“Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.”
― George Eliot, quote from Adam Bede
“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, quote from Adam Bede
“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, quote from Adam Bede
“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, quote from Adam Bede
“Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult....Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing 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, quote from Adam Bede
“When death, the great Reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.”
― George Eliot, quote from Adam Bede
“Because, dear, trouble comes to us all in this life: we set our hearts on things which it isn't God's will for us to have, and then we go sorrowing; the people we love are taken from us, and we can joy in nothing because they are not with us; sickness comes, and we faint under the burden of our feeble bodies; we go astray and do wrong, and bring ourselves into trouble with our fellow men. There is no man or woman born into this world to whom some of these trials do not fall, and so I feel that some of them must happen to you; and I desire for you, that while you are young you should seek for the strength from your Heavenly Father, that you may have a support which will not fail you in the evil day.”
― George Eliot, quote from Adam Bede
“She hates everything that is not what she longs for.”
― George Eliot, quote from Adam Bede
“Her own misery filled her heart—there was no room in it for other people's sorrow.”
― George Eliot, quote from Adam Bede
“When God makes His presence felt through us, we are like the burning bush: Moses never took any heed what sort of bush it was—he only saw the brightness of the Lord.”
― George Eliot, quote from Adam Bede
“We are contented with our day when we have been able to bear our grief in silence, and act as if we were not suffering.”
― George Eliot, quote from Adam Bede
“How is it that the poets have said so many fine things about our first love, so few about our later love? Are their first poems their best? or are not those the best which come from their fuller thought, their larger experience, their deeper-rooted affections? The boy's flute-like voice has its own spring charm; but the man should yield a richer, deeper music.”
― George Eliot, quote from Adam Bede
“and we must learn to accommodate ourselves to the discovery that some of those cunningly-fashioned instruments called human souls have only a very limited range of music, and will not vibrate in the least under a touch that fills others with tremulous rapture or quivering agony.”
― George Eliot, quote from Adam Bede
“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, quote from Adam Bede
“Her little butterfly soul fluttered incessantly between memory and dubious expectation.”
― George Eliot, quote from Adam Bede
“Pity that consequences are determined not by excuses but by actions!”
― George Eliot, quote from Adam Bede
“A man never lies with more delicious languor under the influence of a passion than when he has persuaded himself that he shall subdue it to-morrow.”
― George Eliot, quote from Adam Bede
“These fellow-mortals, every one, must be accepted as they are: you can neither straighten their noses, nor brighten their wit, nor rectify their dispositions; and it is these people -- amongst whom your life is passed -- that it is needful you should tolerate, pity, and love: it is these more or less ugly, stupid, inconsistent people, whose movements of goodness you should be able to admire -- for whom you should cherish all possible hopes, all possible patience.”
― George Eliot, quote from Adam Bede
“It's easy finding reasons why other folks should be patient.”
― George Eliot, quote from Adam Bede
“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, quote from Adam Bede
“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, quote from Adam Bede
“Uncomfortable thoughts must be got rid of by good intentions for the future,”
― George Eliot, quote from Adam Bede
“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, quote from Adam Bede
“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, quote from Adam Bede
“There's folks as make bad butter and trusten to the salt t' hide it.”
― George Eliot, quote from Adam Bede
“Bodily haste and exertion usually leave our thoughts very much at the mercy of our feelings and imagination.”
― George Eliot, quote from Adam Bede
“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, quote from Adam Bede
“We are children of a large family, and must learn, as such children do, not to expect that our little hurts will be made much of - to be content with little nurture and caressing, and help each other the more. ”
― George Eliot, quote from Adam Bede
George Eliot
Born place: in South Farm, Arbury Hall, Nuneaton, Warwickshire, The United Kingdom
Born date November 22, 1819
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“Absoballylutely top hole, wot. A and B the C of D I'd say. . . Above and Beyond the Call of Duty.”
― Brian Jacques, quote from Taggerung
“Suddenly she thought that these men believed feeling itself a disease, something to be cut out like a rotten appendix. Cold, calculating, ambitious, believing themselves rational and superior, they chased the crouching female animal through the brain with a scalpel. From an early age she had been told that what she felt was unreal and didn’t matter. Now they were about to place in her something that would rule her feelings like a thermostat”
― Marge Piercy, quote from Woman on the Edge of Time
“People do more for their fellows than return favors and punish cheaters. They often perform generous acts without the slightest hope for payback ranging from leaving a tip in a restaurant they will never visit again to throwing themselves on a live grenade to save their brothers in arms. [Robert] Trivers together with the economists Robert Frank and Jack Hirshleifer has pointed out that pure magnanimity can evolve in an environment of people seeking to discriminate fair weather friends from loyal allies. Signs of heartfelt loyalty and generosity serve as guarantors of one s promises reducing a partner s worry that you will default on them. The best way to convince a skeptic that you are trustworthy and generous is to be trustworthy and generous.”
― Steven Pinker, quote from The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature
“We shoulder it so these people don't have to know it too. And I know this because that's what you say. And when you say it, I believe you. And when I believe you, I'll follow you anywhere.”
― A.C. Gaughen, quote from Scarlet
“The thing about memories was, you never could control when they came up again.”
― Madeleine Roux, quote from Asylum
Crown of Midnight
Cannery Row
The Host
The Woman in White
Just Listen
Ishmael: An Adventur...BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.
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