Quotes by George Eliot

About George Eliot:

Mary Ann Evans is the author of seven novels, including Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1871–72), and Daniel Deronda (1876), most of them set in provincial England and known for their realism and psychological insight.
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

When we are young we think our troubles a mighty business – that the world is spread out expressly as a stage for the particular drama of our lives and that we have a right to rant and foam at the mouth if we are crossed. I have done enough of that...

George Eliot

Keep true. Never be ashamed of doing right. Decide what you think is right and stick to it.

George Eliot

Selfish— a judgment readily passed by those who have never tested their own power of sacrifice.

George Eliot

But I hasten to finish my story. Brevity is justified at once to those who readily understand, and to those who will never understand.

George Eliot

Can anything be more disgusting than to hear people called 'educated' making small jokes about eating ham, and showing themselves empty of any real knowledge as to the relation of their own social and religious life to the history of the people they ...

George Eliot

The days were longer then (for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings.

George Eliot

I like trying to get pregnant, I'm not so sure about childbirth.

George Eliot

But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.

George Eliot

In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations.

George Eliot

Is it not rather what we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other?

George Eliot

The intense happiness of our union is derived in a high degree from the perfect freedom with which we each follow and declare our own impressions.

George Eliot

There are many victories worse than a defeat.

George Eliot

Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.

George Eliot

Little children are still the symbol of the eternal marriage between love and duty.

George Eliot

Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.

George Eliot

I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out.

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

Whether happiness may come or not, one should try and prepare one's self to do without it.

George Eliot

A woman's heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed recipe.

George Eliot

Rome - the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

George Eliot

The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

George Eliot

Author Bio

  • NameGeorge Eliot
  • DescriptionEnglish novelist, journalist and translator
  • AliasesMary Anne Evans; Mary Ann Evans; Marian Evans
  • BornNovember 22, 1819
  • DiedDecember 22, 1880
  • CountryUnited Kingdom
  • ProfessionNovelist; Translator; Philosopher; Writer; Poet
  • WorksThe Mill On The Floss; Silas Marner; Middlemarch; Daniel Deronda