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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.

“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

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All Quotes by George Eliot

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

— George Eliot

Love

“I desire no future that will break the ties with the past.”

— George Eliot

Future

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

— George Eliot

Death

“And when a woman's will is as strong as the man's who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment.”

— George Eliot

Strength

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

— George Eliot

God

“Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.”

— George Eliot

Great

“Falsehood is easy, truth so difficult.”

— George Eliot

Truth

“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

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

— George Eliot

Wisdom

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

— George Eliot

Truth

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

— George Eliot

Best

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

— George Eliot

Jealousy

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

— George Eliot

Happiness

“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

Jealousy

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

— George Eliot

Marriage

“Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.”

— George Eliot

Great

“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

“When we get to wishing a great deal for ourselves, whatever we get soon turns into mere limitation and exclusion.”

— George Eliot

Great

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

— George Eliot

Experience

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

— George Eliot

Wisdom