George Eliot Quotes Page 3

“Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new. We are told that the oldest inhabitants in Peru do not cease to be agitated by the earthquakes, but they probably see beyond each shock, and reflect that there are plenty more to come.”

“Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.”

“I protest against any absolute conclusion.”

“If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”

“If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind.”

“It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.”

“It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.”

“It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self – never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardor of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted.”

“It is very difficult to be learned; it seems as if people were worn out on the way to great thoughts, and can never enjoy them because they are too tired.”

“It’s rather a strong check to one’s self-complacency to find how much of one’s right doing depends on not being in want of money.”

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

“Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbor's buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.”

“One can begin so many things with a new person! – even begin to be a better man.”

“Our deeds still travel with us from afar. And what we have been makes us what we are.”

“People are almost always better than their neighbors think they are.”

“People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbors.”

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

“Self-consciousness of the manner is the expensive substitute for simplicity.”

“The great safeguard of society and of domestic life was, that opinions were not acted on. Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.”

“The mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it.”

“The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots.”

“We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.”

“We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, "Oh, nothing!"

Pride helps; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our hurts — not to hurt others.”

“What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other?”

“What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?”

“What we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.”

“When a man has seen the woman whom he would have chosen if he had intended to marry speedily, his remaining a bachelor will usually depend on her resolution rather than on his.”

“You must love your work, and not be always looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin. And the other is, you must not be ashamed of your work, and think it would be more honorable to you to be doing something else.

You must have a pride in your own work and in learning to do it well, and not be always saying, There’s this and there’s that – if I had this or that to do, I might make something of it.”

“A man falling into dark waters seeks a momentary footing even on sliding stones.”

“Every man's work, pursued steadily, tends to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life.”