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)
There is nothing that will kill a man so soon as having nobody to find fault with but himself.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Pride
There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire; it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Jealousy
For what we call illusions are often, in truth, a wider vision of past and present realities—a willing movement of a man’s soul with the larger sweep of the world’s forces—a movement towards a more assured end than the chances of a single life.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Illusion
A fool or idiot is one who expects things to happen that never can happen.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Realistic Expectations
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.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Autumn
Can any man or woman choose duties? No more than they can choose their birthplace, or their father and mother.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Duty
Old men’s eyes are like old men’s memories, they are strongest for things a long way off.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Age, Aging
A suppressed resolve will betray itself in the eyes.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Eyes
In the multitude of middle-aged men who go about their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Age, Time
Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Deeds, Goodness, Good Deeds, Action, Secrets of Success
There is a sort of subjection which is the peculiar heritage of largeness and of love; and strength is often only another name for willing bondage to irremediable weakness.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Slavery
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: Anger, Temper
I desire no future that will break the ties of the past.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
There is a great deal of unmapped country within us which would have to be taken into account in an explanation of our gusts and storms.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Self-Discovery, Adversity, Explanation
The only failure one should fear, is not hugging to the purpose they see as best.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Failure
The devil tempts us not. It is we tempt him, beckoning his skill with opportunity.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Temptation
A peasant can no more help believing in a traditional superstition than a horse can help trembling when he sees a camel.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Superstition
Iteration, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
And what the dead had no speech for, when living, they can tell you, being dead: the communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Dying, Death
In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Proverbial Wisdom
The world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome dubious eggs called possibilities.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Progress
We must not inquire too curiously into motives. They are apt to become feeble in the utterance: the aroma is mixed with the grosser air. We must keep the germinating grain away from the light.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Motivation
It is possible to have a strong self-love without any self-satisfaction, rather with a self-discontent which is the more intense because one’s own little core of egoistic sensibility is a supreme care.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Conceit, Vanity
In the vain laughter of folly, wisdom hears half its applause.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Applause, Fools, Foolishness
Our vanities differ as our noses do; all conceit is not the same conceit, but varies in correspondence with the mental make in which one of us differs from another.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Vanity
I like not only to be loved,
but to be told I am loved.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
The sense of an entailed disadvantage—the deformed foot doubtfully hidden by the shoe, makes a restlessly active spiritual yeast, and easily turns a self-centered, unloving nature into an Ishmaelite. But in the rarer sort, who presently see their own frustrated claim as one among a myriad, the inexorable sorrow takes the form of fellowship and makes the imagination tender.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Disability
It always seemed to me a sort of clever stupidity only to have one sort of talent—like a carrier-pigeon.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Talent
Ignorance is not so damnable as humbug, but when it prescribes pills it may happen to do more harm.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Ignorance
Ignorance, says Ajax, “is a painless evil.”—So, I should think, is dirt, considering the merry faces that go along with it.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans)
Topics: Children
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