George Eliot Quotes Page 2

“When death, the great Reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.”

“A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.”

“All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.”

“Anxiety is good for nothing if we can’t turn it into a defense.”

“Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of of those who diffuse it: it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker.”

“I am afraid of nothing but that we should miss the passing of our lives together.”

“I dare say some would never get their eyes opened if it were not for a violent shock from the consequences of their own actions.”

“I think I dislike what I don't like more than I like what I like.”

“Ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities.”

“It is a common sentence that knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what ignorance in an hour pulls down.”

“Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning.”

“Men, like planets, have both a visible and an invisible history.”

“No chemical process shows a more wonderful activity than the transforming influence of the thoughts we imagine to be going on in another.”

“No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.”

“No retrospect will take us to the true beginning.”

“Passion is of the nature of seed, and finds nourishment within, tending to a predominance which determines all currents towards itself, and makes the whole life its tributary.”

“People talk of their motives in a cut and dried way. Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster. I am not a monster but I have not felt exactly what other women feel, or say they feel, for fear of being thought unlike others.”

“There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.”

“There is no escaping the fact that want of sympathy condemns us to a corresponding stupidity.”

“Those who trust us educate us.”

“Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning; but give me the man who has pluck to fight when he's sure of losing. That's my way, sir; and there are many victories worse than a defeat.”

“Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside itself -- it only requires opportunity.”

“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.”

“Hatred is like fire – it makes even light rubbish deadly.”

“Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.”

“The blessed work of helping the world forward, happily does not wait to be done by perfect men.”

“The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.”

“Worldly faces, never look so worldly as at a funeral.”

“A prig is a fellow who is always making you a present of his opinions.”

“A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards.”