George Eliot Quotes

"Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love."

"Our consciousness rarely registers the beginning of a growth within us any more than without us; there have been many circulation of the sap before we detect the smallest sign of the bud."

"The most solid comfort one can fall back upon is the thought that the business of one's life is to help in some small way to reduce the sum of ignorance, degradation and misery on the face of this beautiful earth."

"Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?"

"Conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course."

"We hand folks over to God's mercy, and show none ourselves."

"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."

"The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life."

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

"There are some cases in which the sense of injury breeds not the will to inflict injuries and climb over them as a ladder, but a hatred of all injury."

"More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us."

"Breed is stronger than pasture."

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

"Hobbies are apt to run away with us, you know; it doesn't do to be run away with. We must keep the reins."

"I'm not denying that women are foolish: God almighty made 'em to match the men."

"Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive."

"The reward of one duty done is the power to fulfill another"

"In the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little."

"One soweth and another reapeth is a verity that applies to evil as well as good."

"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."