"What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known, and loved because it is known?"
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George Eliot quotes (page 39 of 51)
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"It is in the nature of foolish reasonings to seem good to the foolish reasoner."
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"Whatever may be the success of my stories, I shall be resolute in preserving my incognito, having observed that a nom de plume secures all the advantages without the disagreeables of reputation."
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"In all failures, the beginning is certainly the half of the whole."
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"Life was never anything but a perpetual see-saw between gravity and jest."
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"When our life is a continuous trial, the moments of respite seem only to substitute the heaviness of dread for the heaviness of actual suffering; the curtain of cloud seems parted an instant only that we may measure all its horror as it hangs low, black, and imminent, in contrast with the transient brightness; the waterdrops that visit the parched lips in the desert bear with them only the keen imagination of thirst."
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"So our lives glide on: the river ends we don't know where, and the sea begins, and then there is no more jumping ashore."
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"The great river-courses which have shaped the lives of men have hardly changed; and those other streams, the life-currents that ebb and flow in human hearts, pulsate to the same great needs, the same great loves and terrors. As our thought follows close in the slow wake of the dawn, we are impressed with the broad sameness of the human lot, which never alters in the main headings of its history--hunger and labour, seed-time and harvest, love and death."
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"In the chequered area of human experience the seasons are all mingled as in the golden age: fruit and blossom hang together; in the same moment the sickle is reaping and the seed is sprinkled; one tends the green cluster and another treads the wine-press. Nay, in each of our lives harvest and spring-time are continually one, until Death himself gathers us and sows us anew in his invisible fields."
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"You must learn to deal with the odd and even in life, as well as in figures."
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"Folks as have no mind to be o' use have allays the luck to be out o' the road when there's anything to be done."
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"The saints were cowards who stood by to see Christ crucified: they should have flung themselves Upon the Roman spears, and died in vain-- The grandest death, to die in vain--for love Greater than sways the forces of the world!"
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"It is worth repeating that powerful imagination is not false outward vision, but intense inward representation, and a creative energy constantly fed by susceptibility to the veriest minutiæ of experience, which it reproduces and constructs in fresh and fresh wholes; not the habitual confusion of provable fact with the fictions of fancy and transient inclination, but a breadth of ideal association which informs every material object, every incidental fact with far-reaching memories and storied residues of passion, bringing into new light the less obvious relations to human existence."
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"The purifying influence of public confession springs from the fact, that by it the hope in lies is forever swept away, and the soul recovers the noble attitude of simplicity."
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"I'd sooner have one real grief on my mind than twenty false. It's better to know one's robbed than to think one's going to be murdered."
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"When gratitude has become a matter of reasoning there are many ways of escaping from its bonds."
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"They say fortune is a woman and capricious. But sometimes she is a good woman, and gives to those who merit."
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"Those who have been indulged by fortune and have always thought of calamity as what happens to others, feel a blind incredulous rage at the reversal of their lot, and half believe that their wild cries will alter the course of the storm."
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"Whatever be thy fate today, Remember, this will pass away!"
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"That sort of reputation which precedes performance [is] often the larger part of a man's fame."
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