George Eliot Quotes

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.

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

Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.

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.

Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.

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.

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

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.

If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

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.

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

Iteration, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress.