Topic: Humor
"A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections."
--George Eliot
"A woman's heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed receipt."
--George Eliot
Topic: Hope
"A woman's hopes are woven of sunbeams; a shadow annihilates them."
--George Eliot
"Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life."
--George Eliot
"Adventure is not outside man; it is within."
--George Eliot
"All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation."
--George Eliot
"All the learnin' my father paid for was a bit o' birch at one end and an alphabet at the other."
--George Eliot
"And when a woman's will is as strong as the man's who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment."
--George Eliot
Topic: Anger
"Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love."
--George Eliot
"Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms."
--George Eliot
"Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions; they pass no criticisms."
--George Eliot
"Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning, but give me the man who has pluck to fight when he's sure of losing. That's my way, sir; and there are many victories worse than a defeat."
--George Eliot
"Be courteous, be obliging, but don't give yourself over to be melted down for the benefit of the tallow trade."
--George Eliot
"Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them."
--George Eliot
"Best friend, my well-spring in the wilderness!"
--George Eliot
"Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another."
--George Eliot
Topic: Influence
"Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another. "
--George Eliot
Topic: Silence
"Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact."
--George Eliot
"Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact."
--George Eliot
Topic: Sarcasm
"Blows are sarcasms turned stupid."
--George Eliot
"Blows are sarcasm's turned stupid."
--George Eliot
"Breed is stronger than pasture."
--George Eliot
"But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy."
--George Eliot
"But most of us are apt to settle within ourselves that the man who blocks our way is odious, and not to mind causing him a little of the disgust which his personality excites in ourselves."
--George Eliot
"But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with."
--George Eliot
"But the mother's yearning, that completest type of the life in another life which is the essence of real human love, feels the presence of the cherished child even in the debased, degraded man."
--George Eliot
"Conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course."
--George Eliot
"Consequences are unpitying."
--George Eliot
Topic: Cruelty
"Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity."
--George Eliot
"Death is the king of this world: 'Tis his park where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music for his banquet"
--George Eliot
"Different taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections."
--George Eliot
"Excessive literary production is a social offense."
--George Eliot
"Friendships begin with liking or gratitude roots that can be pulled up."
--George Eliot
"Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it: it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker."
--George Eliot
"Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together."
--George Eliot
"Harold, like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas."
--George Eliot
Topic: Hate
"Hatred is like fire -- it makes even light rubbish deadly."
--George Eliot
"He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow."
--George Eliot
Topic: Judgment
"Hear Everything and judge for yourself."
--George Eliot
"Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy: -in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures."
--George Eliot
"I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe."
--George Eliot
"I desire no future that will break the ties with the past."
--George Eliot
"I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence."
--George Eliot
"I hold it a blasphemy to say that a man ought not to fight against authority: there is no great religion and no great freedom that has not done it, in the beginning."
--George Eliot
"I like not only to be loved, but to be told I am loved."
--George Eliot
"I like trying to get pregnant. I'm not so sure about childbirth."
--George Eliot
"I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out."
--George Eliot
"I tell you there isn't a thing under the sun that needs to be done at all, but what a man can do better than a woman, unless it's bearing children, and they do that in a poor make-shift way; it had better ha been left to the men."
--George Eliot
"I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music."
--George Eliot
"If we use common words on a great occasion, they are the more striking, because they are felt at once to have a particular meaning, like old banners, or everyday clothes, hung up in a sacred place."
--George Eliot
Topic: Ignorance
"Ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities."
--George Eliot
"Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness."
--George Eliot
"I'm not denyin' the women are foolish. God Almighty made 'em to match the men."
--George Eliot
"I'm proof against that word failure. I've seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best."
--George Eliot
"In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness."
--George Eliot
"In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations."
--George Eliot
"In the schoolroom her quick mind had taken readily that strong starch of unexplained rules and disconnected facts which saves ignorance from any painful sense of limpness."
--George Eliot
"In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause."
--George Eliot
"Is it not rather what we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other?"
--George Eliot
"It is a common enough case, that of a man being suddenly captivated by a woman nearly the opposite of his ideal."
--George Eliot
"It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibers that knit us to the old."
--George Eliot
"It is generally a feminine eye that first detects the moral deficiencies hidden under the "dear deceit" of beauty."
--George Eliot
"It is never too late to be what you might have been."
--George Eliot
"It is, I fear, but a vain show of fulfilling the heathen precept, "Know thyself," and too often leads to a self-estimate which will subsist in the absence of that fruit by which alone the quality of the tree is made evident."
--George Eliot
"It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees."
--George Eliot
Topic: Repetition
"Iteration, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress."
--George Eliot
"It's never too late to be who you might have been."
--George Eliot
"Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart."
--George Eliot
"Kisses honeyed by oblivion."
--George Eliot
Topic: Knowledge
"Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down."
--George Eliot
"Life is too precious to be spent in this weaving and unweaving of false impressions, and it is better to live quietly under some degree of misrepresentation than to attempt to remove it by the uncertain process of letter-writing."
--George Eliot
"Might, could, would -they are contemptible auxiliaries."
--George Eliot
"More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us."
--George Eliot
"My own experience and development deepen everyday my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy."
--George Eliot
"No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty."
--George Eliot
