Top 500 George Eliot Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbors.”

— George Eliot

302. “No man is matriculated to the art of life till he has been well tempted.”

— George Eliot

303. “A prig is a fellow who is always making you a present of his opinions.”

— George Eliot

304. “Often the soul is ripened into fuller goodness while age has spread an ugly film, so that mere glances can never divine the preciousness of the fruit.”

— George Eliot

305. “Souls have complexions too: what will suit one will not suit another.”

— George Eliot

306. “Old men’s eyes are like old men’s memories; they are strongest for things a long way off.”

— George Eliot

307. “The stars are golden fruit upon a tree all out of reach.”

— George Eliot

308. “Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.”

— George Eliot

309. “Hobbies are apt to run away with us, you know; it doesn’t do to be run away with. We must keep the reins.”

— George Eliot

310. “There’s good chances and bad chances, and nobody’s luck is pulled only by one string.”

— George Eliot

311. “For the tragedy of our lives is not created entirely from within. “Character,” says Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms,–“character is destiny.” But not the whole of our destiny.”

— George Eliot

312. “Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth.”

— George Eliot

313. “Raveloe was a village where many of the old echoes lingered, undrowned by new voices. Not that it was one of those barren parishes lying on the outskirts of civilization – inhabited by meagre sheep and thinly-scattered shepherds: on the contrary, it lay in the rich central plain of what we are pleased to call Merry England, and.”

— George Eliot

314. “Her little butterfly soul fluttered incessantly between memory and dubious expectation.”

— George Eliot

315. “The perpetual mourner – the grief that can never be healed – is innocently enough felt to be wearisome by the rest of the world. And my sense of desolation increases. Each day seems a new beginning – a new acquaintance with grief.”

— George Eliot

316. “I wish always to be quoted as George Eliot.”

— George Eliot

317. “It’s rather a strong check to one’s self-complacency to find how much of one’s right doing depends on not being in want of money.”

— George Eliot

318. “Where women love each other, men learn to smother their mutual dislike.”

— George Eliot

319. “To judge wisely, we must know how things appear to the unwise.”

— George Eliot

320. “I cherish my childish loves – the memory of that warm little nest where my affections were fledged.”

— George Eliot

321. “Those only can thoroughly feel the meaning of death who know what is perfect love.”

— George Eliot

322. “Those bitter sorrows of childhood! – when sorrow is all new and strange, when hope has not yet got wings to fly beyond the days and weeks, and the space from summer to summer seems measureless.”

— George Eliot

323. “Mighty is the force of motherhood! It transforms all things by its vital heat.”

— George Eliot

324. “The most solid comfort one can fall back upon is the thought that the business of one’s life is to help in some small way to reduce the sum of ignorance, degradation and misery on the face of this beautiful earth.”

— George Eliot

325. “I’ll tell you what’s the greatest power under heaven, and that is public opinion-the ruling belief in society about what is right and what is wrong, what is honourable and what is shameful. That’s the steam that is to work the engines.”

— George Eliot

326. “Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down.”

— George Eliot

327. “A mother’s yearning feels the presence of the cherished child even in the degraded man.”

— George Eliot

328. “Do we not all agree to call rapid thought and noble impulse by the name of inspiration?”

— George Eliot

329. “Self-consciousness of the manner is the expensive substitute for simplicity.”

— George Eliot

330. “Some people are born to make life pretty, and others to grumble that it is not pretty enough.”

— George Eliot

331. “You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.”

— George Eliot

332. “Strange, that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us.”

— George Eliot

333. “Nature has her language, and she is not unveracious; but we don’t know all the intricacies of her syntax just yet, and in a hasty reading we may happen to extract the very opposite of her real meaning.”

— George Eliot

334. “That’s what a man wants in a wife, mostly; he wants to make sure one fool tells him he’s wise.”

— George Eliot

335. “Impatient people, according to Bacon, are like the bees, and kill themselves in stinging others.”

— George Eliot

336. “A picture of human life such as a great artist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that attention to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the raw material of moral sentiment.”

— George Eliot

337. “Oh may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence.”

— George Eliot

338. “Life is measured by the rapidity of change, the succession of influences that modify the being.”

— George Eliot

339. “As to people saying a few idle words about us, we must not mind that, any more than the old church steeple minds the rooks cawing about it.”

— George Eliot

340. “The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots.”

— George Eliot

341. “The difficult task of knowing another soul is not for young gentlemen whose consciousness is chiefly made up of their own wishes.”

— George Eliot

342. “Habit is the beneficent harness of routine which enables silly men to live respectfully and unhappy men to live calmly.”

— George Eliot

343. “My childhood was full of deep sorrows – colic, whooping-cough, dread of ghosts, hell, Satan, and a Deity in the sky who was angry when I ate too much plumcake.”

— George Eliot

344. “Ingenious philosophers tell you, perhaps, that the great work of the steam-engine is to create leisure for mankind. Do not believe them; it only creates a vacuum for eager thought to rush in.”

— George Eliot

345. “It is possible to have a strong self-love without any self-satisfaction, rather with a self-discontent which is the more intense because one’s own little core of egoistic sensibility is a supreme care.”

— George Eliot

346. “Would not love see returning penitence afar off, and fall on its neck and kiss it?”

— George Eliot

347. “Don’t let us rejoice in punishment, even when the hand of God alone inflicts it. The best of us are but poor wretches, just saved from shipwreck. Can we feel anything but awe and pity when we see a fellow-passenger swallowed by the waves?”

— George Eliot

348. “Among all the many kinds of first love, that which begins in childish companionship is the strongest and most enduring: when passion comes to unite its force to long affection, love is at its spring-tide.”

— George Eliot

349. “If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie? We should have no law but the inclination of the moment.”

— George Eliot

350. “We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.”

— George Eliot