Quotes from George Eliot

How can one ever do anything nobly Christian, living among people with such petty thoughts?

When God makes His presence felt through us, we are like the burning bush: Moses never took any heed what sort of bush it was—he only saw the brightness of the Lord.

When a man turns a blessing from his door, it falls to them as take it in.

Love once, love always

We are contented with our day when we have been able to bear our grief in silence, and act as if we were not suffering.

I 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.

Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity.

While the heart beats, bruise it--it is your only opportunity

So deeply inherent is it in this life of ours that men have to suffer for each other's sins, so inevitably diffusive is human suffering, that even justice makes its victims, and we can conceive no retribution that does not spread beyond its mark in pulsations of unmerited pain.

eh, there's trouble i' this world, and there's things as we can niver make out the rights on. And all we've got to do is to trusten - Master Marner, to do the right thing as fur as we know, and to trusten. For if us as knows so little can see a bit o' good and rights, we may be sure as there's a good and a rights bigger nor what we can know.

whatever else remained the same, the light had changed, and you cannot find the pearly dawn at noonday. The fact is unalterable, that a fellow-mortal with whose nature you are acquainted solely through the brief entrances and exits of a few imaginative weeks called courtship, may, when seen in the continuity of married companionship, be disclosed as something better or worse than what you have preconceived, but will certainly not appear altogether the same.

But I have a belief of my own, and it comforts me. What is that? said Will, rather jealous of the belief. That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and can not do what we would, we are part of the divine struggle against evil--widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.