"In the man whose childhood has known caresses and kindness, there is always a fiber of memory that can be touched to gentle issues."
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Quote collection
George Eliot quotes (page 38 of 51)
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"Them as ha' never had a cushion don't miss it."
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"If a woman's young and pretty, I think you can see her good looks all the better for her being plainly dressed."
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"We are all apt to believe what the world believes about us."
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"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."
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"You must mind and not lower the Church in people's eyes by seeming to be frightened about it for such a little thing."
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"Some gentlemen have made an amazing figure in literature by general discontent with the universe as a trap of dulness into which their great souls have fallen by mistake; but the sense of a stupendous self and an insignificant world may have its consolations. Lydgate's discontent was much harder to bear; it was the sense that there was a grand existence in thought and effective action lying around him, while his self was being narrowed into the miserable isolation of egoistic fears, and vulgar anxieties for events that might allay such fears."
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"A human being in this aged nation of ours is a very wonderful hole, the slow creation of long interchanging influences; and charm is a result of two such wholes, the one loving and the one loved."
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"I would not creep along the coast but steer Out in mid-sea, by guidance of the stars."
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"This is a puzzling world, and Old Harry's got a finger in it."
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"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."
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"What furniture can give such finish to a room as a tender woman's face? And is there any harmony of tints that has such stirring of delight as the sweet modulation of her voice?"
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"A girl of eighteen imagines the feelings behind the face that has moved her with its sympathetic youth as easily as primitive people imagined the humors of the gods in fair weather. What is she to believe in if not in this vision woven from within?"
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"Beauty is part of the finished language by which goodness speaks."
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"Husbands are an inferior class of men, who require keeping in order."
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"The words of genius have a wider meaning than the thought that prompted them."
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"Ah! but the moods lie in his nature, my boy, just as much as his reflections did, and more. A man can never do anything at variance with his own nature. He 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."
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"But I think it is hardly an argument against a man's general strength of character, that he should be apt to be mastered by love. A fine constitution doesn't insure one against small-pox or any other of those inevitable diseases. A man may be very firm in other matters, and yet be under a sort of witchery from a woman."
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"A good solid bit of work lasts."
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"There is a mercy which is weakness, and even treason against the common good."
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