Top 500 George Eliot Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty – it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it.”

— George Eliot

352. “Resolve will melt no rocks. But it can scale them.”

— George Eliot

353. “Pride only helps us to be generous; it never makes us so, any more than vanity makes us witty.”

— George Eliot

354. “Men and women make sad mistakes about their own symptoms, taking their vague uneasy longings, sometimes for genius, sometimes for religion, and oftener still for a mighty love.”

— George Eliot

355. “There is no general doctrine which is not capable of eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.”

— George Eliot

356. “But how little we know what would make paradise for our neighbours! We judge from our own desires, and our neighbours themselves are not always open enough even to throw out a hint of theirs.”

— George Eliot

357. “The right to rebellion is the right to seek a higher rule, and not to wander in mere lawlessness.”

— George Eliot

358. “It had already occurred to him that books were stuff, and that life was stupid.”

— George Eliot

359. “How lovely the little river is, with its dark changing wavelets! It seems to me like a living companion while I wander along the bank, and listen to its low, placid voice...”

— George Eliot

360. “It is a vain thought to flee from the work that God appoints us, for the sake of finding a greater blessing, instead of seeking it where alone it is to be found – in loving obedience.”

— George Eliot

361. “Shall we, because we walk on our hind feet, assume to ourselves only the privilege of imperishability?”

— George Eliot

362. “Blameless people are always the most exasperating.”

— George Eliot

363. “It is a sad weakness in us, after all, that the thought of a man’s death hallows him anew to us; as if life were not sacred too.”

— George Eliot

364. “Consequences are unpitying.”

— George Eliot

365. “It is a wonderful subduer-this need of love, this hunger of the heart.”

— George Eliot

366. “Power of generalizing gives men so much the superiority in mistake over the dumb animals.”

— George Eliot

367. “O the anguish of the thought that we can never atone to our dead for the stinted affection we gave them.”

— George Eliot

368. “Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses.”

— George Eliot

369. “Miserliness is a capital quality to run in families; it’s the safe side for madness to dip on.”

— George Eliot

370. “The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies.”

— George Eliot

371. “No compliment can be eloquent, except as an expression of indifference.”

— George Eliot

372. “There is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence.”

— George Eliot

373. “The best travel is that which one can take by one’s own fireside. In memory or imagination.”

— George Eliot

374. “Human longings are perversely obstinate; and to the man whose mouth is watering for a peach, it is of no use to offer the largest vegetable marrow.”

— George Eliot

375. “The only failure one should fear, is not hugging to the purpose they see as best.”

— George Eliot

376. “The dew-bead Gem of earth and sky begotten.”

— George Eliot

377. “For what is love itself, for the one we love best? An enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.”

— George Eliot

378. “It is painful to be told that anything is very fine and not be able to feel that it is fine – something like being blind, while people talk of the sky.”

— George Eliot

379. “As they who make Good luck a god count all unlucky men.”

— George Eliot

380. “It was one of those dangerous moments when speech is at once sincere and deceptive – when feeling, rising high above its average depth, leaves flood-marks which are never reached again.”

— George Eliot

381. “One soweth and another reapeth is a verity that applies to evil as well as good.”

— George Eliot

382. “There is a great deal of unmapped country within us.”

— George Eliot

383. “I’d sooner have one real grief on my mind than twenty false. It’s better to know one’s robbed than to think one’s going to be murdered.”

— George Eliot

384. “Religion can only change when the emotions which fill it are changed; and the religion of personal fear remains nearly at the level of the savage.”

— George Eliot

385. “There is heroism even in the circles of hell for fellow-sinners who cling to each other in the fiery whirlwind and never recriminate.”

— George Eliot

386. “It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibers that knit us to the old.”

— George Eliot

387. “It must be sad to outlive aught we love.”

— George Eliot

388. “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

389. “Particular lies may speak a general truth.”

— George Eliot

390. “We have had an unspeakably delightful journey, one of those journeys which seem to divide one’s life in two, by the new ideas they suggest and the new views of interest they open.”

— George Eliot

391. “How will you find good? It is not a thing of choice; it is a river that flows from the foot of the Invisible Throne and flows by the path of obedience.”

— George Eliot

392. “Boots and shoes are the greatest trouble of my life.”

— George Eliot

393. “A woman’s heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed recipe.”

— George Eliot

394. “The poverty of our imagination is no measure of say the world’s resources. Our posterity will no doubt get fuel in ways that we are unable to devise for them.”

— George Eliot

395. “Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.”

— George Eliot

396. “I take a dose of mathematics every day to prevent my brain from becoming quite soft.”

— George Eliot

397. “So shall I join the choir invisible Whose music is the gladness of the world.”

— George Eliot

398. “When you’ve been used to doing things, and they’ve been taken away from you, it’s as if your hands had been cut off, and you felt the fingers as are of no use to you.”

— George Eliot

399. “No anguish I have had to bear on your account has been too heavy a price to pay for the new life into which I have entered in loving you.”

— George Eliot

400. “What is opportunity to a man who can’t use it.”

— George Eliot