My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.
GEORGE ELIOTConscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course.
More George Eliot Quotes
-
-
Life is too precious to be spent in this weaving and unweaving of false impressions, and it is better to live quietly under some degree of misrepresentation than to attempt to remove it by the uncertain process of letter-writing.
GEORGE ELIOT -
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 have recovered hope.
GEORGE ELIOT -
In bed our yesterdays are too oppressive: if a man can only get up, though it be but to whistle or to smoke, he has a present which offers some resistance to the past-sensations which assert themselves against tyrannous memories.
GEORGE ELIOT -
Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self.
GEORGE ELIOT -
What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.
GEORGE ELIOT -
What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined – to strengthen each other – to be at one with each other in silent unspeakable memories.
GEORGE ELIOT -
Of new acquaintances one can never be sure because one likes them one day that it will be so the next. Of old friends one is sure that it will be the same yesterday, today, and forever.
GEORGE ELIOT -
there are two ways of speaking an audience will always like: one is, to tell them what they don’t understand; and the other is, to tell them what they’re used to.
GEORGE ELIOT -
The world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities.
GEORGE ELIOT -
If you deliver an opinion at all, it is mere stupidity not to do it with an air of conviction and well-founded knowledge. You make it your own in uttering it, and naturally get fond of it.
GEORGE ELIOT -
The best travel is that which one can take by one’s own fireside. In memory or imagination.
GEORGE ELIOT -
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.
GEORGE ELIOT -
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.
GEORGE ELIOT -
When God makes His presence felt through us, we are like the burning bush: Moses never took any heed what sort of bush it was—he only saw the brightness of the Lord.
GEORGE ELIOT -
People are so ridiculous with their illusions, carrying their fool’s caps unawares, thinking their own lies opaque while everybody else’s are transparent, making themselves exceptions to everything, as if when all the world looked yellow under a lamp they alone are rosy.
GEORGE ELIOT