George Eliot Quotes

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

People who can’t be witty exert themselves to be devout and affectionate.

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

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.

For what is love itself, for the one we love best? An enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.

The responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision.

Life began with waking up and loving my mother’s face.

It always remains true that if we had been greater, circumstance would have been less strong against us.

The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.

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

A woman’s heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed recipe.

The strongest principle of growth lies in the human choice.

When death comes it is never our tenderness that we repent from, but our severity.

There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire; it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.

What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self.

The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory.

In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness.