George Eliot – Quotes Crazy

It is in these acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are forever wasted, until men and women look round with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste has made, and say, the earth bears no harvest of sweetness — calling their denial knowledge. – George Eliot

Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have wrinkles. What do we live for if not to make the world less difficult for each other? – George Eliot

Sir Joshua would have been glad to take her portrait; and he would have had an easier task than the historian at least in this, that he would not have had to represent the truth of change –only to give stability to one beautiful moment. – George Eliot

Iteration, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress. – George Eliot

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistorical acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs. – George Eliot

Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution. – George Eliot

There are some cases in which the sense of injury breeds — not the will to inflict injuries and climb over them as a ladder, but — a hatred of all injury. – George Eliot

For what we call illusions are often, in truth, a wider vision of past and present realities –a willing movement of a mans soul with the larger sweep of the worlds forces –a movement towards a more assured end than the chances of a single life. – George Eliot

Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral. They have the same effect of grating incongruity as the sound of a coarse voice breaking the solemn silence of night. – George Eliot

Sympathetic people often dont communicate well, they back reflected images which hide their own depths. – George Eliot

Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends? – George Eliot

The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character. – George Eliot

Blows are sarcasms turned stupid. – George Eliot

Perhaps his might be one of the natures where a wise estimate of consequences is fused in the fires of that passionate belief which determines the consequences it believes in. – George Eliot

Of what use, however, is a general certainty that an insect will not walk with his head hindmost, when what you need to know is the play of inward stimulus that sends him hither and thither in a network of possible paths? – George Eliot

What quarrel, what harshness, what unbelief in each other can subsist in the presence of a great calamity, when all the artificial vesture of our life is gone, and we are all one with each other in primitive mortal needs? – George Eliot

But most of us are apt to settle within ourselves that the man who blocks our way is odious, and not to mind causing him a little of the disgust which his personality excites in ourselves. – George Eliot

Strange, that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us. – George Eliot

A patronizing disposition always has its meaner side. – George Eliot

His honest, patronizing pride in the good-will and respect of everybody about him was a safeguard even against foolish romance, still more against a lower kind of folly. – George Eliot