It is hard to say how much we could forgive ourselves if we were secure from judgment by another whose opinion is the breathing-medium of all our joy – who brings to us with close pressure and immediate sequence that judgment of the Invisible and Universal which self-flattery and the world’s tolerance would easily melt and disperse. In this way our brother may be in the stead of God to us, and his opinion which has pierced even to the joints and marrow, may be our virtue in the making.

— George Eliot

George Eliot Quotes

Hetty’s mind was oppressed at that moment with a worse difficulty than poor Lisbeth’s ways; she could not care about them.

— George Eliot

In those days the world in general was more ignorant of good and evil by forty years than it is at present.

— George Eliot

Don’t ask me, Adam,” Arthur said; “I feel sometimes as if I should go mad with thinking of her looks and what she said to me, and then, that I couldn’t get a full pardon – that I couldn’t save her from that wretched fate of being transported – that I can do nothing for her all those years; and she may die under it, and never know comfort any more.

— George Eliot

It’s all I’ve got to think of now – to do my work well and make the world a bit better place for them as can enjoy it.

— George Eliot

On the contrary, having the amiable vanity which knits us to those who are fond of us, and disinclines us to those who are indifferent.

— George Eliot

Oh, dear, because I have always loved him. I should never like scolding any one else so well; and that is a point to be thought of in a husband.

— George Eliot

I wouldn’t make a downright lawyer o’ the lad, – I should be sorry for him to be a raskill, – but a sort o’ engineer, or a surveyor, or an auctioneer and vallyer, like Riley, or one o’ them smartish businesses as are all profits and no outlay, only for a big watch-chain and a high stool.

— George Eliot

Explain my preference! I never had a preference for her, any more than I have a preference for breathing.

— George Eliot

Can’t you tell me?” said Celia, setting her arms cozily. “No, dear, you would have to feel it with me, else you would never know.

— George Eliot

If that were true, Celia, my giving up would be self-indulgence, not self-mortification. But there may be good reasons for choosing not to do what is very agreeable,′ said Dorothea.

— George Eliot

She filled up all blanks with unmanifested perfections, interpreting him as she interpreted the works of Providence, and accounting for seeming discords by her own deafness to the higher harmonies. And there are many blanks left in the weeks of courtship, which a loving faith fills with happy assurance.

— George Eliot

Do you suppose the public reads with a view to its own conversion?

— George Eliot

She was able enough to estimate him – she who waited on his glances with trembling, and shut her best soul in prison, paying it only hidden visits, that she might be petty enough to please him. In such a crisis as this, some women begin to hate.

— George Eliot

Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings.

— George Eliot

There is a pale shade of bribery which is sometimes called prosperity.

— George Eliot

A man may be puffed and belauded, envied, ridiculed, counted upon as a tool and fallen in love with, or at least selected as a future husband, and yet remain virtually unknown – known merely as a cluster of signs for his neighbors’ false suppositions.

— George Eliot

She was blind, you see, to many things obvious to others – likely to tread in the wrong places, as Celia had warned her; yet her blindness to whatever did not lie in her own pure purpose carried her safely by the side of precipices where vision would have been perilous with fear.

— George Eliot

He shrank from pity; and if the suspicion of being pitied for anything in his lot surmised or known in spite of himself was embittering, the idea of calling forth a show of compassion by frankly admitting an alarm or a sorrow was necessarily intolerable to him. Every proud mind knows something of this experience, and perhaps it is only to be overcome by a sense of fellowship deep enough to make all efforts at isolation seem mean and petty instead of exalting.

— George Eliot

They are a narrow ignorant set, and do more to make their neighbors uncomfortable than to make them better. Their system is a sort of worldly-spiritual cliqueism: they really look on the rest of mankind as a doomed carcass which is to nourish them for heaven.

— George Eliot

Silas himself was feeling the withering desolation of that bereavement about which his neighbours were arguing at their ease.

— George Eliot
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