The beginning of an acquaintance whether with persons or things is to get a definite outline of our ignorance.
George Eliot
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George Eliot quotes
Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.
I like not only to be loved, but to be told I am loved.
A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.
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 receipt.
Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life.
Adventure is not outside man; it is within.
All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.
All the learnin' my father paid for was a bit o' birch at one end and an alphabet at the other.
An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.
And when a woman's will is as strong as the man's who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment.
Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions; they pass no criticisms.
Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning, but give me the man who has pluck to fight when he's sure of losing. That's my way, sir; and there are many victories worse than a defeat.
Belief consists in accepting the affirmations of the soul; unbelief, in denying them.
Best friend, my well-spring in the wilderness!
Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.
Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.
Blows are sarcasm's turned stupid.
Breed is stronger than pasture.
But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.
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.
But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.
But the mother's yearning, that completest type of the life in another life which is the essence of real human love, feels the presence of the cherished child even in the debased, degraded man.
Conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course.
Consequences are unpitying.
Death is the king of this world: 'Tis his park where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music for his banquet
Different taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.
Excessive literary production is a social offense.
Friendships begin with liking or gratitude roots that can be pulled up.
Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it: it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker.
Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.
Harold, like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas.
He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.
Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy: -in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures.
I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe.
I desire no future that will break the ties with the past.
I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.
I hold it a blasphemy to say that a man ought not to fight against authority: there is no great religion and no great freedom that has not done it, in the beginning.
I like trying to get pregnant. I'm not so sure about childbirth.
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.
I tell you there isn't a thing under the sun that needs to be done at all, but what a man can do better than a woman, unless it's bearing children, and they do that in a poor make-shift way; it had better ha been left to the men.
I'm not denyin' the women are foolish. God Almighty made 'em to match the men.
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.
If we use common words on a great occasion, they are the more striking, because they are felt at once to have a particular meaning, like old banners, or everyday clothes, hung up in a sacred place.
Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.
In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness.
In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations.
In the schoolroom her quick mind had taken readily that strong starch of unexplained rules and disconnected facts which saves ignorance from any painful sense of limpness.
In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause.
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?
It is a common enough case, that of a man being suddenly captivated by a woman nearly the opposite of his ideal.
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.
It is generally a feminine eye that first detects the moral deficiencies hidden under the "dear deceit" of beauty.
It is, I fear, but a vain show of fulfilling the heathen precept, "Know thyself," and too often leads to a self-estimate which will subsist in the absence of that fruit by which alone the quality of the tree is made evident.
It is never too late to be what you might have been.
It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees.
Iteration, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress.
Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.
Kisses honeyed by oblivion.
Life is too precious to be spent in this weaving and unweaving of false impressions, and it is better to live quietly under some degree of misrepresentation than to attempt to remove it by the uncertain process of letter-writing.
Might, could, would -they are contemptible auxiliaries.
More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.
My own experience and development deepen everyday my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.
No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty.
No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.
Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.
One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!
One way of getting an idea of our fellow-countrymen's miseries is to go and look at their pleasures.
Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.
Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.
Our consciousness rarely registers the beginning of a growth within us any more than without us; there have been many circulations of the sap before we detect the smallest sign of the bud.
Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.
Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.
Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.
Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans -which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.
Our words have wings, but fly not where we would.
People who can't be witty exert themselves to be devout and affectionate.
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.
Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which there is much agreement, much disputation, and yet more personal liking.
Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?
She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.
That farewell kiss which resembles greeting, that last glance of love which becomes the sharpest pang of sorrow.
That's what a man wants in a wife, mostly; he wants to make sure one fool tells him he's wise.
The beginning of an acquaintance whether with persons or things is to get a definite outline of our ignorance.
The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.
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.
The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.
The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.
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.
The only failure one should fear, is not hugging to the purpose they see as best.
The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another.
The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory.
The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.
The tendancy of liberals is to create bodies of men and women-of all classes-detached from tradition, alienated from religion, and susceptible to mass suggestion-mob rule. And a mob will be no less a mob if it is well fed, well clothed, well housed, and well disciplined.
The world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities.
The years between fifty and seventy are the hardest. You are always being asked to do things, and yet you are not decrepit enough to turn them down.
There are many victories worse than a defeat.
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.
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 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.
There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.
'Tis God gives skill, but not without men's hand: He could not make Antonio Stradivarius's violins without Antonio.
'Tis very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence.
To act with doubleness towards a man whose own conduct was double, was so near an approach to virtue that it deserved to be called by no meaner name than diplomacy.
To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.
We hand folks over to God's mercy, and show none ourselves.
We long for an affection altogether ignorant of our faults. Heaven has accorded this to us in the uncritical canine attachment.
We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.
We must not inquire too curiously into motives... They are apt to become feeble in the utterance: the aroma is mixed with the grosser air. We must keep the germinating grain away from the light.
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.
Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have wrinkles.
What a wretched lot of old shrivelled creatures we shall be by-and-by. Never mind - the uglier we get in the eyes of others, the lovelier we shall be to each other; that has always been my firm faith about friendship.
What do we live for; if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?
What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other?
What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?
What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.
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?
When death comes it is never our tenderness that we repent from, but our severity.
When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.
When one wanted one's interests looking after whatever the cost, it was not so well for a lawyer to be over honest, else he might not be up to other people's tricks.
Whether happiness may come or not, one should try and prepare one's self to do without it.
Who has not felt the beauty of a woman's arm? The unspeakable suggestions of tenderness that lie in the dimpled elbow, and all the varied gently-lessening curves, down to the delicate wrist, with its tiniest, almost imperceptible nicks in the firm softness.
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.
Would not love see returning penitence afar off, and fall on its neck and kiss it?
You may try but you can never imagine what it is to have a man's form of genius in you, and to suffer the slavery of being a girl.
Death is the king of this world: 'Tis his park where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music for his banquet.
Might, could, would - they are contemptible auxiliaries.
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