George Eliot
I wish always to be quoted as George Eliot.Collection: Names
Unhappily the habit of being offensive 'without meaning it' leads usually to a way of making amends which the injured person cannot but regard as a being amiable without meaning it.Collection: Way
I think the effective use of quotation is an important point in the art of writing. Given sparingly, quotations serve admirably as a climax or as a corroboration, but when they are long and frequent, they seriously weaken the effect of a book. We lose sight of the writer - he scatters our sympathy among others than himself - and the ideas which he himself advances are not knit together with our impression of his personality.Collection: Art
All honour and reverence to the divine beauty of form! Let us cultivate it to the utmost in men, women and children -- in our gardens and in our houses. But let us love that other beauty too, which lies in no secret of proportion but in the secret of deep human sympathy.Collection: Children
There is no sense of ease like the ease we felt in those scenes where we were born.Collection: Ease
There's things to put up wi' in ivery place, an' you may change an' change an' not better yourself when all's said an' done.Collection: Done
But how little we know what would make paradise for our neighbours! We judge from our own desires, and our neighbours themselves are not always open enough even to throw out a hint of theirs.Collection: Judging
Unwonted circumstances may make us all rather unlike ourselves: there are conditions under which the most majestic person is obliged to sneeze, and our emotions are liable to be acted on in the same incongruous manner.Collection: May
Receptiveness is a rare and massive power, like fortitude.Collection: Fortitude
Human experience is usually paradoxical.Collection: Human Experience
What is opportunity to the man who cant use it?Collection: Opportunity
You must mind and not lower the Church in people's eyes by seeming to be frightened about it for such a little thing.Collection: Fear
The dew-bead Gem of earth and sky begotten.Collection: Sky
Those who have been indulged by fortune and have always thought of calamity as what happens to others, feel a blind incredulous rage at the reversal of their lot, and half believe that their wild cries will alter the course of the storm.Collection: Believe
They say fortune is a woman and capricious. But sometimes she is a good woman, and gives to those who merit.Collection: Giving
When gratitude has become a matter of reasoning there are many ways of escaping from its bonds.Collection: Gratitude
I'd sooner have one real grief on my mind than twenty false. It's better to know one's robbed than to think one's going to be murdered.Collection: Real
The worst of all hobbies are those that people think they can get money at. They shoot their money down like corn out of a sack then.Collection: Thinking
The purifying influence of public confession springs from the fact, that by it the hope in lies is forever swept away, and the soul recovers the noble attitude of simplicity.Collection: Honesty
It is worth repeating that powerful imagination is not false outward vision, but intense inward representation, and a creative energy constantly fed by susceptibility to the veriest minutiæ of experience, which it reproduces and constructs in fresh and fresh wholes; not the habitual confusion of provable fact with the fictions of fancy and transient inclination, but a breadth of ideal association which informs every material object, every incidental fact with far-reaching memories and storied residues of passion, bringing into new light the less obvious relations to human existence.Collection: Memories
Among the blessings of love there is hardly one more exquisite than the sense that in uniting the beloved life to ours we can watch over its happiness, bring comfort where hardship was, and over memories of privation and suffering open the sweetest fountains of joy.Collection: Love
I've seen pretty clear, ever since I was a young un, as religion's something else besides notions. It isn't notions sets people doing the right things--it's feelings. It's the same with the notions in religion as it is with math'matics--a man may be able to work problems straight off in's head as he sits by the fire and smokes his pipe; but if he has to make a machine or a building, he must have a will and a resolution, and love something else better than his own ease.Collection: Math
Some folks' tongues are like the clocks as run on strikin', not to tell you the time o' the day, but because there's summat wrong i' their own inside.Collection: Running
It belongs to every large nature, when it is not under the immediate power of some strong unquestioning emotion, to suspect itself, and doubt the truth of its own impressions, conscious of possibilities beyond its own horizon.Collection: Strong
When you see fair hair Be pitiful.Collection: Hair
Tis a petty kind of fame At best, that comes of making violins; And saves no masses, either. Thou wilt go To purgatory none the less.Collection: Violin
Every man who is not a monster, a mathematician, or a mad philosopher, is the slave of some woman or other.Collection: Men
Fate has carried me 'Mid the thick arrows: I will keep my stand Not shrink and let the shaft pass by my breast To pierce another.Collection: Fate
The stars are golden fruit upon a tree all out of reach.Collection: Stars
Animals are such agreeable friends.Collection: Animal
Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult. Even with no motive to be false, it is very hard to say the exact truth.Collection: Easy
It is well known to all experienced minds that our firmest convictions are often dependent on subtle impressions for which words are quite too coarse a medium.Collection: Mind
I not only want to be loved, I want to be told that I'm loved.Collection: Want
Of all forms of human error, prophesy is the most avoidable.Collection: Errors
Every year strips us of at least one vain expectation, and teaches us to reckon some solid good in its stead.Collection: Years
Education is an asset no man can take away.Collection: Men
All the learnin' my father ever paid for was a bit o' birch at one end and the alphabet at th ' other.Collection: Father
There is one order of beauty which seems made to turn heads. It is a beauty like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle.Collection: Beauty
Certainly the determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and novel impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion.Collection: Beautiful
We have no right to come forward and urge wider changes for good, until we have tried to alter the evils which lie under our own hands.Collection: Lying
A mother's yearning feels the presence of the cherished child even in the degraded man.Collection: Mom
Education was almost entirely a matter of luck — usually of ill-luck — in those distant days.Collection: Education
We are apt to think it the finest era of the world when America was beginning to be discovered, when a bold sailor, even if he were wrecked, might alight on a new kingdom.Collection: Thinking
I used to come from the village with all that dirt and coarse ugliness like a pain within me, and the simpering pictures in the drawing-room seemed to me like a wicked attempt to find delight in what is false, while we don't mind how hard the truth is for the neighbors outside our walls. I think we have no right to come forward and urge wider changes for good, until we have tried to alter the evils which lie under our own hands.Collection: Wall
After all, people may really have in them some vocation which is not quite plain to themselves, may they not? They may seem idle and weak because they are growing. We should be very patient with each other, I think.Collection: Thinking
It is better - it shall be better with me because I have known you.Collection: Known
...there's never a garden in all the parish but what there's endless waste in it for want o' somebody as could use everything up. It's what I think to myself sometimes, as there need nobody run short o' victuals if the land was made the most on, and there was never a morsel but what could find it's way to a mouth.Collection: Running
If we need a true conception of the popular character to guide our sympathies rightly, we need it equally to check our theories, and direct us in their application.Collection: Character
O may I join the choir invisible of those immortal dead who live again in minds made better by their presence; live in pulses stirred to generosity, in deeds of daring rectitude, in scorn for miserable aims that end with self, in thoughts sublime that pierce the night like stars, and with their mild persistence urge men's search to vaster issues.Collection: Stars