Quotes from George Eliot

it seemed to him as if he were beholding in a magic panorama a future where he himself was sliding into that pleasureless yielding to the small solicitations of circumstance, which is a commoner history of perdition than any single momentous bargain.

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.

I thirsted for the unknown: the thirst is gone. O God, let me stay with the known, and be weary of it: I am content.

Gwendolen would not have liked to be an object of disgust to this husband whom she hated: she liked all disgust to be on her side.

We are overhasty to speak as if God did not manifest himself by our silent feeling, and make his love felt through ours.

Mrs. Deane was a thin-lipped woman, who made small well-considered speeches on peculiar occasions, repeating them afterwards to her husband, and asking him if she had not spoken very properly.

In bitter manuscript remarks on other men's notions about solar deities, he had become indifferent to the sunlight.

There is no escaping the fact that want of sympathy condemns us to a corresponding stupidity.

Expenditure—like ugliness and errors—becomes a totally new thing when we attach our own personality to it, and measure it by that wide difference which is manifest (in our own sensations) between ourselves and others.

He had no ideal world of dead heroes; he knew little of the life of men in the past; he must find the beings to whom he could cling with loving admiration among those who came within speech of him.

The secret of our emotions never lies in the bare object, but in its subtle relations to our own past.

The most obstinate beliefs that mortals entertain about themselves are such as they have no evidence for beyond a constant, spontaneous pulsing of their self-satisfaction—as it were a hidden seed of madness, a confidence that they can move the world without precise notion of standing-place or lever.