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If I could only fancy myself clever, it would be better, but to be a failure of Nature and to know it is not a comfortable lot. It is the last lesson one learns, to be contented with one's inferiority -- but it must be learned.

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
Translator
Writer
Mary Anne Evans
Mary Ann Evans
Marian Evans
Mary Anne Evans Cross
Mary Anne Cross
Better
Clever
Must
Lessons
Would
Failure
Comfortable
Contented
Learned
Inferiority
Lasts
Learns
Last
Lesson
Nature
Fancy

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No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence.
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The bow always strung ... will not do.
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My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.
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It is difficult for woman to try to be anything good when she is not believed in.
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It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.
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What quarrel, what harshness, what unbelief in each other can subsist in the presence of a great calamity, when all the artificial vesture of our life is gone, and we are all one with each other in primitive mortal needs?
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Do we not all agree to call rapid thought and noble impulse by the name of inspiration? After our subtlest analysis of the mental process, we must still say that our highest thoughts and our best deeds are all given to us.
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Susceptible persons are more affected by a change of tone that by unexpected words.
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How should all the apparatus of heaven and earth make poetry for a mind that had no movements of awe and tenderness, no sense of fellowship which thrills from the near to the distant, and back again from the distant to the near?
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To see an enemy humiliated gives a certain contentment, but this is jejune compared with the highly blent satisfaction of seeing him humiliated by your benevolent action or concession on his behalf. That is the sort of revenge which falls into the scale of virtue.
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I love words they are the quoits, the bows, the staves that furnish the gymnasium of the mind.
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... as usual I am suffering much from doubt as to the worth of what I am doing and fear lest I may not be able to complete it so as to make it a contribution to literature and not a mere addition to the heap of books.
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How will you find good? It is not a thing of choice it is a river that flows from the foot of the Invisible Throne and flows by the path of obedience.
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I had some ambition. I meant everything to be different with me. I thought I had more strength and mastery. But the most terrible obstacles are such as nobody can see except oneself.
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What a wretched lot of old shrivelled creatures we shall be by-and-by. Never mind - the uglier we get in the eyes of others, the lovelier we shall be to each other that has always been my firm faith about friendship.
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All honour and reverence to the divine beauty of form! Let us cultivate it to the utmost in men, women and children -- in our gardens and in our houses. But let us love that other beauty too, which lies in no secret of proportion but in the secret of deep human sympathy.
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Obligation may be stretched till it is no better than a brand of slavery stamped on us when we were too young to know its meaning.
George Eliot
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Great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion.
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We are overhasty to speak as if God did not manifest himself by our silent feeling, and make his love felt through ours.
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I have nothing to tell except travellers' stories, which are always tiresome, like the description of a play which was very exciting to those who saw it.
George Eliot