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Life Quotes by George Eliot

183 Life quotes by George Eliot

All Life quotes George Eliot’s page

George Eliot writes that each person’s actions ripple outward, shaping the world in subtle ways. He warns that relentless skepticism would freeze life, while hidden guilty wishes can poison the heart. He also sees love and excellence as sources of spiritual wealth.

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It's no trifle at her time of life to part with a doctor who knows her constitution

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“sympathy is but a living again through our own past in a new form,”

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What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.

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No man is matriculated to the art of life till he has been well tempted.

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Affection is the broadest basis of a good life.

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Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.

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Some people are born to make life pretty, and others to grumble that it is not pretty enough.

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There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.

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The idea of duty--that recognition of something to be lived for beyond the mere satisfaction of self--is to the moral life what…

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Death is the king of this world: 'Tis his park where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music…

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I think what we call the dullness of things is a disease in ourselves. Else how could anyone find an intense interest…

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The nature o' things doesn't change, though it seems as if one's own life was nothing but change.

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Hopes have precarious life. They are oft blighted, withered, snapped sheer off In vigorous growth and turned to rottenness.

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... one's own faults are always a heavy chain to drag through life and one can't help groaning under the weight now…

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

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So our lives glide on: the river ends we don't know where, and the sea begins, and then there is no more…

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“There is no hopelessness so sad as that of early youth, when the soul is made up of wants, and has no…

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There is no compensation for the woman who feels that the chief relation of her life has been no more than a…

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“And there is no better reason for preferring this elderberry bush than that it stirs an early memory, that it is no…

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“A bride and bridegroom, surrounded by all the appliances of wealth, hurried through the day by the whirl of society, filling their…

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I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you…

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I might mention all the divine charms of a bright spring day, but if you had never in your life utterly forgotten…

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“[She was] a creature full of eager, passionate longings for all that was beautiful and glad; thirsty for all knowledge; with an…

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“Nay, are there many situations more sublimely tragic than the struggle of the soul with the demand to renounce a work which…

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“Because, dear, trouble comes to us all in this life: we set our hearts on things which it isn't God's will for…

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“Dorothea, with all her eagerness to know the truths of life, retained very childlike ideas about marriage. She felt sure that she…

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Looking at your life as a debt may seem the dreariest view of things at a distance; but it cannot really be…

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It is worth repeating that powerful imagination is not false outward vision, but intense inward representation, and a creative energy constantly fed…

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“Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love - that makes life and nature harmonise. The…

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For my part I am very sorry for him. It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly…

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The great river-courses which have shaped the lives of men have hardly changed; and those other streams, the life-currents that ebb and…

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It is never too late, no matter how old you get because anytime or any point in your life you can always…

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“The intensity of her religious disposition, the coercion it exercised over her life, was but one aspect of a nature altogether ardent,…

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“Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and noble impulse struggling…

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“It seems right to me sometimes that we should follow our strongest feeling; but then, such feelings continually come across the ties…

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“She could make dream-worlds of her own – but no dream-world would satisfy her now. She wanted some explanation of this hard,…

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“I should like to make life beautiful--I mean everybody's life. And then all this immense expense of art, that seems somehow to…

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“She locked herself in her room. She needed time to get used to her maimed consciousness, her poor lopped life, before she…

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“Even people whose lives have been made various by learning sometimes find it hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual…

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“There were intervals in which she could sit perfectly still, enjoying the outer stillness and the subdued light. The red fire with…

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More by George Eliot

There are various orders of beauty, causing men to make fools of themselves in various styles.

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on…

Scepticismcan never be thoroughly applied, else life would come to a standstill.

Under every guilty secret there is hidden a brood of guilty wishes, whose unwholesome infecting life is cherished by the darkness.

The most powerful movement of feeling with a liturgy is the prayer which seeks for nothing special, but is a yearning to escape from…

“[W]e must learn to accommodate ourselves to the discovery that some of those cunningly-fashioned instruments called human souls have only a very limited range…

“Mr. Casaubon had never had a strong bodily frame, and his soul was sensitive without being enthusiastic: it was too languid to thrill out…

“... she took her husband's jokes and joviality as patiently as everything else, considering that "men would be so", and viewing the stronger sex…

What is opportunity to the man who can't use it? An unfecundated egg, which the waves of time wash away into nonentity.

And, of course men know best about everything, except what women know better.

“But let the wise be warned against too great readiness at explanation: it multiplies the sources of mistake, lengthening the sum for reckoners sure…

“But any one watching keenly the stealthy convergence of human lots, sees a slow preparation of effects from one life on another, which tells…

Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial…

“Sane people did what their neighbours did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.”

even those who call themselves 'intimate' know very little about each other - hardly ever know just how a sorrow is felt, and hurt…