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Thinking Quotes by George Eliot

60 Thinking quotes by George Eliot

All Thinking quotes George Eliot’s page

George Eliot observes that thinking about one’s hidden vocation can be harder than any social expectation, and she calls dullness a disease that blocks intense interest in life. She uses vivid metaphors, like making pudding with thought, to illustrate how imagination can turn ordinary tasks into something meaningful.

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to my thinking, it is more pitiable to bore than to be bored.

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Decide on what you think is right, and stick to it.

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People are almost always better than their neighbors think they are.

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I think I dislike what I don't like more than I like what I like.

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Upon my word, I think the truth is the hardest missile one can be pelted with.

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I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music.

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I think cheerfulness is a fortune in itself.

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I always think the flowers can see us, and know what we are thinking about.

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Ignorance ... is a painless evil; so, I should think, is dirt, considering the merry faces that go along with it.

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Our life is determined for us--and it makes the mind very free when we give up wishing, and only think of bearing…

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The worst of all hobbies are those that people think they can get money at. They shoot their money down like corn…

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I would rather not be engaged. When people are engaged, they begin to think of being married soon, and I should like…

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I think I am quite wicked with roses. I like to gather them, and smell them till they have no scent left.

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I think there are stores laid up in our human nature that our understandings can make no complete inventory of.

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You youngsters nowadays think you're to begin with living well and working easy; you've no notion of running afoot before you get…

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What people do who go into politics I can't think; it drives me almost mad to see mismanagement over only a few…

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I know forgiveness is a man's duty, but, to my thinking, that can only mean as you're to give up all thoughts…

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Poor fellow! I think he is in love with you.' I am not aware of it. And to me it is one…

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I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength…

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I like to read about Moses best, in th' Old Testament. He carried a hard business well through, and died when other…

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You must love your work, and not be always looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin. And the…

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It's a strange thing to think of a man as can lift a chair with his teeth, and walk fifty mile on…

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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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When we are young we think our troubles a mighty business - that the world is spread out expressly as a stage…

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I think the effective use of quotation is an important point in the art of writing. Given sparingly, quotations serve admirably as…

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Can anything be more disgusting than to hear people called 'educated' making small jokes about eating ham, and showing themselves empty of…

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A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some area of native land where it may get the love of…

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I used to come from the village with all that dirt and coarse ugliness like a pain within me, and the simpering…

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If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us;…

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I have always been thinking of the different ways in which Christianity is taught, and whenever I find one way that makes…

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If you could make a pudding wi' thinking o' the batter, it 'ud be easy getting dinner.

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A common fallacy: to imagine a measure will be easy because we have private motives for desiring it.

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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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I'd sooner have one real grief on my mind than twenty false. It's better to know one's robbed than to think one's…

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I think any hardship is better than pretending to do what one is paid for, and never really doing it.

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To think of the part one little woman can play in the life of a man, so that to renounce her may…

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The years seem to rush by now, and I think of death as a fast approaching end of a journey-double and treble…

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A bachelor's children are always young: they're immortal children - always lisping, waddling, helpless, and with a chance of turning out good.

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I've never any pity for conceited people, because I think they carry their comfort about with them.

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Solomon's Proverbs, I think, have omitted to say, that as the sore palate findeth grit, so an uneasy consciousness heareth innuendos.

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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…