Top 500 George Eliot Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “The difficult task of knowing another soul is not for young gentlemen whose consciousness is chiefly made up of their own wishes.”

— George Eliot

352. “Whatever may be the success of my stories, I shall be resolute in preserving my incognito, having observed that a nom de plume secures all the advantages without the disagreeables of reputation.”

— George Eliot

353. “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

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

— George Eliot

355. “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

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

— George Eliot

357. “I couldn’t live in peace if I put the shadow of a willful sin between myself and God.”

— George Eliot

358. “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

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

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

361. “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

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

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

364. “Meanwhile the indefiniteness remains, and the limits of variation are really much wider than any one would imagine from the sameness of women’s coiffure and the favorite love-stories in prose and verse.”

— George Eliot

365. “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

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

— George Eliot

367. “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

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

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

373. “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

374. “Consequences are unpitying.”

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

378. “Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?”

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

380. “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

381. “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

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

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

384. “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

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

— George Eliot

386. “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

387. “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

388. “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

389. “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

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

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

393. “In the love of a brave and faithful man there is always a strain of maternal tenderness; he gives out again those beams of protecting fondness which were shed on him as he lay on his mother’s knee.”

— George Eliot

394. “He had the superficial kindness of a good-humored, self-satisfied nature, that fears no rivalry, and has encountered no contrarieties.”

— George Eliot

395. “But we all know the wag’s definition of a philanthropist: a man whose charity increases directly as the square of the distance.”

— George Eliot

396. “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

397. “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

398. “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

399. “Our impartiality is kept for abstract merit and demerit, which none of us ever saw.”

— George Eliot

400. “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