George Eliot Quotes

“A perfectly sane intellect is hardly at home in this insane world.”

“Better spend an extra hundred or two on your son's education, than leave it him in your will.”

“Don't judge a book by its cover.”

“I am not imposed upon by fine words; I can see what actions mean.”

“I desire no future that will break the ties of the past.”

“I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out.”

“I’m determined to read no more books where the blond-haired women carry away all the happiness.”

“If I got places, sir, it was because I made myself fit for 'em. If you want to slip into a round hole, you must first make a ball of yourself; that's where it is.”

“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.”

“It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.”

“Life seems to go on without effort when I am filled with music.”

“One gets a bad habit of being unhappy.”

“Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure.”

“The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.”

“The place where you are is the one where my mind must live, wherever I might travel.”

“We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass, the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows, the same redbreasts that we used to call ‘God’s birds’ because they did no harm to the precious crops.

What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known?”

“We don't ask what a woman does; we ask whom she belongs to.”

“What's broke can never be whole again.”