George Eliot Quotes That Will Inspire You to Live Your Best Life

1. Adventure is not outside man; it is within.

2. Duty has a trick of behaving unexpectedly -- something like a heavy friend whom we have amiably asked to visit us, and who breaks his leg within our gates.

3. Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult....Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings -- much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth. Adam Bede

4. I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same mind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.

5. I never had any preference for her, any more than I have a preference for breathing. Middlemarch

6. If a princess in the days of enchantment had seen a four-footed creature from among those which live in herds come to her once and again with a human gaze which rested upon her with choice and beseeching, what would she think of in her journeying, what would she look for when the herds passed her? Surely for the gaze which had found her, and which she would know again. Middlemarch

7. It is a common sentence that knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what ignorance in an hour pulls down. Daniel Deronda

8. It is very hard to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings – much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth. Adam Bede

9. Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.

10. Our deeds determine us, as long as we determine our deeds Adam Bede

11. People are almost always better than their neighbors think they are. Middlemarch

12. Poor fellow! I think he is in love with you.'I am not aware of it. And to me it is one of the most odious things in a girl's life, that there must always be some supposition of falling in love coming between her and any man who is kind to her... I have no ground for the nonsensical vanity of fancying everybody who comes near me is in love with me.

13. She was no longer struggling against the perception of facts, but adjusting herself to their clearest perception. Middlemarch

14. The best piety is to enjoy - when you can. You are doing the most then to save the earth's character as an agreeable planet. And enjoyment radiates. It is of no use to try and take care of all the world; that is being taken care of when you feel delight- in art or in anything else. Middlemarch

15. Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through.

16. Upon my word, I think the truth is the hardest missile one can be pelted with. Middlemarch

17. We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass, the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows, the same redbreasts that we used to call ‘God’s birds’ because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known? The Mill on the Floss

18. What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life--to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting? Adam Bede

19. ....whatever else remained the same, the light had changed, and you cannot find the pearly dawn at noonday. The fact is unalterable, that a fellow-mortal with whose nature you are acquainted solely through the brief entrances and exits of a few imaginative weeks called courtship, may, when seen in the continuity of married companionship, be disclosed as something better or worse than what you have preconceived, but will certainly not appear altogether the same. Middlemarch

20. [She was] a creature full of eager, passionate longings for all that was beautiful and glad; thirsty for all knowledge; with an ear straining after dreamy music that died away and would not come near to her; with a blind unconscious yearning for something that would link together the wonderful impressions of this mysterious life, and give her soul a sense of home in it. The Mill on the Floss

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

22. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive. Middlemarch

23. Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing was, than simply to know it; for conjecture soon became more confident than knowledge, and had a more liberal allowance for the incompatible. Middlemarch

24. It is a common sentence that knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what ignorance in an hour pulls down. Daniel Deronda

25. It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted. Middlemarch

26. Let my body dwell in poverty, and my hands be as the hands of the toiler; but let my soul be as a temple of remembrance where the treasures of knowledge enter and the inner sanctuary is hope. Daniel Deronda

27. Most of us who turn to any subject with love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices within, as the first traceable beginning of our love. Middlemarch

28. O may I join the choir invisibleOf those immortal dead who live againIn minds made better by their presence; liveIn pulses stirred to generosity,In deeds of daring rectitude... O May I Join the Choir Invisible! And Other Favourite Poems

29. Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure. The Mill on the Floss

30. She did not want to deck herself with knowledge—to wear it loose from the nerves and blood that fed her action Middlemarch