George Eliot Quotes

“Language is a finer medium.”

“A dull mind ... is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which [an] inference started was purely problematic.”

“He spread them out in heaps and bathed his hands in them; then he counted them and set them up in regular piles, and felt their rounded outline between his thumb and fingers, and thought fondly of the guineas that were only half-earned by the work in his loom, as if they had been unborn children.”

“Every man’s work ... tends ... to become an end in itself ... to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life.”

“Formerly, his heart had been as a locked casket with its treasure inside; but now the casket was empty, and the lock was broken.”

“The love of accumulating money grows an absorbing passion in men whose imaginations, even in the very beginning of their hoard, showed them no purpose beyond it.”

“It seemed to him that the Power in which he had vainly trusted among the streets and in the prayer-meetings, was very far away from this land in which he had taken refuge.”

“The money’s gone I don’t know where, and this is come from I don’t know where.”

“There’s debts we can’t pay like money debts, by paying extra for the years that have slipped by.”

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

“Everything comes to light ... sooner or later. When God Almighty wills it, our secrets are found out.”

“The past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all vanished, and the present too is dreamy because it is linked with no memories.”

“There was ... a dreamy feeling that this child was somehow a message come to him from that far-off life.”

“The weaver’s hand had known the touch of hard-won money even before the palm had grown to its full breadth; for twenty years, mysterious money had stood to him as the symbol of earthly good, and the immediate object of toil.”

“He would on no account have exchanged those coins, which had become his familiars, for other coins with unknown faces.”

“Perhaps there was hardly a person in the parish who would not have held that to go to church every Sunday in the calendar would have shown a greedy desire to stand well with Heaven, and get an undue advantage over their neighbours.”

“To people accustomed to reason about the forms in which their religious feeling has incorporated itself, it is difficult to enter into that simple, untaught state of mind in which the form and the feeling have never been severed by an act of reflection.”

“It’s natural he should be disappointed at not having any children: every man likes to have somebody to work for and lay by for, and he always counted so on making a fuss with ‘em when they were little.”

“To have sought a medical explanation for this phenomenon would have been held by Silas himself, as well as by his minister and fellow-members, a willful self-exclusion from the spiritual significance that might lie therein.”

“In old days ... angels ... took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction ... the hand may be a little child’s.”

“As the child’s mind was growing into knowledge, his mind was growing into memory.”

“We do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual.”

“Not only young virgins of that town, but grey-bearded men also, were often in haste to conjecture how a new acquaintance might be wrought into their purposes, contented with very vague knowledge as to the way in which life had been shaping him for their instrumentality. Middlemarch, in fact, counted on swallowing Lydgate and assimilating him very comfortably.”

“What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?”

“It is so painful in you, Celia, that you will look at human beings as if they were merely animals with a toilette, and never see the great soul in a man’s face.”

“It was wicked to let a young girl blindly decide her fate in that way, without any effort to save her.”

“I mean, marriage drinks up all of our power of giving or getting any blessedness in that sort of love. I know it may be very dear—but it murders our marriage—and then the marriage stays with us like a murder—and everything else is gone.”

“A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards.”

“She was as blind to his inward troubles as he to hers; she had not yet learned those hidden conflicts in her husband which claim our pity. She had not yet listened patiently to his heart-beats, but only felt that her own was beating violently.”

“Marriage, like religion and erudition, nay, like authorship itself, was fated to become an outward requirement.”

“There is hardly any contact more depressing to a young ardent creature than that of a mind in which years full of knowledge seem to have issued a blank absence of interest or sympathy.”

“For my part I am very sorry for him.”

“What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult to each other?”

“This young creature has a heart large enough for the Virgin Mary.”

“She did not look at things from the proper feminine angle. The society of such women was about as relaxing as going from your work to teach the second form, instead of reclining in a paradise with sweet laughs for bird-notes, and blue eyes for a heaven.”

“She was not a woman to be spoken of as other women are.”

“Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

“One can begin so many things with a new person! – even begin to be a better man.”

“No man, one sees, can understand and estimate the entire structure or its parts – what are its frailties and what its repairs, without knowing the nature of the materials.”

“Somebody put a drop [of Mr. Casaubon’s blood] under a magnifying-glass, and it was all semicolons and parentheses.”