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

It is very hard to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings – much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.

George Eliot

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

George Eliot

You know I have duties──we both have duties──before which feeling must be sacrificed.

George Eliot

Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.

George Eliot

It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self--never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never ...

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 ...

George Eliot

Our deeds still travel with us from afar/And what we have been makes us what we are.

George Eliot

That was the way with Casaubon's hard intellectual labours. Their most characteristic result was not the 'Key to all Mythologies', but a morbid consciousness that others did not give him the place which he had not demonstrably merited - a perpetual s...

George Eliot

That is the way with us when we have any uneasy jealousy in our disposition: if our talents are chiefly of the burrowing kind, our honey-sipping cousin (whom we have grave reasons for objecting to) is likely to have a secret contempt for us, and any ...

George Eliot

Fred dislikes the idea going into the ministry partly because he doesn't like "feeling obligated to look serious", and he centers his doubts on "what people expect of a clergyman".

George Eliot

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.

George Eliot

All choice of words is slang. It marks a class.” “There is correct English: that is not slang.” “I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write history and essays. And the strongest slang of all is the slang of poets.

George Eliot

A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an appetite for submission afterwards.

George Eliot

The fact is unalterable, that a fellow-mortal with whose nature you are acquainted solely through the brief entrances and exits of a few imaginative weeks called courtship, may, when seen in the continuity of married companionship, be disclosed as so...

George Eliot

There are answers which, in turning away wrath, only send it to the other end of the room, and to have a discussion coolly waived when you feel that justice is all on your own side is even more exasperating in marriage than in philosophy.

George Eliot

Dorothea, with all her eagerness to know the truths of life, retained very childlike ideas about marriage. She felt sure that she would have accepted the judicious Hooker, if she had been born in time to save him from that wretched mistake he made in...

George Eliot

But a good wife—a good unworldly woman—may really help a man, and keep him more independent.

George Eliot

It had never occurred to him that he should live in any other than what he would have called an ordinary way, with green glasses for hock, and excellent waiting at table. In warming himself at French social theories he had brought away no smell of sc...

George Eliot

In poor Rosamond’s mind there was not room enough for luxuries to look small in.

George Eliot

I’ve always felt that your belongings have never been on a level with you.

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