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What mortal is there of us, who would find his satisfaction enhanced by an opportunity of comparing the picture he presents to himself of his doings, with the picture they make on the mental retina of his neighbours? We are poor plants buoyed up by the air-vessels of our own conceit.

George Eliot

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George Eliot
Age: 61 †
Born: 1819
Born: November 22
Died: 1880
Died: December 22
Editor
Essayist
Journalist
Novelist
Philosopher
Poet
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Writer
Mary Anne Evans
Mary Ann Evans
Marian Evans
Mary Anne Evans Cross
Mary Anne Cross
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Compare
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Enhanced

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O the anguish of the thought that we can never atone to our dead for the stinted affection we gave them.
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Death is the king of this world: 'Tis his park where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music for his banquet.
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Confound you handsome young fellows! You think of having it all your own way in the world. You don't understand women. They don't admire you half so much as you admire yourselves.
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The rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families.
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bad literature of the sort called amusing is spiritual gin.
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And, of course men know best about everything, except what women know better.
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A supreme love, a motive that gives a sublime rhythm to a woman's life, and exalts habit into partnership with the soul's highest needs, is not to be had where and how she wills.
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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.
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To have suffered much is like knowing many languages. Thou hast learned to understand all.
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In the man whose childhood has known caresses and kindness, there is always a fiber of memory that can be touched to gentle issues.
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Poor dog! I've a strange feeling about the dumb things as if they wanted to speak, and it was a trouble to 'em because they couldn't. I can't help being sorry for the dogs always, though perhaps there's no need. But they may well have more in them than they know how to make us understand, for we can't say half what we feel, with all our words.
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... indefinite visions of ambition are weak against the ease of doing what is habitual or beguilingly agreeable.
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A proud woman who has learned to submit carries all her pride to the reinforcement of her submission, and looks down with severe superiority on all feminine assumption as unbecoming.
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Inclination snatches arguments To make indulgence seem judicious choice.
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Kisses honeyed by oblivion.
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Perfect love has a breath of poetry which can exalt the relations of the least-instructed human beings.
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People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbors.
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With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.
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I always think the flowers can see us, and know what we are thinking about.
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Whether happiness may come or not, one should try and prepare one's self to do without it.
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