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Time Quotes by George Eliot

81 Time quotes by George Eliot

All Time quotes George Eliot’s page

An egg drifts in waves of time, showing how opportunity can disappear if we don’t use it. The quotes compare loyalty to silence, and they describe memory as a wound that keeps reopening. They also talk about the danger of wasting moments on trivial repeats and the power of honest speech.

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I desire no future that will break the ties with the past.

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Nothing at times is more expressive than silence.

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

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“There comes a moment when the soul must have no guide but the voice within it.”

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Time, like money, is measured by our needs.

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It's but little good you'll do a-watering the last year's crops

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Uncomfortable thoughts must be got rid of by good intentions for the future.

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If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie? We should have no law but the inclination of the…

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Rome - the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral…

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There are moments when our passions speak and decide for us ... like a fire kindled within our being to which everything…

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I am influenced at the present time by far higher considerations and by a nobler idea of duty than I ever was…

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“Persecution and revenge, like courtship and toadyism, will not prosper without a considerable expenditure of time and ingenuity,”

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There is a sort of human paste that when it comes near the fire of enthusiasm is only baked into harder shape.

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“Bulstrode, after a moment’s hesitation, took his hat from the floor and slowly rose,”

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The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not…

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“He had no ideal world of dead heroes; he knew little of the life of men in the past; he must find…

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In the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same…

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It is time the clergy are told that thinking men, after a close examination of that doctrine, pronounce it to be subversive…

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Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at…

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It was one of those dangerous moments when speech is at once sincere and deceptive - when feeling, rising high above its…

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“When the commonplace "We must all die" transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness "I must die-- and soon," then death grapples…

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There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have…

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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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“She felt sure that she would have accepted the judicious Hooker, if she had been born in time to save him from…

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“Mary was fond of her own thoughts, and could amuse herself well sitting in twilight with her hands in her lap; for,…

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“she threw herself wearily into a chair that stood out of its place in the middle of the house floor, where in…

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Her future, she thought, was likely to be worse than her past, for after her years of contented renunciation, she had slipped…

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“The sense of security more frequently springs from habit than from conviction, and for this reason it often subsists after such a…

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When our life is a continuous trial, the moments of respite seem only to substitute the heaviness of dread for the heaviness…

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If we only look far enough off for the consequence of our actions, we can always find some point in the combination…

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“goodness tries to get the upper hand in us whenever it seems to have the slightest chance—on Sunday mornings, perhaps, when we…

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Here was a man who now for the first time found himself looking into the eyes of death--who was passing through one…

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“The sense of security more frequently springs from habit than from conviction, and for this reason it often subsists after such a…

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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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“Do we not wile away moments of inanity or fatigued waiting by repeating some trivial movement or sound, until the repetition has…

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Childhood is only the beautiful and happy time in contemplation and retrospect: to the child it is full of deep sorrows, the…

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The moment of finding a fellow-creature is often as full of mingled doubt and exultation, as the moment of finding an idea.

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“a terrible scorching light showed him the hidden letters that changed the meaning of the past.”

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

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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…