Quotes from George Eliot

dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters a desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic

A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards. And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it.

connected, I may say, with such activity of the affections as even the preoccupations of a work too special to be abdicated could not uninterruptedly dissimulate);

Only those who know the supremacy of intellectual life - the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it - can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing, soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

But God lasts when everything else is gone. What shall we do if he is not our friend?

Who knows that about anybody?

Here's a fender that if you had the misfortune to hang yourselves would cut you down in no time—with astonishing celerity ... —an appropriate thing for a spare bedroom where there was a four-poster and a guest a little out of his mind.

he held it one of the prettiest attitudes of the feminine mind to adore a man's pre-eminence without too precise a knowledge of what it consisted in.

the colossi whose huge legs our living pettiness is observed to walk under

she is giving up a fortune for the sake of a man, and we men have so poor an opinion of each other that we can hardly call a woman wise who does that.

the human soul is hospitable, and will entertain conflicting sentiments and contradictory opinions with much impartiality.

have always been thinking of the different ways in which Christianity is taught, and whenever I find one way that makes it a wider blessing than any other, I cling to that as the truest—I mean that which takes in the most good of all kinds, and brings in the most people as sharers in it. It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much.