Silas Marner Quotes

“Hurt, he'll never be hurt--he's made to hurt other people.”
― George Eliot, Silas Marner

“In old days there were angels who came and took men by the hand and led them away from the city of destruction. We see no white-winged angels now. But yet men are led away from threatening destruction: a hand is put into theirs, which leads them forth gently towards a calm and bright land, so that they look no more backward; and the hand may be a little child's.”
― George Eliot, Silas Marner

“Perfect love has a breath of poetry which can exalt the relations of the least-instructed human beings.”
― George Eliot, Silas Marner

“A man falling into dark waters seeks a momentary footing even on sliding stones.”
― George Eliot, Silas Marner

“Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.”
― George Eliot, Silas Marner

“A child, more than all other gifts
That earth can offer to declining man,
Brings hope with it, and forward-looking thoughts."
—WORDSWORTH.”
― George Eliot, Silas Marner

“...There's nothing kills a man so soon as having nobody to find fault with but himself.”
― George Eliot, Silas Marner

“When a man turns a blessing from his door, it falls to them as take it in.”
― George Eliot, Silas Marner

“Even people whose lives have been made various by learning sometimes find it hard to keep a fast hold on their habitual views of life, on their faith in the Invisible - nay, on the sense that their past joys and sorrows are a real experience, when they are suddenly transported to a new land, where the beings around them know nothing of their history, and share none of their ideas - where their mother earth shows another lap, and human life has other forms than those on which their souls have been nourished. Minds that have been unhinged from their old faith and love have perhaps sought this Lethean influence of exile in which the past becomes dreamy because its symbols have all vanished, and the present too is dreamy because it is linked with no memories.”
― George Eliot, Silas Marner

“He seemed to weave, like the spider, from pure impulse, without reflection. Every man's work, pursued steadily, tends in this way to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of life. Silas's hand satisfied itself with throwing the shuttle, and his eye with seeing the little squares in the cloth complete themselves under his effort. Then there were the calls of hunger; and Silas, in his solitude, had to provide his own breakfast, dinner, and supper, to fetch his own water from the well, and put his own kettle on the fire; and all these immediate promptings helped, along with the weaving, to reduce his life to the unquestioning activity of a spinning insect. He hated the thought of the past; there was nothing that called out his love and fellowship toward the strangers he had come amongst; and the future was all dark, for there was no Unseen Love that cared for him. Thought was arrested by utter bewilderment, not its old narrow pathway was closed, and affection seemed to have died under the bruise that had fallen on its keenest nerves.”
― George Eliot, Silas Marner

“Love once, love always”
― George Eliot, Silas Marner

“Every man's work, pursued steadily, tends to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life.”
― George Eliot, Silas Marner

“The dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters the desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic.”
― George Eliot, Silas Marner

“The kindness fell on him as sunshine falls on the wretched - he had no heart to taste it, and felt that it was very far off him.”
― George Eliot, Silas Marner

“I think I shall trusten till I die.”
― George Eliot, Silas Marner

“eh, there's trouble i' this world, and there's things as we can niver make out the rights on. And all we've got to do is to trusten - Master Marner, to do the right thing as fur as we know, and to trusten. For if us as knows so little can see a bit o' good and rights, we may be sure as there's a good and a rights bigger nor what we can know.”
― George Eliot, Silas Marner

“The sense of security more frequently springs from habit than from conviction, and for this reason it often
subsists after such a change in the conditions as might have been expected to suggest alarm. The lapse of time during which a given event has not happened, is, in this logic of habit, constantly alleged as a reason why the event should never happen, even when the lapse of time is precisely the added condition which makes the event imminent.”
― George Eliot, Silas Marner

“The yoke a man creates for himself by wrong-doing will breed hate in the kindliest nature.”
― George Eliot, Silas Marner

“Our consiousness rarely registers the beginning of a growth within us anymore than without us: there have been many circulations of the sap before we detect the smallest sign of the bud.”
― George Eliot, Silas Marner

“Favourable Chance, I fancy, is the god of all men who follow their own devices instead of obeying a law they believe in. Let even a polished man of these days get into a position he is ashamed to avow, and his mind will be bent on all the possible issues that may deliver him from the calculable results of that position. Let him live outside his income, or shirk the resolute honest work that brings wages, and he will presently find himself dreaming of a possible benefactor, a possible simpleton who may be cajoled into using his interest, a possible state of mind in some possible person not yet forthcoming. Let him neglect the responsibilities of his office, and he will inevitably anchor himself on the chance that the thing left undone may turn out not to be of the supposed importance. Let him betray his friend's confidence, and he will adore that same cunning complexity called Chance, which gives him the hope that his friend will never know. Let him forsake a decent craft that he may pursue the gentilities of a profession to which nature never called him, and his religion will infallibly be the worship of blessed Chance, which he will believe in as the mighty creator of success. The evil principle deprecated in that religion is the orderly sequence by which the seed brings forth a crop after its kind.”
― George Eliot, Silas Marner

“Everything comes to light, Nancy, sooner or later. When God Almighty wills it, our secrets are found out.”
― George Eliot, Silas Marner

“If there is an angel who records the sorrows of men as well as their sins, he knows how many and deep are the sorrows that spring from false ideas for which no man is culpable.”
― George Eliot, Silas Marner

“I suppose one reason why we are seldom able to comfort our neighbours with our words is that our good will gets adulterated, in spite of ourselves, before it can pass our lips. We can send black puddings and pettitoes without giving them a flavour of our own egoism; but language is a stream that is almost sure to smack of a mingled soil.”
― George Eliot, Silas Marner

“When we are treated well, we naturally begin to think that we are not altogether unmeritorious, and that it is only just we should treat ourselves well, and not mar our own good fortune.”
― George Eliot, Silas Marner

“Let even an affectionate Goliath get himself tied to a small tender thing, dreading to hurt it by pulling, and dreading still more to snap the cord, and which of the two, pray, will be master?”
― George Eliot, Silas Marner

“No," said Godfrey, with a keen decisiveness of tone, in contrast with his usually careless and unemphatic speech—"there's debts we can't pay like money debts, by paying extra for the years that have slipped by. While I've been putting off and putting off, the trees have been growing—it's too late now. Marner was in the right in what he said about a man's turning away a blessing from his door: it falls to somebody else.”
― George Eliot, Silas Marner

“Instead of trying to still his fears he encouraged them, with that superstitious impression which clings to us all that if we expect evil very strongly it is the less likely to come...”
― George Eliot, Silas Marner

“It might seem singular that Nancy—with her religious theory pieced together out of narrow social traditions, fragments of church doctrine imperfectly understood, and girlish reasonings on her small experience—should have arrived by herself at a way of thinking so nearly akin to that of many devout people, whose beliefs are held in the shape of a system quite remote from her knowledge—singular, if we did not know that human beliefs, like all other natural growths, elude the barriers of system.”
― George Eliot, Silas Marner

“That quiet mutual gaze of a trusting husband and wife is like the first moment of rest or refuge from a great weariness or a great danger - not to be interfered with by speech or action which would distract the sensations from the fresh enjoyment of repose.”
― George Eliot, Silas Marner

“A bit o' bread's what I like from one year's end to the other; but men's stomachs are made so comical, they want a change--they do, I know, God help 'em.”
― George Eliot, Silas Marner