Top 500 George Eliot Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “It must be sad to outlive aught we love.”

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

403. “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

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

— George Eliot

405. “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

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

— George Eliot

407. “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

408. “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

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

— George Eliot

410. “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

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

— George Eliot

412. “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

413. “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

414. “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

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

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

417. “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

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

— George Eliot

419. “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

420. “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

421. “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

422. “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

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

— George Eliot

424. “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

425. “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

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

— George Eliot

427. “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

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

— George Eliot

429. “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

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

— George Eliot

431. “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

432. “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

433. “The mother’s love is at first an absorbing delight, blunting all other sensibilities; it is an expansion of the animal existence.”

— George Eliot

434. “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

435. “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

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

— George Eliot

437. “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

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

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

440. “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

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

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

444. “I shall do everything it becomes me to do.”

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

446. “The vainest woman is never thoroughly conscious of her beauty till she is loved by the man who sets her own passion vibrating in return.”

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

448. “Kisses honeyed by oblivion.”

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

450. “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