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Quotes from Middlemarch — George Eliot

1819–1880 England

← All quotes by George Eliot

28 quotes

Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.

Middlemarch (1871)

I would not creep along the coast but steer
Out in mid-sea, by guidance of the stars.

Middlemarch (1871)

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

Middlemarch (1871)

It was a room where you had no reason for sitting in one place rather than in another.

Middlemarch (1871)

But let the wise be warned against too great readiness at explanation: it multiplies the sources of mistake, lengthening the sum for reckoners sure to go wrong.

Middlemarch (1871)

Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.

Middlemarch (1871)

There is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it.

Middlemarch (1871)

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.

Middlemarch (1871)

I think any hardship is better than pretending to do what one is paid for, and never really doing it.

Middlemarch (1871)

People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbors.

Middlemarch (1871)

‘Why, what can a man do when he takes to adoring one of you mermaids? He only neglects his work and runs up bills.’

Middlemarch (1871)

The world would have a new dreariness for her, as a wilderness that a magician's spells had turned for a little while into a garden.

Middlemarch (1871)

It is never too late to be what you might have been.

Middlemarch (1871)

Our vanities differ as our noses do: all conceit is not the same conceit, but varies in correspondence with the minutiae of mental make in which one of us differs from another.

Middlemarch (1871)

In all failures, the beginning is certainly the half of the whole.

Middlemarch (1871)

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving!

Middlemarch (1871)

Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centring in some long-recognizable deed.

Middlemarch (1871)

What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other? I cannot be indifferent to the troubles of a man who advised me in my trouble, and attended me in my illness.

Middlemarch (1871)

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

Middlemarch (1871)

‘I suppose a woman is never in love with any one she has always known— ever since she can remember; as a man often is. It is always some new fellow who strikes a girl.’

Middlemarch (1871)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: George Eliot (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.