Victorian Quotes by George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans)

Adventure is not outside man; it is within.

It's no use filling your pocket with money if you have got a hole in the corner.

The dew-bead Gem of earth and sky begotten.

It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much.

Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which there is much agreement, much disputation, and yet more personal liking.

It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses we must plant more bushes.

Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.

Prophecy is the most gratuitous form of error.

I would rather not be engaged. When people are engaged, they begin to thin of being married soon...and I should like everything to go on for a long while just as it is.

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

It's but little good you'll do a.

Net the large fish and you are sure to have the small fry.

A patronizing disposition always has it's meaner side.

Oh, may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence; live.

A man is seldom ashamed of feeling that he cannot love a woman so well when he sees a certain greatness in her: nature having intended greatness for men.

Deep unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state.

Signs are small measurable things, but interpretations are illimitable, and in girls of sweet, ardent nature, every sign is apt to conjure up wonder, hope, belief, vast as a sky, and coloured by a diffused thimbleful of matter in the shape of knowledge.

Friendship is the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person,
having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words.

These gems have life in them: their colors speak, say what words fail of.

What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined for life ... to strengthen each other ... to be at one with each other in silent unspeakable memories.

You must mind and not lower the Church in people's eyes by seeming to be frightened about it for such a little thing.

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.

For what we call illusions are often, in truth, a wider vision of past and present realities--a willing movement of a man's soul with the larger sweep of the world's forces--a movement towards a more assured end than the chances of a single life.

Don't seem to he on the lookout for crows, else you'll set other people watching.

Appearances have very little to do with happiness.

Rome -- the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

A woman's rank lies in the fulness of her womanhood: Therein alone she is royal.

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.

Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love that makes life and nature harmonize.

You are lonely; I love you; I want you to consent to be my wife; I will wait, but I want you to promise that you will marry me -- no one else.

Sympathetic people often don't communicate well, they back reflected images which hide their own depths.

He who rules must fully humor as much as he commands.

The last refuge of intolerance is in not tolerating the intolerant .

For there is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and to have recovered hope.

Each position has its corresponding duties.

Correct English is the slang of prigs.

The business of life shuts us up within the environs of London and within sight of human advancement, which I should be so very glad to believe in without seeing.

It's all one web, sir. The prosperity of the country is one web.

Affection is the broadest basis of a good life.

But a good wife--a good unworldly woman--may really help a man, and keep him more independent.

He has got no good red blood in his body, said Sir James.
No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying glass, and it was all semicolons and parentheses, said Mrs. Cadwallader.

When he turned his head quickly his hair seemed to shake out light, and some persons thought they saw decided genius in this coruscation. Mr. Casaubon, on the contrary, stood rayless.

I've been turning it over in after-dinner speeches, but it looks awkward-it's not what people are used to-it wants a good deal of Latin to make it go down.

It is curious what patches of hardness and tenderness lie side by side in men's dispositions. I suppose he has some test by which he finds out whom Heaven cares for.

Can any man or woman choose duties? No more than they can choose their birthplace or their father and mother.

So shall I join the choir invisible Whose music is the gladness of the world.

I've never any pity for conceited people, because I think they carry their comfort about with them.

I protest against any absolute conclusion.

I think cheerfulness is a fortune in itself.

History, we know, is apt to repeat itself, and to foist very old incidents upon us with only a slight change of costume.

It is one thing to like defiance, and another thing to like its consequences.

Her little butterfly soul fluttered incessantly between memory and dubious expectation.

He loved also to think, I did it! And I believe the only people who are free from that weakness are those who have no work to call their own.

Your dunce who can't do his sums always has a taste for the infinite.

The very truth hath a colour from the disposition of the utterer.

To act with doubleness towards a man whose own conduct was double, was so near an approach to virtue that it deserved to be called by no meaner name than diplomacy.

It is very difficult to be learned; it seems as if people were worn out on the way to great thoughts, and can never enjoy them because they are too tired.

It is difficult for woman to try to be anything good when she is not believed in.

A man carries within him the germ of his most exceptional action; and if we wise people make eminent fools of ourselves on any particular occasion, we must endure the legitimate conclusion that we carry a few grains of folly to our ounce of wisdom.

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us.

There's no work so tirin' as danglin' about an' starin' an' not rightly knowin' what you're goin' to do next; and keepin' your face i' smilin' order like a grocer o' market-day for fear people shouldna think you civil enough.

Bodily haste and exertion usually leave our thoughts very much at the mercy of our feelings and imagination.

It is always your heaviest bore who is astonished at the tameness of modern celebrities: naturally; for a little of his company has reduced them to a state of flaccid fatigue.

Hath she her faults? I would you had them too. They are the fruity must of soundest wine; Or say, they are regenerating fire Such as hath turned the dense black element Into a crystal pathway for the sun.

The beginning of hardship is like the first taste of bitter food--it seems for a moment unbearable; yet, if there is nothing else to satisfy our hunger, we take another bite and find it possible to go on.

We are overhasty to speak as if God did not manifest himself by our silent feeling, and make his love felt through ours.

Memory, when duly impregnated with ascertained facts, is sometimes surprisingly fertile.

But faithfulness can feed on suffering,
And knows no disappointment.

It is the favourite stratagem of our passions to sham a retreat, and to turn sharp round upon us at the moment we have made up our minds that the day is our own.

Receptiveness is a rare and massive power, like fortitude.

For the fragment of a life, however typical, is not the sample of an even web: promises may not be kept, and an ardent outset may be followed by declension; latent powers may find their long-awaited opportunity; a past error may urge a grand retrieval.

Human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty -- it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it.

There's folks as make bad butter and trusten to the salt t' hide it.

It's easy finding reasons why other folks should be patient.

It is only a poor sort of happiness that could ever come by caring very much about our own pleasures. We can only have the highest happiness such as goes along with being a great man, by having wide thoughts and much feeling for the rest of the world as well as ourselves.

Mankind is not disposed to look narrowly into the conduct of great victors when their victory is on the right side.

Indefinite visions of ambition are weak against the ease of doing what is habitual or beguilingly agreeable.

Man may content himself with the applause of the world and the homage paid to his intellect, but woman's heart has holier idols.

A fool or idiot is one who expects things to happen that never can happen.

Each lived in a world of which the other knew nothing.

I wonder if any other girl thinks her father the best man in the world!
Nonsense, child; you'll think your husband better.
Impossible, said Mary, relapsing into her usual tone; husbands are an inferior class of men, who require keeping in order.

For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it.

Probabilities--the surest screen a wise man can place between himself and the truth.

I have a knack of hoping, which is as good as an estate.

The Vicar's talk was not always inspiriting: he had escaped being a Pharisee, but he had not escaped that low estimate of possibilities which we rather hastily arrive at as an inference from our own failure.

Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning.

What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known, and loved because it is known?

In poor Rosamond's mind there was not room enough for luxuries to look small in.

Subtract from the New Testament the miraculous and highly impossible, and what will be the remainder?

I like to read about Moses best, in th' Old Testament. He carried a hard business well through, and died when other folks were going to reap the fruits; a man must have courage to look after his life so, and think what'll come f it after he's dead and gone.

What a different result one gets by changing the metaphor!

People talk of their motives in a cut and dried way. Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster. I am not a monster but I have not felt exactly what other women feel, or say they feel, for fear of being thought unlike others.

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.

The scornful nostril and the high head gather not the odors that lie on the track of truth.

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.

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.

Each thought is a nail that is driven In structures that cannot decay; And the mansion at last will be given To us as we build it each day.

Ignorance is not so damnable as humbug, but when it prescribes pills it may happen to do more harm.

There was no gleam, no shadow, for the heavens, too, were one still, pale cloud; no sound or motion in anything but the dark river that flowed and moaned like an unresting sorrow.

The tendency toward good in human nature has a force which no creed can utterly counteract, and which insures the ultimate triumph of that tendency over all dogmatic perversions.

Fred dislikes the idea going into the ministry partly because he doesn't like feeling obligated to look serious, and he centers his doubts on what people expect of a clergyman.

If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?

The poverty of our imagination is no measure of say the world's resources. Our posterity will no doubt get fuel in ways that we are unable to devise for them.

Fear was stronger than the calculation of probabilities.

Ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities.

He was at a starting point which makes many a man's career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose.

An ingenious web of probabilities is the surest screen a wise man can place between himself and the truth.

We mustn't be in a hurry to fix and choose our own lot; we must wait to be guided.

Who with repentance is not satisfied, is not of heaven, nor earth.

When gratitude has become a matter of reasoning there are many ways of escaping from its bonds.

When what is good comes of age, and is likely to live, there is reason for rejoicing.

Resolve will melt no rocks. But it can scale them.

One way of getting an idea of our fellow-countrymen's miseries is to go and look at their pleasures.

Keep true. Never be ashamed of doing right. Decide what you think is right and stick to it.

The intensest form of hatred is that rooted in fear.

A maggot must be born i' the rotten cheese to like it.

We have all got to exert ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same names as other people call them by.

Blows are sarcasms turned stupid.

He had the superficial kindness of a good-humored, self-satisfied nature, that fears no rivalry, and has encountered no contrarieties.

Religion can only change when the emotions which fill it are changed; and the religion of personal fear remains nearly at the level of the savage.

Of what use, however, is a general certainty that an insect will not walk with his head hindmost, when what you need to know is the play of inward stimulus that sends him hither and thither in a network of possible paths?

The true seeing is within; and painting stares at you with an insistent imperfection.

Life is measured by the rapidity of change, the succession of influences that modify the being.

The sweetest of all success is that which one wins by hard exertion.

I have nothing to tell except travellers' stories, which are always tiresome, like the description of a play which was very exciting to those who saw it.

Much of our waking experience is but a dream in the daylight.

What if my words Were meant for deeds.

I shall do everything it becomes me to do.

To manage men one ought to have a sharp mind in a velvet sheath.

But we are frightened at much that is not strictly conceivable.

In high vengeance there is noble scorn.

Expenditure -- like ugliness and errors -- becomes a totally new thing when we attach our own personality to it, and measure it by that wide difference which is manifest (in our own sensations) between ourselves and others.

Uncomfortable thoughts must be got rid of by good intentions for the future,.

To judge wisely, we must know how things appear to the unwise.

There are answers which, in turning away wrath, only send it to the other end of the room.

She was no longer struggling against the perception of facts, but adjusting herself to their clearest perception.

It was one of those dangerous moments when speech is at once sincere and deceptive -- when feeling, rising high above its average depth, leaves flood-marks which are never reached again.

There is no compensation for the woman who feels that the chief relation of her life has been no more than a mistake. She has lost her crown. The deepest secret of human blessedness has half whispered itself to her, and then forever passed her by.

When a man has seen the woman whom he would have chosen if he had intended to marry speedily, his remaining a bachelor will usually depend on her resolution rather than on his.

What business has an old bachelor like that to marry?' said Sir James. 'He has one foot in the grave.' 'He means to draw it out again, I suppose.

You may try -- but you can never imagine what it is to have a man's force of genius in you, and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl.

Blameless people are always the most exasperating.

The bow always strung ... will not do.

Enveloped in a common mist, we seem to walk in clearness ourselves, and behold only the mist that enshrouds others.

His faith wavered, but not his speech: it is the lot of every man who has to speak for the satisfaction of the crowd, that he must often speak in virtue of yesterday's faith, hoping it will come back to-morrow.

Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing was, than simply to know it; for conjecture soon became more confident than knowledge, and had a more liberal allowance for the incompatible.

The human soul is hospitable, and will entertain conflicting sentiments and contradictory opinions with much impartiality.

The commonest man, who has his ounce of sense and feeling, is conscious of the difference between a lovely, delicate woman and a coarse one. Even a dog feels a difference in her presence.

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some of them woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

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.

With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader.

Trouble always seems heavier when it is only one's thought and not one's bodily activity that is employed about it.

Art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.

Consequences are unpitying. Our deeds carry their terrible consequences, quite apart from any fluctuations that went before--consequences that are hardly ever confined to ourselves. And it is best to fix our minds on that certainty, instead of considering what may be the elements of excuse for us.

When we are young we think our troubles a mighty business -- that the world is spread out expressly as a stage for the particular drama of our lives and that we have a right to rant and foam at the mouth if we are crossed. I have done enough of that in my time.

On the contrary, having the amiable vanity which knits us to those who are fond of us, and disinclines us to those who are indifferent, and also a good grateful nature, the mere idea that a woman had a kindness towards him spun little threads of tenderness from out his heart towards hers.

In the love of a brave and faithful man there is always a strain of maternal tenderness; he gives out again those beams of protecting fondness which were shed on him as he lay on his mother's knee.

There's good chances and bad chances, and nobody's luck is pulled only by one string.

Things don't happen because they're bad or good, else all eggs would be addled or none at all, and at the most it is but six to the dozen. There's good chances and bad chances, and nobody's luck is pulled only by one string.

As to memory, it is known that this frail faculty naturally lets drop the facts which are less flattering to our self-love -- when it does not retain them carefully as subjects not to be approached, marshy spots with a warning flag over them.

Bad literature of the sort called amusing is spiritual gin.

There's truth in wine, and there may be some in gin and muddy beer; but whether it's truth worth my knowing, is another question.

The rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families.

When we are treated well, we naturally begin to think that we are not altogether unmeritous, and that it is only just we should treat ourselves well, and not mar our own good fortune.

John considered a young master as the natural enemy of an old servant, and young people in general as a poor contrivance for carrying on the world.

To fear the examination of any proposition apears to me an intellectual and a moral palsy that will ever hinder the firm grasping of any substance whatever.

I easily sink into mere absorption of what other minds have done, and should like a whole life for that alone.

One always believes one's own town to be more stupid than any other.

I can't bear fishing. I think people look like fools sitting watching a line hour after hour-or else throwing and throwing, and catching nothing.

'Tis God gives skill, but not without men's hand: He could not make Antonio Stradivarius's violins without Antonio.

No man can be wise on an empty stomach.

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.

Even those who call themselves 'intimate' know very little about each other -- hardly ever know just how a sorrow is felt, and hurt each other by their very attempts at sympathy or consolation. We can bear no hand on our bruises.

Few things hold the perception more thoroughly captive than anxiety about what we have got to say.

No matter whether failure came A thousand different times, For one brief moment of success, Life rang its golden chimes.

Vague memories hang about the mind like cobwebs.

It is for art to present images of a lovelier order than the actual, gently winning the affections, and so determining the taste.

There are natures in which, if they love us, we are conscious of having a sort of baptism and consecration.

When you get me a good man made out of arguments, I will get you a good dinner with reading you the cookery book.

Them as ha' never had a cushion don't miss it.

Shall we, because we walk on our hind feet, assume to ourselves only the privilege of imperishability?

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.

What mortal is there of us, who would find his satisfaction enhanced by an opportunity of comparing the picture he presents to himself of his doings, with the picture they make on the mental retina of his neighbours? We are poor plants buoyed up by the air-vessels of our own conceit.

It is always good to know, if only in passing, charming human beings. It refreshes one like flowers and woods and clear brooks.

A man falling into dark waters seeks a momentary footing even on sliding stones.

To men who only aim at escaping felony, nothing short of the prisoner's dock is disgrace.

Do we not wile away moments of inanity or fatigued waiting by repeating some trivial movement or sound, until the repetition has bred a want, which is incipient habit?

I wish always to be quoted as George Eliot.

It's them as take advantage that get advantage I' this world, I think: folks have to wait long enough afore it's brought to 'em.

Life's a vast sea
That does its mighty errand without fail,
Painting in unchanged strength though waves are changing.

Our deeds are fetters that we forge ourselves.

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.

I am not imposed upon by fine words; I can see what actions mean.

Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through.