Quotes & anectdotes from
the wise,
the foolish,
the courageous &
the drunk

George Eliot Novelist

  • Gender: Female
  • Citizenship: England
  • Born: Nov 22, 1819
  • Died: Dec 22, 1880

Mary Ann Evans, known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, journalist, translator and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She is the author of seven novels, including Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda, most of them set in provincial England and known for their realism and psychological insight.

She used a male pen name, she said, to ensure her works would be taken seriously. Female authors were published under their own names during Eliot's life, but she wanted to escape the stereotype of women only writing lighthearted romances. She also wished to have her fiction judged separately from her already extensive and widely known work as an editor and critic. An additional factor in her use of a pen name may have been a desire to shield her private life from public scrutiny and to prevent scandals attending her relationship with the married George Henry Lewes, with whom she lived for over 20 years.

Her 1872 work Middlemarch has been described by Martin Amis and Julian Barnes as the greatest novel in the English language.

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

The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory.

Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.

When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.

Our deeds still travel with us from afar, and what we have been makes us what we are.

Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.

I'm not denyin' the women are foolish. God Almighty made 'em to match the men.

I like not only to be loved, but also to be told I am loved.

I desire no future that will break the ties with the past.

Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.

You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.

Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.

Animals are such agreeable friends - they ask no questions they pass no criticisms.

There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.

Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things brought together.

In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness.

No story is the same to us after a lapse of time or rather we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.

When we get to wishing a great deal for ourselves, whatever we get soon turns into mere limitation and exclusion.

For what is love itself, for the one we love best? An enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.

We hand folks over to God's mercy, and show none ourselves.

Life began with waking up and loving my mother's face.

Little children are still the symbol of the eternal marriage between love and duty.

Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through.

Whether happiness may come or not, one should try and prepare one's self to do without it.

The only failure one should fear, is not hugging to the purpose they see as best.

The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another.

Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.

Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down.

The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.

Different taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

Wear a smile and have friends wear a scowl and have wrinkles.

A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.

It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees.

Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.

No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty.

All the learnin' my father paid for was a bit o' birch at one end and an alphabet at the other.

The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

Marriage must be a relation either of sympathy or of conquest.

The best augury of a man's success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.

There are many victories worse than a defeat.

More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.

An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.

Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.

In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause.

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.

Falsehood is easy, truth so difficult.

In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations.

In every parting there is an image of death.

And when a woman's will is as strong as the man's who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment.

When death comes it is never our tenderness that we repent from, but our severity.

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.