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George Eliot

63 quotes

George Eliot (1819–1880) was the pen name of Mary Ann Evans, an English novelist, poet, and journalist who wrote some of the most psychologically nuanced fiction of the Victorian era. Her masterwork *Middlemarch* is widely regarded as one of the greatest novels in the English language.

“Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest.”

— George Eliot

Marriage

All Quotes by George Eliot

“But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.”

— George Eliot

Experience

“Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.”

— George Eliot

Failure

“Different taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.”

— George Eliot

Great

“In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause.”

— George Eliot

Wisdom

“I'm not denyin' the women are foolish. God Almighty made 'em to match the men.”

— George Eliot

God

“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.”

— George Eliot

Best

“Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest.”

— George Eliot

Marriage

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

— George Eliot

Pet

“There are many victories worse than a defeat.”

— George Eliot

Fear

“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.”

— George Eliot

Faith

“Rome - the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.”

— George Eliot

History

“Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.”

— George Eliot

Love

“Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.”

— George Eliot

Nature

“Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.”

— George Eliot

Travel

“But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.”

— George Eliot

Hope

“Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through.”

— George Eliot

Truth

“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

Great

“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

Science

“Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.”

— George Eliot

Jealousy

“Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down.”

— George Eliot

Knowledge