Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.
--George Eliot
An ass may bray a good while before he shakes the stars down.
--George Eliot
An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.
--George Eliot
Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love...
--George Eliot
Animals are such agreeable friends-they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms.
--George Eliot
Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning; but give me the man who has pluck to fight when he's sure of losing.
--George Eliot
Better spend an extra hundred or two on your son's education, than leave it him in your will.
--George Eliot
Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.
--George Eliot
Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.
--George Eliot
Childhood has no forebodings; but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.
--George Eliot
Consequences are unpitying. Our deeds carry their terrible consequences, quite apart from any fluctuations that went before- consequences that are hardly ever confined to ourselves.
--George Eliot
Every man who is not a monster, a mathematician, or a mad philosopher, is the slave of some woman or other.
--George Eliot
Hate is like fire- it makes even light rubbish deadly.
--George Eliot
Human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty- it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it.
--George Eliot
I've never any pity for conceited people, because I think they carry their comfort about with them.
--George Eliot
If art does not enlarge men's sympathies, it does nothing morally.
--George Eliot
Ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities.
--George Eliot
Imagination is a licensed trespasser: it has no fear of dogs, but may climb over walls and peep in at windows with impunity.
--George Eliot
It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.
--George Eliot
It is so much easier to make up your mind that your neighbour is good for nothing, than to enter into all the circumstances that would oblige you to modify that opinion.
--George Eliot
It's never too late to become what you might have been.
--George Eliot
Love has a way of cheating itself consciously, like a child who plays at solitary hide-and-seek; it is pleased with assurances that it all the while disbelieves.
--George Eliot
Men's lives are as thoroughly blended with each other as the air they breathe: evil spreads as necessarily as disease.
--George Eliot
My own experience and development deepen everyday my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.
--George Eliot
Nice distinctions are troublesome.
--George Eliot
One couldn't carry on life comfortably without a little blindness to the fact that everything has been said better than we can put it ourselves.
--George Eliot
One gets a bad habit of being unhappy.
--George Eliot
Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.
--George Eliot
Our deeds are like children that are born to us; they live and act apart from our own will. Nay, children may be strangled, but deeds never: they have an indestructible life both in and out of our consciousness.
--George Eliot
Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds...
--George Eliot
People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbors.
--George Eliot
People who can't be witty exert themselves to be devout and affectionate.
--George Eliot
Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.
--George Eliot
The blessed work of helping the world forward, happily does not wait to be done by perfect men.
--George Eliot
The darkest night that ever fell upon the earth never hid the light, never put out the stars. It only made the stars more keenly, kindly glancing, as if in protest against the darkness.
--George Eliot
The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.
--George Eliot
The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.
--George Eliot
The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.
--George Eliot
The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.
--George Eliot
There are few prophets in the world; few sublimely beautiful women; few heroes. I can't afford to give all my love and reverence to such rarities: I want a great deal of those feelings for my every-day fellow-men, especially for the few in the foreground of the great multitude, whose faces I know, whose hands I touch for whom I have to make way with kindly courtesy.
--George Eliot
There is hardly any mental misery worse than that of having our own serious phrases, our own rooted beliefs, caricatured by a charlatan or a hireling.
--George Eliot
There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and to have recovered hope.
--George Eliot
There's a sort of wrong that can never be made up for.
--George Eliot
To judge wisely, we must know how things appear to the unwise.
--George Eliot
To manage men, one ought to have a sharp mind in a velvet sheath.
--George Eliot
We cannot reform our forefathers.
--George Eliot
We hand folks over to God's mercy, and show none ourselves.
--George Eliot
We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.
--George Eliot
What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?
--George Eliot
What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?
--George Eliot
Worldly faces, never look so worldly as at a funeral.
--George Eliot
Found 51 occurence(s) in 52,267 quotation(s).