Top 500 George Eliot Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

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

— George Eliot

404. “Education was almost always a matter of luck usually ill luck in those distant days.”

— George Eliot

405. “Susceptible persons are more affected by a change of tone that by unexpected words.”

— George Eliot

406. “The saints were cowards who stood by to see Christ crucified: they should have flung themselves Upon the Roman spears, and died in vain – The grandest death, to die in vain – for love Greater than sways the forces of the world!”

— George Eliot

407. “There are men whose presence infuses trust and reverence.”

— George Eliot

408. “We are overhasty to speak as if God did not manifest himself by our silent feeling, and make his love felt through ours.”

— George Eliot

409. “She hates everything that is not what she longs for.”

— George Eliot

410. “We read, indeed, that the walls of Jericho fell down before the sound of trumpets,39 but we nowhere hear that those trumpets were hoarse and feeble. Doubtless they were trumpets that gave forth clear ringing tones, and sent a mighty vibration through brick and mortar. But the oratory of the Rev. Amos resembled rather a Belgian railway-horn, which shows praiseworthy intentions inadequately fulfilled.”

— George Eliot

411. “By a peculiar thermometric adjustment, when a woman’s talent is at zero, journalistic approbation is at the boiling pitch; when she attains mediocrity, it is already at no more than summer heat; and if ever she reaches excellence, critical enthusiasm drops to the freezing point.”

— George Eliot

412. “It is seldom that the miserable of the world can help regarding their misery as a wrong inflicted by those who are less miserable.”

— George Eliot

413. “The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory.”

— George Eliot

414. “My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.”

— George Eliot

415. “We have all our secret sins; and if we knew ourselves we should not judge each other harshly.”

— George Eliot

416. “When I married Humphrey I made up my mind to like sermons, and I set out by liking the end very much. That soon spread to the middle and the beginning, because I couldn’t have the end without them.”

— George Eliot

417. “We want people to feel with us more than to act for us.”

— George Eliot

418. “Surely there was something taught her by this experience of great need; and she must be learning a secret of human tenderness and long-suffering, that the less erring could hardly know?”

— George Eliot

419. “Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest.”

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

421. “When the soul is just liberated from the wretched giant’s bed of dogmas on which it has been racked and stretched ever since it began to think, there is a feeling of exultation and strong hope.”

— George Eliot

422. “I have no courage to write much unless I am written to. I soon begin to think that there are plenty of other correspondents more interesting – so if you all want to hear from me you know the conditions.”

— George Eliot

423. “To have suffered much is like knowing many languages. Thou hast learned to understand all.”

— George Eliot

424. “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

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

— George Eliot

426. “Teach love, for that is what you are.”

— George Eliot

427. “You must learn to deal with the odd and even in life, as well as in figures.”

— George Eliot

428. “Our consciousness rarely registers the beginning of a growth within us any more than without us; there have been many circulation of the sap before we detect the smallest sign of the bud.”

— George Eliot

429. “The sublime delight of truthful speech to one who has the great gift of uttering it, will make itself felt even through the pangs of sorrow.”

— George Eliot

430. “He who rules must fully humor as much as he commands.”

— George Eliot

431. “Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which there is much agreement, much disputation, and yet more personal liking.”

— George Eliot

432. “What courage and patience are wanted for every life that aims to produce anything!”

— George Eliot

433. “Confound you handsome young fellows! You think of having it all your own way in the world. You don’t understand women. They don’t admire you half so much as you admire yourselves.”

— George Eliot

434. “The tendency toward good in human nature has a force which no creed can utterly counteract, and which insures the ultimate triumph of that tendency over all dogmatic perversions.”

— George Eliot

435. “The years seem to rush by now, and I think of death as a fast approaching end of a journey-double and treble reason for loving as well as working while it is day.”

— George Eliot

436. “We all remember epochs in our experience when some dear expectation dies, or some new motive is born.”

— George Eliot

437. “The idea of duty – that recognition of something to be lived for beyond the mere satisfaction of self – is to the moral life what the addition of a great central ganglion is to animal life.”

— George Eliot

438. “We are all apt to believe what the world believes about us.”

— George Eliot

439. “Subtle impressions for which words are quite too coarse a medium.”

— George Eliot

440. “You know nothing about Hope, that immortal, delicious maiden forever courted forever propitious, whom fools have called deceitful, as if it were Hope that carried the cup of disappointment, whereas it is her deadly enemy, Certainty, whom she only es.”

— George Eliot

441. “But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.”

— George Eliot

442. “Looking at the mother, you might hope that the daughter would become like her, which is a prospective advantage equal to a dowry – the mother too often standing behind the daughter like a malignant prophecy – “Such as I am, she will shortly be.”

— George Eliot

443. “Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it.”

— George Eliot

444. “In the first moments when we come away from the presence of death, every other relation to the living is merged, to our feeling, in the great relation of a common nature and a common destiny.”

— George Eliot

445. “I like trying to get pregnant. I’m not so sure about childbirth.”

— George Eliot

446. “A medical man likes to make psychological observations, and sometimes in the pursuit of such studies is too easily tempted into momentous prophecy which life and death easily set at nought.”

— George Eliot

447. “If you deliver an opinion at all, it is mere stupidity not to do it with an air of conviction and well-founded knowledge. You make it your own in uttering it, and naturally get fond of it.”

— George Eliot

448. “I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.”

— George Eliot

449. “Men outlive their love, but they don’t outlive the consequences of their recklessness.”

— George Eliot

450. “Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through.”

— George Eliot