Mary Ann Evans, most commonly known by her pen name as George Eliot, was born on November 22, 1819, in Nuneaton, United Kingdom. She was an English poet, journalist, novelist, and one of the most renowned writers of the Victorian Era. She was also famous for her profound psychological realism, profound moral exploration, and vivid depictions of English rural life, achieving literary fame with novels such as Middlemarch, Adam Bede, and Silas Marner. May these famous George Eliot quotes and sayings offer you insights into her ideas and beliefs that will help you pursue whatever your goals and dreams in life.
1. “Keep true. Never be ashamed of doing right. Decide what you think is right and stick to it.” – George Eliot
2. “Don't judge a book by its cover.” – George Eliot
3. “Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.” – George Eliot
4. “Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have wrinkles.” – George Eliot
5. “The responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision.” – George Eliot
6. “Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.” – George Eliot
7. “The memory has as many moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery like a diorama.” – George Eliot
8. “What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?” – George Eliot
9. “I desire no future that will break the ties of the past.” – George Eliot
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10. “Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.” – George Eliot
11. “The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another.” – George Eliot
12. “Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.” – George Eliot
13. “Men outlive their love, but they don’t outlive the consequences of their recklessness.” – George Eliot
14. “I don't make myself disagreeable; it is you who find me so. Disagreeable is a word that describes your feelings and not my actions.” – George Eliot
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15. “I am not imposed upon by fine words; I can see what actions mean.” – George Eliot
16. “She was no longer struggling against the perception of facts, but adjusting herself to their clearest perception.” – George Eliot
17. “We all remember epochs in our experience when some dear expectation dies, or some new motive is born.” – George Eliot
18. “Upon my word, I think the truth is the hardest missile one can be pelted with.” – George Eliot
19. “What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self.” – George Eliot
-min.jpg "Famous quotes and sayings by George Eliot")
20. “The strongest principle of growth lies in the human choice.” – George Eliot
21. “Her own misery filled her heart. There was no room in it for other people's sorrow.” – George Eliot
22. “We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.” – George Eliot
23. “Few things hold the perception more thoroughly captive than anxiety about what we have got to say.” – George Eliot
24. “We have all got to exert ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same names as other people call them by.” – George Eliot
-min.jpg "Famous quotes and sayings by George Eliot")
25. “A man falling into dark waters seeks a momentary footing even on sliding stones.” – George Eliot
26. “It is very difficult to be learned; it seems as if people were worn out on the way to great thoughts, and can never enjoy them because they are too tired.” – George Eliot
27. “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.” – George Eliot
28. “Those who trust us educate us.” – George Eliot
29. “The dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters the desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic.” – George Eliot
.jpg "Famous quotes and sayings by George Eliot")
30. “Blameless people are always the most exasperating.” – George Eliot
More Inspirational Quotes from George Eliot
31. “For pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion.” – George Eliot
32. “I like not only to be loved, but also to be told I am loved.” – George Eliot
33. “Self-consciousness of the manner is the expensive substitute for simplicity.” – George Eliot
34. “The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots.” – George Eliot
35. “Starting a long way off the true point by loops and zigags, we now and then arrive just where we ought to be.” – George Eliot
36. “All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.” – George Eliot
37. “No anguish I have had to bear on your account has been too heavy a price to pay for the new life into which I have entered in loving you.” – George Eliot
38. “When a man turns a blessing from his door, it falls to them as take it in.” – George Eliot
39. “By desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil, widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.” – George Eliot
40. “We are all of us imaginative in some form or other, for images are the brood of desire.” – George Eliot
41. “I am not magnanimous enough to like people who speak to me without seeming to see me.” – George Eliot
42. “Power of generalizing gives men so much the superiority in mistake over the dumb animals.” – George Eliot
43. “Love has a way of cheating itself consciously, like a child who plays at solitary hide-and-seek; it is pleased with assurances that it all the while disbelieves.” – George Eliot
44. “Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.” – George Eliot
45. “The most powerful movement of feeling with a liturgy is the prayer which seeks for nothing special, but is a yearning to escape from the limitations of our own weakness and an invocation of all Good to enter and abide with us.” – George Eliot
46. “One must be poor to know the luxury of giving.” – George Eliot
47. “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.” – George Eliot
48. “Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbor's buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.” – George Eliot
49. “There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.” – George Eliot
50. “Hold up your head. You were not made for failure, you were made for victory. Go forward with a joyful confidence.” – George Eliot
51. “A man never lies with more delicious languor under the influence of a passion than when he has persuaded himself that he shall subdue it to-morrow.” – George Eliot
52. “The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.” – George Eliot
53. “Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity.” – George Eliot
54. “It’s rather a strong check to one’s self-complacency to find how much of one’s right doing depends on not being in want of money.” – George Eliot
55. “Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.” – George Eliot
56. “Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.” – George Eliot
57. “Pity that consequences are determined not by excuses but by actions.” – George Eliot
58. “What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other?” – George Eliot
59. “The world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities.” – George Eliot
60. “Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them: they can be injured by us, they can be wounded; they know all our penitence, all our aching sense that their place is empty.” – George Eliot
61. “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.” – George Eliot
62. “It is never too late to be what you might have been.” – George Eliot
63. “Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.” – George Eliot
64. “It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibers that knit us to the old.” – George Eliot
65. “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.” – George Eliot
66. “It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees.” – George Eliot
67. “But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.” – George Eliot
68. “Falsehood is easy, truth so difficult.” – George Eliot
69. “The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.” – George Eliot
70. “It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.” – George Eliot
71. “There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.” – George Eliot
72. “The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.” – George Eliot
73. “One can begin so many things with a new person—even begin to be a better man.” – George Eliot
74. “Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.” – George Eliot
75. “What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined—to strengthen each other—to be at one with each other in silent unspeakable memories” – George Eliot
76. “Animals are such agreeable friends—they ask no questions; they pass no criticisms.” – George Eliot
77. “The years seem to rush by now, and I think of death as a fast approaching end of a journey—double and treble reason for loving as well as working while it is day.” – George Eliot
78. “True friendship is oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but to pour them all out, just as they are.” – George Eliot
79. “If art does not enlarge men's sympathies, it does nothing morally.” – George Eliot
80. “It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.” – George Eliot
81. “A friend is one to whom one may pour out the contents of one's heart, chaff and grain together, knowing that gentle hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.” – George Eliot
82. “When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.” – George Eliot
83. “One of the most beautiful qualities of true friendship is to understand and to be understood.” – George Eliot
84. “Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest.” – George Eliot
85. “You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.” – George Eliot
86. “Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which there is much agreement, much disputation, and yet more personal liking.” – George Eliot
87. “Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings.” – George Eliot
88. “There are many victories worse than a defeat.” – George Eliot
89. “But a good wife—a good unworldly woman—may really help a man, and keep him more independent.” – George Eliot
90. “Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.” – George Eliot
91. “The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.” – George Eliot
92. “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.” – George Eliot
93. “Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.” – George Eliot
94. “If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.” – George Eliot
95. “What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.” – George Eliot
96. “Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.” – George Eliot
97. “People who can't be witty exert themselves to be devout and affectionate.” – George Eliot
98. “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
99. “To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.” – George Eliot
100. “But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.” – George Eliot
Share these Best George Eliot Quotes on Life with your friends, family, and loved ones to inspire them as well.
2. “Don't judge a book by its cover.” – George Eliot
3. “Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.” – George Eliot
4. “Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have wrinkles.” – George Eliot
5. “The responsibility of tolerance lies with those who have the wider vision.” – George Eliot
6. “Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.” – George Eliot
7. “The memory has as many moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery like a diorama.” – George Eliot
8. “What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?” – George Eliot
9. “I desire no future that will break the ties of the past.” – George Eliot
11. “The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another.” – George Eliot
12. “Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.” – George Eliot
13. “Men outlive their love, but they don’t outlive the consequences of their recklessness.” – George Eliot
14. “I don't make myself disagreeable; it is you who find me so. Disagreeable is a word that describes your feelings and not my actions.” – George Eliot
16. “She was no longer struggling against the perception of facts, but adjusting herself to their clearest perception.” – George Eliot
17. “We all remember epochs in our experience when some dear expectation dies, or some new motive is born.” – George Eliot
18. “Upon my word, I think the truth is the hardest missile one can be pelted with.” – George Eliot
19. “What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self.” – George Eliot
21. “Her own misery filled her heart. There was no room in it for other people's sorrow.” – George Eliot
22. “We are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we have been making up our world entirely without it.” – George Eliot
23. “Few things hold the perception more thoroughly captive than anxiety about what we have got to say.” – George Eliot
24. “We have all got to exert ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same names as other people call them by.” – George Eliot
26. “It is very difficult to be learned; it seems as if people were worn out on the way to great thoughts, and can never enjoy them because they are too tired.” – George Eliot
27. “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.” – George Eliot
28. “Those who trust us educate us.” – George Eliot
29. “The dull mind, once arriving at an inference that flatters the desire, is rarely able to retain the impression that the notion from which the inference started was purely problematic.” – George Eliot
More Inspirational Quotes from George Eliot
31. “For pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion.” – George Eliot
32. “I like not only to be loved, but also to be told I am loved.” – George Eliot
33. “Self-consciousness of the manner is the expensive substitute for simplicity.” – George Eliot
34. “The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots.” – George Eliot
35. “Starting a long way off the true point by loops and zigags, we now and then arrive just where we ought to be.” – George Eliot
36. “All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.” – George Eliot
37. “No anguish I have had to bear on your account has been too heavy a price to pay for the new life into which I have entered in loving you.” – George Eliot
38. “When a man turns a blessing from his door, it falls to them as take it in.” – George Eliot
39. “By desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil, widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.” – George Eliot
40. “We are all of us imaginative in some form or other, for images are the brood of desire.” – George Eliot
41. “I am not magnanimous enough to like people who speak to me without seeming to see me.” – George Eliot
42. “Power of generalizing gives men so much the superiority in mistake over the dumb animals.” – George Eliot
43. “Love has a way of cheating itself consciously, like a child who plays at solitary hide-and-seek; it is pleased with assurances that it all the while disbelieves.” – George Eliot
44. “Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.” – George Eliot
45. “The most powerful movement of feeling with a liturgy is the prayer which seeks for nothing special, but is a yearning to escape from the limitations of our own weakness and an invocation of all Good to enter and abide with us.” – George Eliot
46. “One must be poor to know the luxury of giving.” – George Eliot
47. “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.” – George Eliot
48. “Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbor's buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.” – George Eliot
49. “There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.” – George Eliot
50. “Hold up your head. You were not made for failure, you were made for victory. Go forward with a joyful confidence.” – George Eliot
51. “A man never lies with more delicious languor under the influence of a passion than when he has persuaded himself that he shall subdue it to-morrow.” – George Eliot
52. “The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone.” – George Eliot
53. “Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity.” – George Eliot
54. “It’s rather a strong check to one’s self-complacency to find how much of one’s right doing depends on not being in want of money.” – George Eliot
55. “Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.” – George Eliot
56. “Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.” – George Eliot
57. “Pity that consequences are determined not by excuses but by actions.” – George Eliot
58. “What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other?” – George Eliot
59. “The world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities.” – George Eliot
60. “Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them: they can be injured by us, they can be wounded; they know all our penitence, all our aching sense that their place is empty.” – George Eliot
61. “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.” – George Eliot
62. “It is never too late to be what you might have been.” – George Eliot
63. “Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.” – George Eliot
64. “It is easy to say how we love new friends, and what we think of them, but words can never trace out all the fibers that knit us to the old.” – George Eliot
65. “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.” – George Eliot
66. “It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees.” – George Eliot
67. “But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.” – George Eliot
68. “Falsehood is easy, truth so difficult.” – George Eliot
69. “The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.” – George Eliot
70. “It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.” – George Eliot
71. “There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.” – George Eliot
72. “The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.” – George Eliot
73. “One can begin so many things with a new person—even begin to be a better man.” – George Eliot
74. “Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.” – George Eliot
75. “What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined—to strengthen each other—to be at one with each other in silent unspeakable memories” – George Eliot
76. “Animals are such agreeable friends—they ask no questions; they pass no criticisms.” – George Eliot
77. “The years seem to rush by now, and I think of death as a fast approaching end of a journey—double and treble reason for loving as well as working while it is day.” – George Eliot
78. “True friendship is oh, the comfort, the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words, but to pour them all out, just as they are.” – George Eliot
79. “If art does not enlarge men's sympathies, it does nothing morally.” – George Eliot
80. “It is not death that a man should fear, but he should fear never beginning to live.” – George Eliot
81. “A friend is one to whom one may pour out the contents of one's heart, chaff and grain together, knowing that gentle hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.” – George Eliot
82. “When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.” – George Eliot
83. “One of the most beautiful qualities of true friendship is to understand and to be understood.” – George Eliot
84. “Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest.” – George Eliot
85. “You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.” – George Eliot
86. “Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which there is much agreement, much disputation, and yet more personal liking.” – George Eliot
87. “Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings.” – George Eliot
88. “There are many victories worse than a defeat.” – George Eliot
89. “But a good wife—a good unworldly woman—may really help a man, and keep him more independent.” – George Eliot
90. “Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.” – George Eliot
91. “The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.” – George Eliot
92. “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.” – George Eliot
93. “Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.” – George Eliot
94. “If we had a keen vision of all that is ordinary in human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow or the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which is the other side of silence.” – George Eliot
95. “What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.” – George Eliot
96. “Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.” – George Eliot
97. “People who can't be witty exert themselves to be devout and affectionate.” – George Eliot
98. “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
99. “To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.” – George Eliot
100. “But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.” – George Eliot
Share these Best George Eliot Quotes on Life with your friends, family, and loved ones to inspire them as well.