Mary Anne Evans (1819–80,) known by her pseudonym George Eliot, was an English novelist. Her novels of provincial life, most famously Middlemarch (1871–72,) are celebrated for their realistic exploration of moral problems, and the social and psychological analysis portrayed in the modern novel.
Born in Warwickshire in the English Midlands, Eliot was the youngest of the five children. While attending boarding school, she was deeply influenced by a priest’s encouragement of personal salvation through faith and religious self-sacrifice. When her mother died in 1836, Eliot left school to help run her father’s household. After her father’s death, Eliot settled in London. She met philosopher and literary critic George Henry Lewes, with whom she lived until his death in 1878. Lewes was married, couldn’t get divorced legally and marry Eliot; so, their relationship caused an outrage. Family and friends shunned Eliot.
Eliot’s first novel, Adam Bede (1859,) brought her fame and success. She used a male nom de plume to make sure that her works were taken seriously in an age when female authors were regularly associated with romantic novels.
Eliot’s other notable works include The Mill on the Floss (1860,) Silas Marner (1861,) Romola (1863,) her masterpiece Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda (1874–76.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Habit is the beneficent harness of routine which enables silly men to live respectably, and unhappy men to live calmly.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Habit, Unhappiness
Wear a smile and have friends; wear a scowl and have wrinkles. What do we live for if not to make the world less difficult for each other?
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Smile, Friendship, Smiles
Would not love see returning penitence afar off, and fall on its neck and kiss it?
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Forgiveness
It was not that she was out of temper, but that the world was not equal to the demands of her fine organism.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Temper, Anger
Our instructed vagrancy, which has hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and banyans—which is nourished on books of travel, and stretches the theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Travel, Tourism
Coarse kindness is, at least, better than coarse anger; and in all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of its dullness.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Fighting, Fight, Quarrels
The most solid comfort one can fall back upon is the thought that the business of one’s life is to help in some small way to reduce the sum of ignorance, degradation and misery on the face of this beautiful earth.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Action
By desiring what is perfectly good, even when we do not quite know what it is, and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil, widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Goodness
How lovely the little river is, with its dark changing wavelets! It seems to me like a living companion while I wander along the bank, and listen to its low, placid voice…
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
We hand folks over to God’s mercy, and show none ourselves.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Forgiveness, Kindness, Compassion, Mercy
Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Expectation, Realistic Expectations, Foresight, Anticipation, Goodness
The devil tempts us not. It is we tempt him, beckoning his skill with opportunity.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Temptation
Perhaps his might be one of the natures where a wise estimate of consequences is fused in the fires of that passionate belief which determines the consequences it believes in.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Consequences
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 (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Appreciation, Reading
Our consciousness rarely registers the beginning of a growth within us any more than without us; there have been many circulations of the sap before we detect the smallest sign of the bud.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Growth
This is the bitterest of all, to wear the yoke of our own wrong-doing.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Remorse
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Information, Wisdom, Knowledge
There is much pain that is quite noiseless; and vibrations that make human agonies are often a mere whisper in the roar of hurrying existence. There are glances of hatred that stab and raise no cry of murder; robberies that leave man or woman for ever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer—committed to no sound except that of low moans in the night, seen in no writing except that made on the face by the slow months of suppressed anguish and early morning tears. Many an inherited sorrow that has marred a life has been breathed into no human ear.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Hatred, Pain
There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Feelings, Music
Sir Joshua would have been glad to take her portrait; and he would have had an easier task than the historian at least in this, that he would not have had to represent the truth of change—only to give stability to one beautiful moment.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Aging, Age
The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Woman, Happiness, Women
Among all the many kinds of first love, that which begins in childish companionship is the strongest and most enduring; when passion comes to unite its force to long affection, love is at its spring-tide.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Love
I desire no future that will break the ties of the past.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
It is only a poor sort of happiness that could ever come by caring very much about our own narrow pleasures. We can only have the highest happiness, such as goes along with true greatness, by having wide thoughts and much feeling for the rest of the world as well as ourselves; and this sort of happiness often brings so much pain with it, that we can only tell it from pain by its being what we would choose before everything else, because our souls see it is good.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Happiness
A human life, I think, should be well rooted in some area of native land where it may get the love of tender kinship from the earth, for the labors men go forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that early home a familiar unmistakable difference amidst the future widening of knowledge. The best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one’s own homestead.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Stars
Let us be thankful that our sorrow lives in us as an indestructible force, only changing in form, as forces do, and passing from pain to sympathy? To have suffered much is like knowing many languages? Thou hast learned to understand all.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
I have the conviction that excessive literary production is a social offence.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Writers, Authors & Writing
The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Perfection, Activism
For character too is a process and an unfolding… among our valued friends is there not someone or other who is a little too self confident and disdainful; whose distinguished mind is a little spotted with commonness; who is a little pinched here and protuberant there with native prejudices; or whose better energies are liable to lapse down the wrong channel under the influence of transient solicitations?
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Character
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