Top 500 George Eliot Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “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

402. “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

403. “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

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

— George Eliot

405. “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

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

— George Eliot

407. “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

408. “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

409. “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

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

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

412. “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

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

— George Eliot

414. “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

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

— George Eliot

416. “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

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

— George Eliot

418. “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

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

— George Eliot

420. “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

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

— George Eliot

422. “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

423. “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

424. “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

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

— George Eliot

426. “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

427. “When a tender affection has been storing itself in us through many of our years, the idea that we could accept any exchange for it seems to be a cheapening of our lives.”

— George Eliot

428. “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

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

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

432. “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

433. “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

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

— George Eliot

435. “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

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

— George Eliot

437. “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

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

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

442. “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

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

— George Eliot

444. “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

445. “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

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

— George Eliot

447. “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

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

— George Eliot

449. “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

450. “Errors look so very ugly in persons of small means -one feels they are taking quite a liberty in going astray; whereas people of fortune may naturally indulge in a few delinquencies.”

— George Eliot