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Nature Quotes by George Eliot

76 Nature quotes by George Eliot

All Nature quotes George Eliot’s page

George Eliot calls a best friend a well‑spring in the wilderness, a source of comfort in wild places. He notes that modest goodness is easily discouraged and often hides in privacy when harsh vices press it. He also hears the wind wailing in winter, a funeral cry for summers that have passed.

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The dew-bead Gem of earth and sky begotten.

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Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it.

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We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.

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Effective magic is transcendent nature.

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Jews are not fit for Heaven, but on earth they are most useful.

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Who with repentance is not satisfied, is not of heaven, nor earth.

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Best friend, my well-spring in the wilderness!

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We look at the one little woman's face we love, as we look at the face of our mother earth, and see…

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It is in the nature of foolish reasonings to seem good to the foolish reasoner.

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There are natures in which, if they love us, we are conscious of having a sort of baptism and consecration.

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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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In so complex a thing as human nature, we must consider it is hard to find rules without exception.

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He was of an impressible nature, and lived a great deal in other people's opinions and feelings concerning himself...

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Nature repairs her ravages,--repairs them with her sunshine and with human labor.

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He had the superficial kindness of a good-humored, self-satisfied nature, that fears no rivalry, and has encountered no contrarieties.

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If I could only fancy myself clever, it would be better, but to be a failure of Nature and to know it…

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The sense of an entailed disadvantage - the deformed foot doubtfully hidden by the shoe, makes a restlessly active spiritual yeast, and…

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“How should all the apparatus of heaven and earth, from the farthest firmament to the tender bosom of the mother who nourished…

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She thought it was part of the hardship of her life that there was laid upon her the burthen of larger wants…

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“It is so with emotional natures whose thoughts are no more than the fleeting shadows cast by feeling: to them words are…

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It belongs to every large nature, when it is not under the immediate power of some strong unquestioning emotion, to suspect itself,…

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... the business of life shuts us up within the environs of London and within sight of human advancement, which I should…

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“How should all the apparatus of heaven and earth make poetry for a mind that had no movements of awe and tenderness,…

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“Nonsense, child! Nature never makes a ferret in the shape of a mastiff. You’ll never persuade me that I can’t tell what…

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Nature repairs her ravages, but not all. The uptorn trees are not rooted again; the parted hills are left scarred; if there…

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Signs are small measurable things, but interpretations are illimitable, and in girls of sweet, ardent nature, every sign is apt to conjure…

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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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“It is something cruelly incomprehensible to youthful natures, this sombre sameness in middle-aged and elderly people, whose life has resulted in disappointment…

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And Dorothea..she had no dreams of being praised above other women. Feeling that there was always something better which she might have…

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The impulse to confession almost always requires the presence of a fresh ear and a fresh heart; and in our moments of…

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

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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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“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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“Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and…

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In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness.

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Human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty — it flows with resistless…

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Perhaps the wind Wails so in winter for the summers dead, And all sad sounds are nature's funeral cries For what has…

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“They had entered the thorny wilderness, and the golden gates of their childhood had for ever closed behind them.”

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A child, more than all other gifts That earth can offer to declining man, Brings hope with it, and forward-looking thoughts." —WORDSWORTH.

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We reap what we sow, but nature has love over and above that justice, and gives us shadow and blossom and fruit,…

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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…