Middlemarch Quotes

“It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“And, of course men know best about everything, except what women know better.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life

“It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life

“And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, "Oh, nothing!" Pride helps; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our hurts -- not to hurt others.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life

“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, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life

“Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.”
― George Eliot, Adam Bede

“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life

“The difficult task of knowing another soul is not for young gentlemen whose consciousness is chiefly made up of their own wishes.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“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 Eliot, Adam Bede

“Confound you handsome young fellows! You think of having it all your own way in the world. You don't understand women. They don't admire you half so much as you admire yourselves.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life

“To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion--a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“Our deeds still travel with us from afar/And what we have been makes us what we are.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life

“what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life

“For pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life

“What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life

“One can begin so many things with a new person! - even begin to be a better man.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life

“It is very hard to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings – much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.”
― George Eliot, Adam Bede

“When a man has seen the woman whom he would have chosen if he had intended to marry speedily, his remaining a bachelor will usually depend on her resolution rather than on his.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life

“Certainly the determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and novel impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life

“Blameless people are always the most exasperating.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life

“If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new. We are told that the oldest inhabitants in Peru do not cease to be agitated by the earthquakes, but they probably see beyond each shock, and reflect that there are plenty more to come.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life

“The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life

“For my part I am very sorry for him. It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self--never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardour of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dimsighted. ”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life

“Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult....Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings -- much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.”
― George Eliot, Adam Bede

“Because, dear, trouble comes to us all in this life: we set our hearts on things which it isn't God's will for us to have, and then we go sorrowing; the people we love are taken from us, and we can joy in nothing because they are not with us; sickness comes, and we faint under the burden of our feeble bodies; we go astray and do wrong, and bring ourselves into trouble with our fellow men. There is no man or woman born into this world to whom some of these trials do not fall, and so I feel that some of them must happen to you; and I desire for you, that while you are young you should seek for the strength from your Heavenly Father, that you may have a support which will not fail you in the evil day.”
― George Eliot, Adam Bede

“We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life

“People are almost always better than their neighbors think they are.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life

“Marriage, which has been the bourne of so many narratives, is still a great beginning, as it was to Adam and Eve, who kept their honey-moon in Eden, but had their first little one among the thorns and thistles of the wilderness. It is still the beginning of the home epic - the gradual conquest or irremediable loss of that complete union which make the advancing years a climax, and age the harvest of sweet memories in common.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life