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George Eliot Quotes (1819-1880)
Writer, Poet, Novelist
About George Eliot
George Eliot (born Mary Ann Evans; 22 November 1819 – 22 December 1880) was an English novelist and poet. Despite the strong social customs of her times against such arrangements, she lived unmarried with fellow writer George Henry Lewes for over 20 years.
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Explore our curated collection of the most famous and impactful George Eliot quotes.
“One can say everything best over a meal.”
“Renunciation remains sorrow, though a sorrow borne willingly.”
“What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?”
“Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand - ...”
“If art does not enlarge men's sympathies, it does nothing morally.”
“Ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities.”
“Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.”
George Eliot Quotes by Topic
Find exactly what you are looking for by browsing this categorized list of George Eliot quotes by topic.
George Eliot on Friendship 5 quotes
“Friend more divine than all divinities.”
George Eliot on Poetry about love 3 quotes
“'Tis what I love determines how I love.”
George Eliot on Duty 3 quotes
View all 3 quotes on Duty →George Eliot on Speech 3 quotes
View all 3 quotes on Speech →George Eliot on Words 2 quotes
View all 2 quotes on Words →George Eliot on Wind 2 quotes
View all 2 quotes on Wind →George Eliot on Motivation 2 quotes
View all 2 quotes on Motivation →George Eliot on Thought 2 quotes
“Our growing thought Makes growing revelation.”
George Eliot on Ignorance 2 quotes
“Ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities.”
George Eliot on Stars 2 quotes
View all 2 quotes on Stars →George Eliot on Deeds 2 quotes
View all 2 quotes on Deeds →What George Eliot Said About Others
Discover personal opinions George Eliot shared regarding contemporaries.
George Eliot on Women 5 quotes
View all 5 quotes on Women →George Eliot on Baruch Spinoza 3 quotes
“Do you remember Goethe's wise words about reading Spinoza? — “I always preferred knowing what an author himself said, to knowing what others thought he ought to have said.””
George Eliot on Harriet Martineau 2 quotes
“After all, she is a trump—the only Englishwoman that possesses thoroughly the art of writing.”
George Eliot on Anthony Trollope 2 quotes
“I am much struck in "Rachel" with the skill with which you have organized thoroughly natural everybody incidents into a strictly related, well-proportioned whole, natty and complete as a nut on its stem. Such construction is among those subtleties of art which can hardly be appreciated except by those who have striven after the same result with conscious failure.”
George Eliot on Moses
George Eliot on Thomas Carlyle
George Eliot on William Morris
George Eliot on James Anthony Froude
“We seem to be in companionship with a spirit who is transfusing himself into our souls, and so vitalising them by his superior energy, that life, both outward and inward, presents itself to us in higher relief, in colours brightened and deepened.”
George Eliot on Honoré de Balzac
“Balzac, perhaps the most wonderful writer of fiction the world has ever seen, has in many of his novels overstepped this limit. He drags us by his magic force through scene after scene of unmitigated vice, till the effect of walking among this human carrion is a moral nausea.”
George Eliot on Herbert Spencer
“Spencer had a photo of Marian (George Eliot) in his bedroom until the day he died. The sisters who kept house for him in the 1890s used to tease him about it. "What a long nose she had! She must have been very difficult to kiss, Mr Spencer!" "Yes indeed! he brightly acquiesced, to our intense delight at the apparent admission. He laughingly protested he was speaking theoretically; but would Herbert Spencer, the philosopher, have generalised from an a priori reasoning?"”
George Eliot on John Ruskin
“The truth of infinite value that he teaches is realism — the doctrine that all truth and beauty are to be attained by a humble and faithful study of nature, and not by substituting vague forms, bred by imagination on the mists of feeling, in place of definite, substantial reality. The thorough acceptance of this doctrine would remould our life; and he who teaches its application to any one department of human activity with such power as Mr Ruskin's, is a prophet for his generation.”
George Eliot on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“Everywhere he brings us into the presence of living, generous humanity—mixed and erring, and self-deluding, but saved from utter corruption by the salt of some noble impulse, some disinterested effort, some beam of good nature, even though grotesque or homely. And his mode of treatment seems to us precisely that which is really moral in its influence. It is without exaggeration; he is in no haste to alarm readers into virtue by melodramatic consequences; he quietly follows the stream of fact and of life; and waits patiently for the moral processes of nature as we all do for her material processes. The large tolerance of Goethe, which is markedly exhibited in Wilhelm Meister, is precisely that to which we point as the element of moral superiority.”
Quotes About George Eliot
Gain deeper perspective through quotes about George Eliot from others.
Margaret Atwood on George Eliot
“Writing is also a profession, and, at its best, an honourable one. It has been made honourable by those who have already been members of it. Whether you like it or not, every time you set pen to paper you’re staring at the same blank space that confronted Milton, Melville, Emily Bronte, Dostoevsky and George Eliot, George Orwell and William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf and William Carlos Williams, not to mention the latest hero, Gabriel Garcia Marquez.”
Bill Bullard on George Eliot
Natalia Ginzburg on George Eliot
“(Are there other English language writers who mean a lot to you?) NG: Well, of course, Shakespeare. And I love George Eliot as well.”
Vincent van Gogh on George Eliot 2 quotes
“Have you read anything beautiful lately? Do make sure somehow to get hold of and read the books by Eliot, you won't be sorry, Adam Bede, Silas Marner, Felix Holt, Romola (Savonarola’s story), Scenes of clerical life. You know we gave the 3 underlined ones to Pa on his birthday last year. When I get the time for reading, I'll read them again.”
William Ernest Henley on George Eliot
“Epigrams are at best half-truths that look like whole ones. Here is a handful about George Eliot. It has been said of her books—('on several occasions')—that 'it is doubtful whether they are novels disguised as treatises, or treatises disguised as novels'; that, 'while less romantic than Euclid's Elements, they are on the whole a great deal less improving reading'; and that 'they seem to have been dictated to a plain woman of genius by the ghost of David Hume.' Herself, too, has been variously described: as 'An Apotheosis of Pupil-Teachery'; as 'George Sand plus Science and minus Sex'; as 'Pallas with prejudices and a corset'; as 'the fruit of a caprice of Apollo for the Differential Calculus.' The comparison of her admirable talent to 'not the imperial violin but the grand ducal violoncello' seems suggestive and is not unkind.”
Henry James on George Eliot 2 quotes
“She is magnificently ugly — deliciously hideous... in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which, in a very few minutes steals forth and charms the mind, so that you end as I ended, in falling in love with her.”
Roger Kimball on George Eliot
“Perhaps you thought that George Eliot was the author of Middlemarch. No: according to Professor Eagleton, the phrase “George Eliot” signifies nothing more than the insertion of certain specific ideological determinations -- Evangelical Christianity, rural organicism, incipient feminism, petty-bourgeois moralism -- into a hegemonic ideological formation which is partly supported, partly embarrassed by their presence. [...] The idea is to downgrade the notion of individual genius, as if George Eliot's personal contribution to the writing of Middlemarch were somehow accidental, the more important thing being the “specific ideological determinations” she embodied. The main point of all this is that nothing is what it seems; or, as Professor Eagleton puts it in Criticism and Ideology, “there is no ‘immanent’ value": everything in the realm of culture is determined by something outside culture–namely (catch that whiff of vulgarity?) the oppressive economic relations of capitalism.”
D. H. Lawrence on George Eliot 2 quotes
“You see, it was really George Eliot who started it all... It was she who started putting all the action inside.”
Hermione Lee on George Eliot
“The phrase "double life" used in a book on George Eliot would usually apply to the double identity of Marian Evans (or Lewes) and "George Eliot," as when [Clare] Carlisle talks of Eliot's bringing together "the two parts of herself." She shows us her subject as intensely conscious of her double life as writer and woman, at one time keeping a diary with the front part recording events in the life of Mrs. Lewes and the back pages recording her authorial achievements. In old age Eliot (as Carlisle refers to her as a writer) described her creative life as her "higher life" "that is young and grows, though in my other life I am getting old and decaying." But "double life" in this biography has a double meaning. It also refers to her coexistence with Lewes, which George Eliot called "a shared life, a double life," describing their inseparable intimacy as "a sort of Siamese-twin condition" or, more ominously, a "dual egotism." When she adopted her pseudonym in 1857 in order to write fiction without being judged as a woman, she chose her first name not only in tribute to George Sand but as a mark of her connection to George Lewes.”
Gerda Lerner on George Eliot
“Feminist literary critics have shown how in the 19th century women writers began to acknowledge women as their muses and their role models. Thus, George Eliot admired Harriet Beecher Stowe and was decisively influenced in her work by a thorough reading of the works of Jane Austen...The list could be indefinitely extended to show the almost desperate search of writing women for authoritative female predecessors.”
Aurora Levins Morales on George Eliot
Rebecca Mead on George Eliot
“Once, when she [Eliot] was asked which real-life person had been the inspiration for Casaubon — a man whose "soul was sensitive without being enthusiastic; it was too languid to thrill out of self-consciousness into passionate delight; it went on fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched, thinking of its own winds and never flying" — she tapped her own breast.”
Misattributed Quotes
Quotes mistakenly credited to George Eliot
“Oh, the comfort —
the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person —
having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words,
but pouring them all right out,
just as they are,
chaff and grain together;
certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them,
keep what is worth keeping,
and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.”
the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person —
having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words,
but pouring them all right out,
just as they are,
chaff and grain together;
certain that a faithful hand will take and sift them,
keep what is worth keeping,
and then with the breath of kindness blow the rest away.”
About George Eliot
George Eliot (born Mary Ann Evans; 22 November 1819 – 22 December 1880) was an English novelist and poet. Despite the strong social customs of her times against such arrangements, she lived unmarried with fellow writer George Henry Lewes for over 20 years.