George Eliot Quotes - Page 2

Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through.

The progress of the world can certainly never come at all save by the modified action of the individual beings who compose the world.

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.

What should I do - how should I act now, this very day . . . What she would resolve to do that day did not yet seem quite clear, but something that she could achieve stirred her as with an approaching murmur which would soon gather distinctness.

Duty has a trick of behaving unexpectedly - something like a heavy friend whom we have amiably asked to visit us, and who breaks his leg within our gates.

I never had any preference for her, any more than I have a preference for breathing.

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

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.

O may I join the choir invisible
Of those immortal dead who live again
In minds made better by their presence; live
In pulses stirred to generosity,
In deeds of daring rectitude...

It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.

Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure.

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.

Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing was, than simply to know it; for conjecture soon became more confident than knowledge, and had a more liberal allowance for the incompatible.

Most of us who turn to any subject with love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love.

Those who trust us educate us.

It is very difficult to be learned; it seems as if people were worn out on the way to great thoughts, and can never enjoy them because they are too tired.

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.

In bitter manuscript remarks on other men's notions about solar deities, he had become indifferent to the sunlight.

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.