Quote

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.

George Eliot

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

George Eliot
Age: 61 †
Born: 1819
Born: November 22
Died: 1880
Died: December 22
Editor
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Philosopher
Poet
Translator
Writer
Mary Anne Evans
Mary Ann Evans
Marian Evans
Mary Anne Evans Cross
Mary Anne Cross
Break
Breaks
Within
Gates
Something
Tricks
Like
Legs
Heavy
Unexpectedly
Asked
Behaving
Friend
Visit
Duty
Trick

More quotes by George Eliot

Image
It is a vain thought to flee from the work that God appoints us, for the sake of finding a greater blessing, instead of seeking it where alone it is to be found - in loving obedience.
George Eliot
Image
We are overhasty to speak as if God did not manifest himself by our silent feeling, and make his love felt through ours.
George Eliot
Image
Life began with waking up and loving my mother's face.
George Eliot
Image
Among all the many kinds of first love, that which begins in childish companionship is the strongest and most enduring: when passion comes to unite its force to long affection, love is at its spring-tide.
George Eliot
Image
People are so ridiculous with their illusions, carrying their fool's caps unawares, thinking their own lies opaque while everybody else's are transparent, making themselves exceptions to everything, as if when all the world looked yellow under a lamp they alone are rosy.
George Eliot
Image
Whether happiness may come or not, one should try and prepare one's self to do without it.
George Eliot
Image
Trouble comes to us all in this life: we set our hearts on things which it isn't God's will for us to have, and then we go sorrowing.
George Eliot
Image
You must love your work and not always be looking over the edge of it wanting your play to begin.
George Eliot
Image
It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.
George Eliot
Image
Human longings are perversely obstinate and to the man whose mouth is watering for a peach, it is of no use to offer the largest vegetable marrow.
George Eliot
Image
Perhaps the wind Wails so in winter for the summers dead, And all sad sounds are nature's funeral cries For what has been and is not.
George Eliot
Image
Well, I aren't like a bird-clapper, forced to make a rattle when the wind blows on me. I can keep my own counsel when there's no good i' speaking.
George Eliot
Image
I've been turning it over in after-dinner speeches, but it looks awkward-it's not what people are used to-it wants a good deal of Latin to make it go down.
George Eliot
Image
Husbands are an inferior class of men, who require keeping in order.
George Eliot
Image
All who remember their childhood remember the strange vague sense, when some new experience came, that everything else was going to be changed, and that there would be no lapse into the old monotony.
George Eliot
Image
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
Image
In bed our yesterdays are too oppressive: if a man can only get up, though it be but to whistle or to smoke, he has a present which offers some resistance to the past—sensations which assert themselves against tyrannous memories.
George Eliot
Image
The tendency toward good in human nature has a force which no creed can utterly counteract, and which insures the ultimate triumph of that tendency over all dogmatic perversions.
George Eliot
Image
Do we not all agree to call rapid thought and noble impulse by the name of inspiration?
George Eliot
Image
There's nothing but what's bearable as long as a man can work.... The square o' four is sixteen, and you must lengthen your lever in proportion to your weight, is as true when a man's miserable as when he's happy and the best o' working is, it gives you a grip hold o' things outside your own lot.
George Eliot