The Complete Novels of George Eliot Quotes

“But to minds strongly marked by the positive and negative qualities that create severity,— strength of will, conscious rectitude of purpose, narrowness of imagination and intellect, great power of self-control, and a disposition to exert control over others,— prejudices come as the natural food of tendencies which can get no sustenance out of that complex, fragmentary, doubt-provoking knowledge which we call truth.”
― George Eliot, THE COMPLETE NOVELS OF GEORGE ELIOT (Special Kindle Illustrated and Annotated Edition) All of George Eliot's Unabridged Novels AND Complete Book-Length ...

“If boys and men are to be welded together in the glow of transient feeling, they must be made of metal that will mix, else they inevitably fall asunder when the heat dies out.”
― George Eliot, THE COMPLETE NOVELS OF GEORGE ELIOT (Special Kindle Illustrated and Annotated Edition) All of George Eliot's Unabridged Novels AND Complete Book-Length ...

“There’s nothing but what’s bearable as long as a man can work,” he said to himself; “the natur o’ things doesn’t change, though it seems as if one’s own life was nothing but change. The square o’ four is sixteen, and you must lengthen your lever in proportion to your weight, is as true when a man’s miserable as when he’s happy; and the best o’ working is, it gives you a grip hold o’ things outside your own lot.”
― George Eliot, THE COMPLETE NOVELS OF GEORGE ELIOT (Special Kindle Illustrated and Annotated Edition) All of George Eliot's Unabridged Novels AND Complete Book-Length ...

“lest, to so delicate an article as a lady’s temper, the slightest touch should do mischief.”
― George Eliot, The Complete Novels of George Eliot

“But in that curious compound, the feminine character, it may easily happen that the flavor is unpleasant in spite of excellent ingredients;”
― George Eliot, The Complete Novels of George Eliot

“if it were possible for a healthy female mind even to simulate respect for a husband’s hobby.”
― George Eliot, The Complete Novels of George Eliot

“if it were possible for a healthy female mind even to simulate”
― George Eliot, The Complete Novels of George Eliot

“that she had two points of view from which she could observe the weakness of her fellow-beings, and reinforce her thankfulness for her own exceptional strength of mind.”
― George Eliot, The Complete Novels of George Eliot

“without being obliged to dress itself in an elaborate costume of knowledge;”
― George Eliot, The Complete Novels of George Eliot

“It’s no mischief much while she’s a little un; but an over-’cute woman’s no better nor a long-tailed sheep,—she’ll fetch none the bigger price for that.”
― George Eliot, The Complete Novels of George Eliot

“Arthur would so gladly have persuaded himself that he had done no harm! And if no one had told him the contrary, he could have persuaded himself so much better. Nemesis can seldom forge a sword for herself out of our consciences--out of the suffering we feel in the suffering we may have caused: there is rarely metal enough there to make an effective weapon. Our moral sense learns the manners of good society and smiles when others smile, but when some rude person gives rough names to our actions, she is apt to take part against us. And so it was with Arthur: Adam's judgment of him, Adam's grating words, disturbed his self-soothing arguments.”
― George Eliot, The Complete Novels of George Eliot

“It is a common sentence that Knowledge is power; but who hath duly Considered or set forth the power of Ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down. Knowledge, through patient and frugal centuries, enlarges discovery and makes record of it; Ignorance, wanting its day’s dinner, lights a fire with the record, and gives a flavor to its one roast with the burned souls of many generations. Knowledge, instructing the sense, refining and multiplying needs, transforms itself into skill and makes life various with a new six days’ work; comes Ignorance drunk on the seventh, with a firkin of oil and a match and an easy “Let there not be,” and the many-colored creation is shriveled up in blackness. Of a truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what may be; whereas Ignorance is a blind giant who, let him but wax unbound, would make it a sport to seize the pillars that hold up the long-wrought fabric of human good, and turn all the places of joy dark as a buried Babylon.”
― George Eliot, The Complete Novels of George Eliot

“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. The End”
― George Eliot, The Complete Novels of George Eliot

“In the days when the spinning-wheels hummed busily in the farmhouses—and even great ladies, clothed in silk and thread-lace, had their toy spinning-wheels of polished oak—there might be seen in districts far away among the lanes, or deep in the bosom of the hills, certain pallid undersized men, who, by the side of the brawny country-folk, looked like the remnants of a disinherited race.”
― George Eliot, The Complete Novels of George Eliot

“His friend Tulliver had asked him for an opinion; it is always chilling, in friendly intercourse, to say you have no opinion to give. And 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 COMPLETE NOVELS OF GEORGE ELIOT (Special Kindle Illustrated and Annotated Edition) All of George Eliot's Unabridged Novels AND Complete Book-Length ...

“How should all the apparatus of heaven and earth, from the farthest firmament to the tender bosom of the mother who nourished us, make poetry for a mind that had no movements of awe and tenderness, no sense of fellowship which thrills from the near to the distant, and back again from the distant to the near?”
― George Eliot, The Complete Novels of George Eliot