George Eliot Quotes - Page 2

Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions they pass no criticisms.

I would rather not be engaged. When people are engaged, they begin to think of being married soon, and I should like everything to go on for a long while just as it is.

Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure.

She was no longer struggling against the perception of facts, but adjusting herself to their clearest perception.

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 to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardor of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted.

In Rome it seems as if there were so many things which are more wanted in the world than pictures.

Music sweeps by me as a messenger carrying a message that is not for me.

When a man has seen the woman whom he would have chosen if he had intended to marry speedily, his remaining a bachelor will usually depend on her resolution rather than on his.

It's easy finding reasons why other folks should be patient.

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

Tom's contemptuous conception of a girl included the attribute of being unfit to walk in dirty places.

One’s self-satisfaction is an untaxed kind of property which it is very unpleasant to find deprecated.

It is a mere cowardice to seek safety in negations. No character becomes strong in that way. You will be thrown into the world some day and then every rational satisfaction your nature that you deny now will assault like a savage appetite.

They had entered the thorny wilderness, and the golden gates of their childhood had for ever closed behind them.