Quotes from George Eliot

Falsehood is easy, truth so difficult.

Veracity is a plant of paradise, and the seeds have never flourished beyond the walls.

The worst service, I fancy, that anyone can do for truth, is to set silly people writing on its behalf.

The mother's love is at first an absorbing delight, blunting all other sensibilities; it is an expansion of the animal existence.

But is it what we love, or how we love, That makes true good?

Teach love, for that is what you are.

The first condition of human goodness is something to love; the second, something to reverence.

We reap what we sow, but nature has love over and above that justice, and gives us shadow and blossom and fruit, that spring from no planting of ours.

I shall never forget you. I have never forgotten anyone whom I once knew. My life has never been crowded, and seems not likely to be so.

There are some cases in which the sense of injury breeds not the will to inflict injuries and climb over them as a ladder, but a hatred of all injury.

What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined together to strengthen each other in all labour, to minister to each other in all sorrow, to share with each other in all gladness, to be one with each other in the silent unspoken memories?

There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.