George Eliot was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and translator. She published seven books: Middlemarch (1871–72), Silas Marner (1861), Romola (1862–63), Felix Holt, the Radical (1866), Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), and Daniel Deronda (1876). Her works are renowned for their realism, psychological insight, sense of place, and minutely rendered rural settings.
In this article, we delve into the timeless words of the esteemed 19th-century author, George Eliot. From her thoughts on life and love to her reflections on human nature, her quotes have been a source of inspiration for generations. Through a selection of her most thought-provoking quotes.
68 George Eliot Quotes
- “Keep true. Never be ashamed of doing right. Decide what you think is right and stick to it.”
2. “Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.”
3. “Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.”
4. “What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self.”
5. “One must be poor to know the luxury of giving.”
6. “Those who trust us educate us.”
7. “It is never too late to be what you might have been.”
8. “The responsibility of tolerance lies in those who have the wider vision.”
9. “Pride only helps us to be generous; it never makes us so, any more than vanity makes us witty.”
10. “It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses, we must plant more roses.”
George Eliot Quotes About Life
11. “Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.”
12. “No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.”
13. “Hold up your head! You were not made for failure, you were made for victory. Go forward with a joyful confidence.”
14. “The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots.”
15. “For pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion.”
16. “I desire no future that will break the ties of the past.”
17. “Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.”
18. “Men outlive their love, but they don’t outlive the consequences of their recklessness.”
19. “A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards.”
20. “No man can begin to mould himself on a faith or an idea without rising to a higher order of experience.”
Famous George Eliot Quotes
21. “What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?”
22. “There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.”
23. “What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?”
24. “Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure.”
25. “People are almost always better than their neighbors think they are.”
26. “All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.”
27. “If Art does not enlarge men’s sympathies, it does nothing morally.”
28. “Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.”
29. “Your mind is a sort of world to me: you can tell me all I want to know. I think I should never be tired of being with you.”
30. “Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in her hand.”
Thought-Provoking George Eliot Quotes
31. “Our good depends on the quality and breadth of our emotions.”
32. “Take your sensibility and use it as a vision”
33. “I am not imposed upon by fine words; I can see what actions mean.”
34. “It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.”
35. “Don’t judge a book by its cover”
36. “If a man goes a little too far along a new road, it is usually himself that he harms more than any one else.”
37. “We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves”
38. “The progress of the world can certainly never come at all save by the modified action of the individual beings who compose the world.”
39. “Love has a way of cheating itself consciously, like a child who plays at solitary hide-and-seek; it is pleased with assurances that it all the while disbelieves.”
40. “I protest against any absolute conclusion.”
Positive George Eliot Quotes
41. “The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.”
42. “The wit of a family is usually best received among strangers.”
43. “It is never too late to be what you might have been.”
44. “It’s easy finding reasons why other folks should be patient.”
45. “It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.”
46. “Life seems to go on without effort when I am filled with music.”
47. “The memory has as many moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery like a diorama.”
48. “I am not magnanimous enough to like people who speak to me without seeming to see me.”
49. “But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.”
50. “Ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities.”
51. “A man never lies with more delicious languor under the influence of a passion than when he has persuaded himself that he shall subdue it to-morrow.”
52. “No retrospect will take us to the true beginning”
53. “I think I dislike what I don’t like more than I like what I like.”
54. “I’m determined to read no more books where the blond-haired women carry away all the happiness.”
George Eliot Quotes on Love and poetry
55. “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.”
56. “Power of generalizing gives men so much the superiority in mistake over the dumb animals.”
57. “Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.”
58. “No anguish I have had to bear on your account has been too heavy a price to pay for the new life into which I have entered in loving you.”
59. “Blameless people are always the most exasperating.”
60. “We are all of us imaginative in some form or other, for images are the brood of desire.”
61. “When a man turns a blessing from his door, it falls to them as take it in.”
62. “Everything comes to light, Nancy, sooner or later. When God Almighty wills it, our secrets are found out.”
63. “Perfect love has a breath of poetry which can exalt the relations of the least-instructed human beings.”
64. “I’ve never any pity for conceited people, because I think they carry their comfort about with them.”
65. “Self-consciousness of the manner is the expensive substitute for simplicity.”
66. “We are contented with our day when we have been able to bear our grief in silence, and act as if we were not suffering.”
67. “No chemical process shows a more wonderful activity than the transforming influence of the thoughts we imagine to be going on in another.”
68. “She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.”
Additional Read: George Eliot Biography, Works, and Quotes