George Eliot

It must be sad to outlive aught we love.

— George Eliot

No man can be wise on an empty stomach.

— George Eliot

Steady work turns genius to a loom.

— George Eliot

A good horse makes short miles.

— George Eliot

Human experience is usually paradoxical.

— George Eliot

I wish always to be quoted as George Eliot.

— George Eliot

After all, the true seeing is within.

— George Eliot

Hear Everything and judge for yourself

— George Eliot

Wine and the sun will make vinegar without any shouting to help them.

— George Eliot

Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest.

— George Eliot

Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.

— George Eliot

That is the bitterest of all,--to wear the yoke of our own wrong-doing.

— George Eliot

Death was not to be a leap: it was to be a long descent under thickening shadows.

— George Eliot

The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies.

— George Eliot

“[She] looked as if her nerves were quivering with the expectation that something would be thrown at her. But she never had…

— George Eliot

It is a common enough case, that of a man being suddenly captivated by a woman nearly the opposite of his ideal.

— George Eliot

Enveloped in a common mist, we seem to walk in clearness ourselves, and behold only the mist that enshrouds others.

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

What is your religion? I mean-not what you know about religion but the belief that helps you most?

— George Eliot

... when one's outward lot is perfect, the sense of inward imperfection is the more pressing.

— George Eliot

To men who only aim at escaping felony, nothing short of the prisoner's dock is disgrace.

— George Eliot

“I was dead to worldly ambitions, to social vanities, to all the incentives within the compass of her narrow imagination, and I…

— George Eliot

They the royal-hearted women are Who nobly love the noblest, yet have grace For needy suffering lives in lowliest place, Carrying a…

— George Eliot

An age at which many men are not quite common - at which they are hopeful of achievement, resolute in avoidance, thinking…

— George Eliot

There is nothing I should care more to do, if it were possible, than to rouse the imagination of men and women…

— George Eliot

With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of…

— George Eliot

“Contented speckled hens, industriously scratching for the rarely-found corn, may sometimes do more for a sick heart than a grove of nightingales;…

— George Eliot

“Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very…

— George Eliot

“My spirit is too weak; mortality Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep, And each imagined pinnacle and steep Of godlike hardship…

— George Eliot

“Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them: they can be injured by us, they can be wounded;…

— George Eliot

“An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science,…

— George Eliot

“Conceive the condition of the human mind if all propositions whatsoever were self-evident except one, which was to become self-evident at the…

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

“Pray tell me what it is,” said Dorothea, anxiously, also rising and going to the open window, where Monk was looking in,…

— George Eliot

So much of our early gladness vanishes utterly from our memory: we can never recall the joy with which we laid our…

— George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

Ah! but the moods lie in his nature, my boy, just as much as his reflections did, and more. A man can…

— George Eliot