To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Feelings
The responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Tolerance
That’s what a man wants in a wife, mostly; he wants to make sure one fool tells him he’s wise.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Marriage, Wives
To act with doubleness towards a man whose own conduct was double, was so near an approach to virtue that it deserved to be called by no meaner name than diplomacy.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Diplomacy
We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, “Oh, nothing!” Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts—not to hurt others.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Pride
I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same kind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of literature and speech and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Love, Feelings
I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Authors & Writing, Writers
The world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome dubious eggs called possibilities.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Progress
We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what we imagine might have been.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Duty, Reality
Old men’s eyes are like old men’s memories, they are strongest for things a long way off.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Age, Aging
The sense of an entailed disadvantage—the deformed foot doubtfully hidden by the shoe, makes a restlessly active spiritual yeast, and easily turns a self-centered, unloving nature into an Ishmaelite. But in the rarer sort, who presently see their own frustrated claim as one among a myriad, the inexorable sorrow takes the form of fellowship and makes the imagination tender.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Disability
The desire to conquer is itself a sort of subjection.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: War
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Fear
Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult! Examine your words well and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false it is very hard to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings—much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Perspective
Conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Conscience
We must not inquire too curiously into motives. They are apt to become feeble in the utterance: the aroma is mixed with the grosser air. We must keep the germinating grain away from the light.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Motivation
Blessed influence of one true loving human soul on another.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Leadership, Influence
Life is too precious to be spent in this weaving and unweaving of false impressions, and it is better to live quietly under some degree of misrepresentation than to attempt to remove it by the uncertain process of letter-writing.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Letters
It’s but little good you’ll do a-watering the last year’s crops.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Live-now
A patronizing disposition always has its meaner side.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
In the schoolroom her quick mind had taken readily that strong starch of unexplained rules and disconnected facts which saves ignorance from any painful sense of limpness.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Education, School
The earliest and oldest and longest has still the mastery of us.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Jews, Religion, Judaism
It is possible to have a strong self-love without any self-satisfaction, rather with a self-discontent which is the more intense because one’s own little core of egoistic sensibility is a supreme care.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Vanity, Conceit
One way of getting an idea of our fellow-countrymen’s miseries is to go and look at their pleasures.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
To manage men one ought to have a sharp mind in a velvet sheath.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
In the small circle of pain within the skull
You still shall tramp and tread one endless round
Of thought, to justify your action to yourselves,
Weaving a fiction which unravels as you weave,
Pacing forever in the hell of make-believe
Which never is belief: this is your fate on earth
And we must think no further of you.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Guilt
It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Action
I could not live in peace if I put the shadow of a wilful sin between myself and God.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Sin
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
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- Arthur C. Clarke English Science-fiction Writer
- Anne Bronte English Novelist, Poet
- Emily Bronte English Novelist, Poet
- Bertrand A. Russell British Philosopher, Mathematician
- E. M. Forster English Novelist
- Charlotte Bronte English Novelist, Poet
- Christopher Hitchens Anglo-American Social Critic
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