George Eliot

Bekannte Zitate von George Eliot

The best augury of a man's success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.

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?

There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.

There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.

I'm not denyin' the women are foolish. God Almighty made 'em to match the men.

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.

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

Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.

Life began with waking up and loving my mother's face.

I'm proof against that word failure. I've seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.

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

Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.

No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty.

Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.

The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory.

All the learnin' my father paid for was a bit o' birch at one end and an alphabet at the other.

There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.

When we get to wishing a great deal for ourselves, whatever we get soon turns into mere limitation and exclusion.

A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.

When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.

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.

There are many victories worse than a defeat.

I like not only to be loved, but also to be told I am loved.

Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.

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

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.

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

It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.

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.

The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.

You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.

We hand folks over to God's mercy, and show none ourselves.

The only failure one should fear, is not hugging to the purpose they see as best.

Different taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

I desire no future that will break the ties with the past.

For what is love itself, for the one we love best? An enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.

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.

Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest.

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

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

We must not sit still and look for miracles up and doing, and the Lord will be with thee. Prayer and pains, through faith in Christ Jesus, will do anything.

Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down.