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The select natures who pant after the ideal, and find nothing in pantaloons or petticoats great enough to command their reverence and love, are curiously in unison with the narrowest and pettiest.

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
Ideals
Pant
Find
Curiously
Nothing
Unison
Enough
Natures
Great
Select
Love
Reverence
Ideal
Command
Narrowest

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Joy is the best of wine.
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That is the bitterest of all,--to wear the yoke of our own wrong-doing.
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My childhood was full of deep sorrows - colic, whooping-cough, dread of ghosts, hell, Satan, and a Deity in the sky who was angry when I ate too much plumcake.
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It is time the clergy are told that thinking men, after a close examination of that doctrine, pronounce it to be subversive of true moral development and, therefore, positively noxious.
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A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get the love of tender kinship for the face of earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar, unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge.
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Joy and sorrow are both my perpetual companions, but the joy is called Past and the sorrow Present.
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I don't mind how many letters I receive from one who interests me as much as you do. The receptive part of correspondence I can carry on with much alacrity. It is writing answers that I groan over.
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When a homemaking aunt scolds a niece for following her evangelistic passion instead of domestic pursuits, her reply is interesting. First, she clarifies that God's individual call on her doesn't condemn those in more conventional roles. Then, she says she can no more ignore the cry of the lost than her aunt can the cry of her child.
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You must love your work and not always be looking over the edge of it wanting your play to begin.
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Anger seek it prey,-- Something to tear with sharp-edged tooth and claw, Like not to go off hungry, leaving Love To feast on milk and honeycomb at will.
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An ass may bray a good while before he shakes the stars down.
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Wine and the sun will make vinegar without any shouting to help them.
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Don't let us rejoice in punishment, even when the hand of God alone inflicts it. The best of us are but poor wretches, just saved from shipwreck. Can we feel anything but awe and pity when we see a fellow-passenger swallowed by the waves?
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The wrong that rouses our angry passions finds only a medium in us it passes through us like a vibration, and we inflict what we have suffered.
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The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.
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Thought Has joys apart, even in blackest woe, And seizing some fine thread of verity Knows momentary godhead.
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Our passions do not live apart in locked chambers but dress in their small wardrobe of notions, bring their provisions to a common table and mess together, feeding out of the common store according to their appetite.
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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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