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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.

“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.”

— George Eliot

Freedom

All Quotes by George Eliot

“Whether happiness may come or not, one should try and prepare one's self to do without it.”

— George Eliot

Happiness

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

— George Eliot

Failure

“In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations.”

— George Eliot

Experience

“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 recipe.”

— George Eliot

Happiness

“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

“Falsehood is easy, truth so difficult.”

— George Eliot

Truth

“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.”

— George Eliot

Home

“Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.”

— George Eliot

Anger

“The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another.”

— George Eliot

Power

“More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.”

— George Eliot

Wisdom

“There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.”

— George Eliot

Best

“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

Good

“I like not only to be loved, but also to be told I am loved.”

— George Eliot

Love

“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

“When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.”

— George Eliot

Death

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

— George Eliot

Love

“A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.”

— George Eliot

Great

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

— George Eliot

Hope

“Little children are still the symbol of the eternal marriage between love and duty.”

— George Eliot

Family

“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

Best