Quotes by George Eliot

Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have wrinkles.
– George Eliot
What a wretched lot of old shrivelled creatures we shall be by-and-by. Never mind - the uglier we get in the eyes of others, the lovelier we shall be to each other; that has always been my firm faith about friendship.
– George Eliot
What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other?
– George Eliot
What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?
– George Eliot
What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.
– George Eliot
What quarrel, what harshness, what unbelief in each other can subsist in the presence of a great calamity, when all the artificial vesture of our life is gone, and we are all one with each other in primitive mortal needs?
– George Eliot
When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.
– George Eliot
When one wanted one's interests looking after whatever the cost, it was not so well for a lawyer to be over honest, else he might not be up to other people's tricks.
– George Eliot
Whether happiness may come or not, one should try and prepare one's self to do without it.
– George Eliot
Who has not felt the beauty of a woman's arm? The unspeakable suggestions of tenderness that lie in the dimpled elbow, and all the varied gently-lessening curves, down to the delicate wrist, with its tiniest, almost imperceptible nicks in the firm softness.
– George Eliot
Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral. They have the same effect of grating incongruity as the sound of a coarse voice breaking the solemn silence of night.
– George Eliot
Would not love see returning penitence afar off, and fall on its neck and kiss it?
– George Eliot
You may try but you can never imagine what it is to have a man's form of genius in you, and to suffer the slavery of being a girl.
– George Eliot
Be courteous, be obliging, but don't give yourself over to be melted down for the benefit of the tallow trade.
– George Eliot
I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.
– George Eliot
Ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities.
– George Eliot
It's never too late to be who you might have been.
– George Eliot
One must be poor to know the luxury of giving.
– 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
There's folks 'ud stand on their heads and then say the fault was i' their boots.
– George Eliot
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.
– George Eliot
The scornful nostril and the high head gather not the odors that lie on the track of truth.
– George Eliot
Some people did what their neighbors did so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.
– 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
Every man who is not a monster, mathematician or a mad philosopher, is the slave of some woman or other.
– George Eliot
There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.
– George Eliot
You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.
– George Eliot
When we get to wishing a great deal for ourselves, whatever we get soon turns into mere limitation and exclusion.
– George Eliot
Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through.
– George Eliot
The best augury of a man's success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.
– George Eliot
Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.
– George Eliot
Rome - the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.
– George Eliot
Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest.
– George Eliot
Little children are still the symbol of the eternal marriage between love and duty.
– George Eliot
Life began with waking up and loving my mother's face.
– George Eliot
Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down.
– George Eliot
It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.
– George Eliot
In every parting there is an image of death.
– George Eliot
I like not only to be loved, but also to be told I am loved.
– George Eliot
Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.
– George Eliot
For what is love itself, for the one we love best? An enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.
– George Eliot
Falsehood is easy, truth so difficult.
– George Eliot
Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.
– George Eliot
Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.
– George Eliot
But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.
– George Eliot
A woman's heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed recipe.
– George Eliot