world to give me anything for my books except money enough to save me from the temptation to write only for money.”

— George Eliot

184. “Joy is the best of wine.”

— George Eliot

185. “Beauty is part of the finished language by which goodness speaks.”

— George Eliot

186. “I love words; they are the quoits, the bows, the staves that furnish the gymnasium of the mind.”

— George Eliot

187. “We cannot reform our forefathers.”

— George Eliot

188. “Women were expected to have weak opinions; but the great safeguard of society and of domestic life was, that opinions were not acted on.”

— George Eliot

189. “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 first make a ball of yourself; that’s where it is.”

— George Eliot

190. “A good solid bit of work lasts.”

— George Eliot

191. “Life is too precious to be spent in this weaving and unweaving of false impressions, and it is better to live quietly under some degree of misrepresentation than to attempt to remove it by the uncertain process of letter-writing.”

— George Eliot

192. “The best part of a woman’s love is worship; but it is hard to her to be sent away with her precious spikenard rejected, and her long tresses, too, that were let fall, ready to soothe the wearied feet.”

— George Eliot

193. “Starting a long way off the true point by loops and zigags, we now and then arrive just where we ought to be.”

— George Eliot

194. “It is a very good quality in a man to have a trout-stream.”

— George Eliot

195. “If I could only fancy myself clever, it would be better, but to be a failure of Nature and to know it is not a comfortable lot. It is the last lesson one learns, to be contented with one’s inferiority – but it must be learned.”

— George Eliot

196. “In Rome it seems as if there were so many things which are more wanted in the world than pictures.”

— George Eliot

197. “Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.”

— George Eliot

198. “We look at the one little woman’s face we love, as we look at the face of our mother earth, and see all sorts of answers to our own yearnings.”

— George Eliot

199. “Better a false belief than no belief at all.”

— George Eliot

200. “In the days when the spinning-wheels hummed busily in the farmhouses – and even great ladies, clothed in silk and thread-lace, had their toy spinning-wheels of polished oak – there might be seen in districts far away among the lanes, or deep in the bosom of the hills, certain pallid undersized men, who, by the side of the brawny country-folk, looked like the remnants of a disinherited race. The.”

— George Eliot