Quotes from George Eliot

T]he Meyricks, whose various knowledge had been acquired by the irregular foraging to which clever girls have usually been reduced...

That was a wrong thing for you to say, that you would have had nothing to try for. If we had lost our own chief good, other people's good would remain, and that is worth trying for. Some can be happy. I seemed to see that more clearly than ever, when I was the most wretched. I can hardly think how I could have borne the trouble, if that feeling had not come to me to make strength.

Three words have often been used as the trumpet-call of men - the words God, Immortality, Duty - pronounced with terrible earnestness. How inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable was the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third.

With his taper stuck before him he forgot the absence of windows, and in bitter manuscript remarks on other men's notions about the solar deities, he had become indifferent to the sunlight.

Speculative truth begins to appear but a shadow of individual minds, agreement between intellects seems unattainable, and we turn to the truth of feeling as the only universal bond of union.

What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult to others?

We prepare ourselves for sudden deeds by the reiterated choice of good or evil which gradually determines character.

The bias of human nature to be slow in correspondence triumphs even over the present quickening in the general pace of things:

I don't see how a man is to be good for much unless he has some one woman to love him dearly.

have been little disposed to gather flowers that would wither in my hand, but now I shall pluck them with eagerness, to place them in your bosom.

Let us bind love with duty; for duty is the love of law; and law is the nature of the Eternal.' So we bound ourselves.

The best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one's own homestead.