What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self.
GEORGE ELIOTCharacter is not cut in marble – it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do.
More George Eliot Quotes
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One can say everything best over a meal.
GEORGE ELIOT -
I like breakfast-time better than any other moment in the day. No dust has settled on one’s mind then, and it presents a clear mirror to the rays of things.
GEORGE ELIOT -
There is hardly any contact more depressing to a young ardent creature than that of a mind in which years full of knowledge seem to have issued in a blank absence of interest or sympathy.
GEORGE ELIOT -
The thing we look forward to often comes to pass, but never precisely in the way we have imagined to ourselves.
GEORGE ELIOT -
If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.
GEORGE ELIOT -
Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some of them woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.
GEORGE ELIOT -
The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.
GEORGE ELIOT -
It is hard to believe long together that anything is “worth while,” unless there is some eye to kindle in common with our own, some brief word uttered now and then to imply that what is infinitely precious to us is precious alike to another mind.
GEORGE ELIOT -
No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.
GEORGE ELIOT -
A good horse makes short miles.
GEORGE ELIOT -
I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same mind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.
GEORGE ELIOT -
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.
GEORGE ELIOT -
And, of course men know best about everything, except what women know better.
GEORGE ELIOT -
We have had an unspeakably delightful journey, one of those journeys which seem to divide one’s life in two, by the new ideas they suggest and the new views of interest they open.
GEORGE ELIOT -
Friendship is the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words.
GEORGE ELIOT