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ELIOT, George Quotes
(1819-1880), pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans Cross, English novelist
Abstinence is whereby a man refraineth from anything which he may lawfully claim.
Old men's eyes are like old men's memories; they are strongest for things a long way off.
Breed is stronger than pasture.
Nothing is so good as it seems before hand.
The earliest and oldest and longest has still the mastery of us.
No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.
There is no sorrow I have thought more about than that—to love what is great, and try to reach it, and yet to fail.
It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.
We hand folks over to God's mercy, and show none ourselves.
Childhood has no forebodings; but then it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.
In the man whose childhood has known caresses and kindness, there is always a fibre of memory that can be touched to gentle issues.
He who rules must humor full as much as he commands.
I've never any pity for conceited people, because I think they carry their comfort about with them.
One's self-satisfaction is an untaxed kind of property, which it is very unpleasant to find depreciated.
The contented man is never poor; the discontented never rich.
Whether happiness may come or not, one should try and prepare one's self to do without it.
Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity.
Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.
No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence.
What we call despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.
"Ignorance," says Ajax, "is a painless evil."—So, I should think, is dirt, considering the merry faces that go along with it.
What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?
The reward of one duty done is the power to fulfill another.
Can any man or woman choose duties? No more than they can choose their birthplace, or their father and mother.
Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.
Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult! Examine your words well and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false it is very hard to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings—much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.
We hand folks over to God's mercy, and show none ourselves.
How very beautiful these gems are! It is strange how deeply colors seem to penetrate one like scent.—I suppose that is the reason why gems are used as spiritual emblems in Revelations.—They look like fragments of heaven.
Nothing will give permanent success in any enterprise of life, except native capacity cultivated by honest and persevering effort.—Genius is often but the capacity for receiving and improving by discipline.
One must be poor to know the luxury of giving.
By desiring what is perfectly good, even when we do not quite know what it is, and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil, widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.
As to people saying a few idle words about us, we must not mind that any more than the old church steeple minds the rooks cawing about it.
Habit is the beneficent harness of routine which enables silly men to live respectably, and unhappy men to live calmly.
It is only a poor sort of happiness that could ever come by caring very much about our own narrow pleasures. We can only have the highest happiness, such as goes along with true greatness, by having wide thoughts and much feeling for the rest of the world as well as ourselves; and this sort of happiness often brings so much pain with it, that we can only tell it from pain by its being what we would choose before everything else, because our souls see it is good.
Whether happiness may come or not, one should try and prepare one's self to do without it.
The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.
There are glances of hatred that stab, and raise no cry of murder.
Mankind is not disposed to look narrowly into the conduct of great victora when their victory is on the right side.
To most men their early home is no more than a memory of their early years. The image is never marred. There's no disappointment in memory, and one's exaggerations are always on the good side.
I have a knack of hoping, which is as good as an estate in reversion, if one can keep from the temptation of turning it into certainty, which may spoil all.
Ignorance is not so damnable as humbug, but when it prescribes pills it may happen to do more harm.
We are all of us imaginative in some form or other, for images are the brood of desire.
Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.
The Jews are among the aristocracy of every land. If a literature is called rich in the possession of a few classic tragedies, what shall we say to a national tragedy, lasting for fifteen hundred years, in which the poets and actors were also the heroes?
When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.
What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?
That farewell kiss which resembles greeting, that last glance of love which becomes the sharpest pang of sorrow.
What novelty is worth the sweet monotony where everything is known, and loved because it is known?
Leisure is gone; gone where the spinning wheels are gone, and the pack-horses, and the slow wagons, and the peddlers who brought bargains to the door on sunny afternoons.
Young love-making, that gossamer web! Even the points it clings to—the things whence its subtle interlacings are swung—are scarcely perceptible: momentary touches of fingertips, meetings of rays from blue and dark orbs, unfinished phrases, lightest changes of cheek and lip, faintest tremors. The web itself is made of spontaneous beliefs and indefinable joys, yearnings of one life toward another, visions of completeness, indefinite trust.
Among all the many kinds of first love, that which begins in childish companionship is the strongest and most enduring; when passion comes to unite its force to long affection, love is at its spring-tide.
A supreme love, a motive that gives a sublime rhythm to a woman's life, and exalts habit into partnership with the soul's highest needs, is not to be had where and how she wills: to know that high initiation, she must often tread where it is hard to tread, and feel the chill air and watch through darkness.
We perhaps never detect how much of our social demeanor is made up of artificial airs, until we see a person who is at once beautiful and simple; without the beauty, we are apt to call simplicity awkwardness.
What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined for life—to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent, unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting.
The memory has as many moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery like a diorama.
We hand folks over to God's mercy, and show none ourselves.
There is a chill air surrounding those who are down in the world, and people are glad to get away from them, as from a cold room.
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 base, degraded man.
We must not inquire too curiously into motives. They are apt to become feeble in the utterance: the aroma is mixed with the grosser air. We must keep the germinating grain away from the light.
There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.
It is vain thought to flee from the work that God appoints us, for the sake of finding a greater blessing, instead of seeking it where alone it is to be found—in loving obedience.
How will you find good? It is not a thing of choice; it is a river that flows from the foot of the invisible throne, and flows by the path of obedience.
The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.
What is opportunity to the man who can't use it? An unfecundated egg, which the waves of time wash away into nonentity.
One couldn't carry on life comfortably without a little blindness to the fact that everything has been said better than we can put it ourselves.
In every parting there is an image of death.
There are moments when our passions speak and decide for us, and we seem to stand by and wonder. They carry in them an inspiration of crime, that in one instant does the work of long premeditation.
I desire no future that will break the ties of the past.
It's easy finding reasons why other folks should be patient.
I'm proof against that word failure. I've seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure in cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.
The strength of the donkey mind lies in adopting a course inversely as the arguments urged, which, well considered, requires as great a mental force as the direct sequence.
To manage men one ought to have a sharp mind in a velvet sheath.
We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, "Oh, nothing!" Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts—not to hurt others.
The world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome dubious eggs called possibilities.
Don't let us rejoice in punishment, even when the hand of God alone inflicts it. The best of us are but poor wretches just saved from shipwreck. Can we feel anything but awe and pity when we see a fellow passenger swallowed by the waves?
Coarse kindness is, at least, better than coarse anger; and in all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of its dullness.
This is the bitterest of all, to wear the yoke of our own wrong-doing.
"One soweth and another reapeth" is a verity that applies to evil as well as good.
Nemesis is lame, but she is of colossal stature; and sometimes, while her sword is not yet unsheathed, she stretches out her huge left arm and grasps her victim. The mighty hand is invisible, but the victim totters under the dire clutch.
A cruel story runs on wheels, and every hand oils the wheels as they run.
As to people saying a few idle words about us, we must not mind that, any more than the old church steeple minds the rooks cawing about it.
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.
Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled nest-egg; and when it takes to cackling, will have nothing to announce but that addled delusion.
Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.
I could not live in peace if I put the shadow of a wilful sin between myself and God.
Half the sorrows of women would be averted if they could repress the speech they know to be useless—nay, the speech they have resolved not to utter.
No story is the same to us after the lapse of time: or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.
It is of such stuff that superstitions are commonly made; an intense feeling about ourselves which makes the evening star shine at us with a threat, and the blessing of a beggar encourage us. And superstitions carry consequences which often verify their hope or their foreboding.
It were better to have no opinion of God at all than such an opinion as is unworthy of him, for the one is unbelief, and the other is contumely.—Superstition is the reproach of the deity.
A peasant can no more help believing in a traditional superstition than a horse can help trembling when he sees a camel.
Don't seem to be on the lookout for crows, else you'll set other people watching.
More helpful than all wisdom or counsel is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.
The only true knowledge of our fellowman is that which enables us to feel with him—which gives us a fine ear for the heart-pulses that are beating under the mere clothes of circumstance and opinion.
It always seemed to me a sort of clever stupidity only to have one sort of talent—like a carrier-pigeon.
No man is matriculated to the art of life till he has been well tempted.
The devil tempts us not. It is we tempt him, beckoning his skill with opportunity.
When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.
The responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision.
It is in those acts which we call trivialities that the seeds of joy are forever wasted.
The vainest woman is never thoroughly conscious of her beauty till she is loved by the man who sets her own passion vibrating in return.
Our vanities differ as our noses do; all conceit is not the same conceit, but varies in correspondence with the mental make in which one of us differs from another.
Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference, as tenderness is under the love which it cannot return.
Perhaps the wind wails so in winter for the summer's dead; and all sad sounds are nature's funeral cries for what has been and is not.
No man can be wise on an empty stomach.
A woman's lot is made for her by the love she accepts.
The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.
There is no sort of wrong deed of which a man can bear the punishment alone; you can't isolate yourself and say that the evil that is in you shall not spread. Men's lives are as thoroughly blended with each other as the air they breathe; evil spreads as necessarily as disease.
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