Quotes from George Eliot

The most powerful movement of feeling with a liturgy is the prayer which seeks for nothing special, but is a yearning to escape from the limitations of our own weakness and an invocation of all Good to enter and abide with us.

No chemical process shows a more wonderful activity than the transforming influence of the thoughts we imagine to be going on in another.

What right have such men to represent Christianity—as if it were an institution for getting up idiots genteelly?

Everything comes to light, Nancy, sooner or later. When God Almighty wills it, our secrets are found out.

Who can know how much of his most inward life is made up of the thoughts he believes other men to have about him, until that fabric of opinion is threatened with ruin?

If there is an angel who records the sorrows of men as well as their sins, he knows how many and deep are the sorrows that spring from false ideas for which no man is culpable.

When the commonplace We must all die transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness I must die-- and soon, then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel; afterwards, he may come to fold us in his arms as our mother did, and our last moment of dim earthly discerning may be like the first.

Surely there was something taught her by this experience of great need; and she must be learning a secret of human tenderness and long-suffering, that the less erring could hardly know?

In the checkered area of human experience the seasons are all mingled as in the golden age: fruit and blossom hang together; in the same moment the sickle is reaping and the seed is sprinkled; one tends the green cluster and another treads the winepress. Nay, in each of our lives harvest and spring-time are continually one, until himself gathers us and sows us anew in his invisible fields.

Passion is of the nature of seed, and finds nourishment within, tending to a predominance which determines all currents towards itself, and makes the whole life its tributary.

She felt that she enjoyed it [horseback riding] in a pagan, sensuous way, and always looked forward to renouncing it.

We don't ask what a woman does; we ask whom she belongs to.