Quotes From "Adam Bede" By George Eliot

What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life--to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting? George Eliot

It is very hard to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings — much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth. George Eliot

There is one order of beauty which seems made to turn heads. It is a beauty like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle. George Eliot

Yes! Thank God; human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty–it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it.. There are few prophets in the world; few sublimely beautiful women; few heroes. I can't afford to give all my love and reverence to such rarities: I want a great deal of those feelings for my every-day fellow-men, especially for the few in the foreground of the great multitude, whose faces I know, whose hands I touch, for whom I have to make way with kindly courtesy. George Eliot

A woman may get to love by degrees–the best fire does not flare up the soonest. George Eliot

A pretty building I'm making, without either bricks or timber. I'm up i' the garret a'ready, and haven't so much as dug the foundation. George Eliot

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

Bodily haste and exertion usually leave our thoughts very much at the mercy of our feelings and imagination. George Eliot

Even when she was speaking, her soul was in prayer reposing on an unseen support. George Eliot

In our instinctive rebellion against pain, we are children again, and demand an active will to wreak our vengeance on. George Eliot

If you had a table spread for a feast, and was making merry with your friends, you would think it was kind to let me come and sit down and rejoice with you, because you’d think I should like to share those good things; but I should like better to share in your trouble and your labour. George Eliot

Her own misery filled her heart–there was no room in it for other people's sorrow. George Eliot

What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self. George Eliot

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. George Eliot

She handled it (her trade) with all the grace that belongs to mastery. George Eliot

She hates everything that is not what she longs for. George Eliot

Those slight words and looks and touches are part of the soul's language; and the finest language, I believe, is chiefly made up of unimposing words, such as "light, " "sound, " "stars, " "music"–words really not worth looking at, or hearing, in themselves, any more than "chips" or "sawdust." It is only that they happen to be the signs of something unspeakably great and beautiful. I am of opinion that love is a great and beautiful thing too, and if you agree with me, the smallest signs of it will not be chips and sawdust to you: they will rather be like those little words, "light" and "music, " stirring the long-winding fibres of your memory and enriching your present with your most precious past. George Eliot

Timid people always reek their peevishness on the gentle. George Eliot

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

Aye, aye, that's the way wi' thee: thee allays makes a peck o' thy own words out o' a pint o' the Bible's George Eliot

A man carries within him the germ of his most exceptional action; and if we wise people make eminent fools of ourselves on any particular occasion, we must endure the legitimate conclusion that we carry a few grains of folly to our ounce of wisdom. George Eliot

The secret of our emotions never lies in the bare object, but in its subtle relations to our own past. George Eliot

He was one of those men, and they are not the commonest, of whom we can know the best only by following them away from the marketplace, the platform, and the pulpit, entering with them into their own homes, hearing the voice with which they speak to the young and aged about their own hearthstone, and witnessing their thoughtful care for the everyday wants of everyday companions, who take all their kindness as a matter of course, and not as a subject for panegyric. George Eliot

Author describes one character's optimism as, that quiet well-being which perhaps you and I have felt on a sunny afternoon when, in our brightest youth and health, life has opened a new vista for us, and long to-morrows of activity have stretched before us like a lovely plain which there was no need for hurrying to look at, because it was all our own. George Eliot

There is no hour that has not its births of gladness and despair, no morning brightness that does not bring new sickness to desolation as well as new forces to genius and love. There are so many of us, and our lots are so different, what wonder that Nature's mood is often in harsh contrast with the great crisis of our lives? George Eliot

It is the favourite stratagem of our passions to sham a retreat, and to turn sharp round upon us at the moment we have made up our minds that the day is our own. George Eliot

It's easy finding reasons why other folks should be patient. George Eliot

You must mind and not lower the Church in people's eyes by seeming to be frightened about it for such a little thing. George Eliot

Her little butterfly soul fluttered incessantly between memory and dubious expectation. George Eliot

Ingenious philosophers tell you, perhaps, that the great work of the steam-engine is to create leisure for mankind. Do not believe them: it only creates a vacuum for eager thought to rush in. Even idleness is eager now–eager for amusement; prone to excursion-trains, art museums, periodical literature, and exciting novels; prone even to scientific theorizing and cursory peeps through microscopes. Old Leisure was quite a different personage. He only read one newspaper, innocent of leaders, and was free from that periodicity of sensations which we call post-time. He was a contemplative, rather stout gentleman, of excellent digestion; of quiet perceptions, undiseased by hypothesis; happy in his inability to know the causes of things, preferring the things themselves. He lived chiefly in the country, among pleasant seats and homesteads, and was fond of sauntering by the fruit-tree wall and scenting the apricots when they were warmed by the morning sunshine, or of sheltering himself under the orchard boughs at noon, when the summer pears were falling. He knew nothing of weekday services, and thought none the worse of the Sunday sermon if it allowed him to sleep from the text to the blessing; liking the afternoon service best, because the prayers were the shortest, and not ashamed to say so; for he had an easy, jolly conscience, broad-backed like himself, and able to carry a great deal of beer or port-wine, not being made squeamish by doubts and qualms and lofty aspirations. George Eliot

My life is too short, and God’s work is too great for me to think of making a home for myself in this world. George Eliot

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

She had forgotten his faults as we forgetthe sorrows of our departed childhood. George Eliot

Mr. Poyser had no reason to be ashamed of his leg, and suspected that the growing abuse of top-boots and other fashions tending to disguise the nether limbs had their origin in a pitiable degeneracy of the human calf. George Eliot

How can a man’s candour be seen in all its lustre unless he has a few failings to talk of? But he had an agreeable confidence that his faults were all of a generous kind–impetuous, arm-blooded, leonine; never crawling, crafty, reptilian. George Eliot

He sat watching what went forward with the quiet outward glance of healthy old age. George Eliot

Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion; and ties us by our heart-strings to the beings that jar us at every movement. George Eliot

College mostly makes people like bladders–just good for nothing but t’ hold the stuff as is poured into ‘em. George Eliot

In so complex a thing as human nature, we must consider, it is hard to find rules without exception. George Eliot

Mr. Craig was not above talking politics occasionally, though he piqued himself rather on a wise insight than on specific information. George Eliot