Helen > Helen's Quotes

“I like not only to be loved, but also to be told that I am loved. I am not sure that you are of the same mind. But the realm of silence is large enough beyond the grave. This is the world of light and speech, and I shall take leave to tell you that you are very dear.”
― George Eliot

“[B]e comforted in the fact that the ache in your heart and the confusion in your soul means that you are still alive, still human, and still open to the beauty of the world, even though you have done nothing to deserve it. And when you resent the ache in your heart, remember: You will be dead and buried soon enough.”
― Paul Harding

“My grandfather always said that living is like licking honey off a thorn.”
― Louis Adamic

“A friend is one to whom one may pour out the contents of one's heart, chaff and grain together, knowing that gentle hands will take and sift it, keep what is worth keeping, and with a breath of kindness, blow the rest away.”
― Dinah Maria Craik

“It is an illusion that youth is happy, an illusion of those who have lost it; but the young know they are wretched for they are full of the truthless ideal which have been instilled into them, and each time they come in contact with the real, they are bruised and wounded. It looks as if they were victims of a conspiracy; for the books they read, ideal by the necessity of selection, and the conversation of their elders, who look back upon the past through a rosy haze of forgetfulness, prepare them for an unreal life. They must discover for themselves that all they have read and all they have been told are lies, lies, lies; and each discovery is another nail driven into the body on the cross of life.”
― W. Somerset Maugham, Of Human Bondage

“Civilised life, you know, is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us.”
― J.G. Ballard

“It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are still alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger for them.”
― George Eliot

“But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“Life seems to go on without effort when I am filled with music.”
― George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

“We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, "Oh, nothing!" Pride helps; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our hurts— not to hurt others.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.”
― George Eliot

“Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.”
― George Eliot, Adam Bede

“Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love - that makes life and nature harmonise. The birds are consulting about their migrations, the trees are putting on the hectic or the pallid hues of decay, and begin to strew the ground, that one's very footsteps may not disturb the repose of earth and air, while they give us a scent that is a perfect anodyne to the restless spirit. 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."

[Letter to Miss Lewis, Oct. 1, 1841]”
― George Eliot, George Eliot’s Life, as Related in her Letters and Journals

“What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult for each other?”
― George Eliot

“Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.”
― George Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such

“Adventure is not outside man; it is within.”
― George Eliot

“People are almost always better than their neighbors think they are.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion--a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“For pain must enter into its glorified life of memory before it can turn into compassion.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“There is no despair so absolute as that which comes from the first moments of our first great sorrow when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and healed, to have despaired and recovered hope.”
― George Elliot

“There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.”
― George Eliot

“It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self—never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardor of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts—not to hurt others.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“It is a common sentence that knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what ignorance in an hour pulls down.”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“No story is the same to us after a lapse of time; or rather we who read it
are no longer the same interpreters.”
― George Eliot

“Pride only helps us to be generous; it never makes us so, any more than vanity makes us witty.”
― George Eliot, Middlemarch

“When death, the great Reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.”
― George Eliot, Adam Bede

“She thought it was part of the hardship of her life that there was laid upon her the burthen of larger wants than others seemed to feel – that she had to endure this wide hopeless yearning for that something, whatever it was, that was greatest and best on this earth.”
― George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

“Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets.”
― George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss