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Nobody since Newton has been able to use geometrical methods to the same extent for the like purposes; and as we read the Principia we feel as when we are in an ancient armoury where the weapons are of gigantic size; and as we look at them we marvel what manner of man he was who could use as a weapon what we can scarcely lift as a burden.

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Jul 11, 2026

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About Mary Ann (Marian) Evans

Mary Ann (Marian) Evans

Mary Ann (Marian) Evans

Mary Ann (Marian) Evans (22 November 1819 - 22 December 1880), better known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist. She was one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. Her novels, largely set in provincial England, are well known for their realism and psychological perspicacity.

She used a male pen name, she said, to ensure that her works were taken seriously. Female authors published freely under their own names, but Eliot wanted to ensure that she was not seen as merely a writer of romances. An additional factor may have been a desire to shield her private life from public scrutiny and to prevent scandals attending her relationship with the married George Henry Lewes.

Popular Mary Ann (Marian) Evans Quotes

Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.

Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution.

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.

What makes life dreary is the want of a motive.

What greater thing is there for two human souls than to feel that they are joined ... to strengthen each other ... to be at one with each other in silent unspeakable memories.

What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

... 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.

That's what a man wants in a wife, mostly; he wants to make sure one fool tells him he's wise.

One couldn't carry on life comfortably without a little blindness to the fact that everything has been said better than we can put it ourselves.

There is no short-cut no patent tram-road, to wisdom. After all the centuries of invention, the soul’s path lies through the thorny wilderness which must still be trodden in solitude, with bleeding feet, with sobs for help, as it was trodden by them of old time.

It is easy finding reasons why other folks should be patient.

Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return.

Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through.

There are men whose presence infuses trust and reverence.

The strongest principle of growth lies in the human choice.

It is a vain thought to flee from the work that God appoints us, for the sake of finding a greater blessing; instead of seeking it where alone it is to be found — in loving obedience.

There is only one failure in life possible, and that is not to be true to the best one knows.

It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them.

One way of getting an idea of our fellow-countrymen's miseries is to go and look at their pleasures.

You may try but you can never imagine what it is to have a man's form of genius in you, and to suffer the slavery of being a girl.

One must be poor to know the luxury of giving.

... said of the pitfalls of scrutinizing oneself too closely: It is, I fear, but a vain show of fulfilling the heathen precept, 'Know thyself,' and too often leads to a self-estimate which will subsist in the absence of that fruit by which alone the quality of the tree is made evident.

Women should be protected from anyone's exercise of unrighteous power ... but then, so should every other living creature.

To judge wisely, we must know how things appear to the unwise.

The beginning of an acquaintance whether with persons or things is to get a definite outline of our ignorance.

It is only a poor sort of happiness that could ever come by caring very much about our own pleasures. We can only have the highest happiness such as goes along with being a great man, by having wide thoughts and much feeling for the rest of the world as well as ourselves.

There are some cases ... in which the sense of injury breeds — not the will to inflict injuries and climb over them as a ladder, but — a hatred of all injury.

There are glances of hatred that stab, and raise no cry of murder.

The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they're gone.

The finest language is mostly made up of simple unimposing words.

There is nothing that will kill a man so soon as having nobody to find fault with but himself.

To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.

I'm proof against that word failure. I've seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.

The egoism which enters into our theories does not affect their sincerity; rather, the more our egoism is satisfied, the more robust is our belief.

To act with doubleness towards a man whose own conduct was double, was so near an approach to virtue that it deserved to be called by no meaner name than diplomacy.

The desire to conquer is itself a sort of subjection.

It is a common enough case, that of a man being suddenly captivated by a woman nearly the opposite of his ideal.

There is one order of beauty which seems made to turn heads.... It is a beauty like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle....

There are various orders of beauty, causing men to make fools of themselves in various styles... but there is one order of beauty which seems made to turn the heads not only of men, but of all intelligent mammals, even of women. It is a beauty like that of kittens, or very small downy ducks making gentle rippling noises with their soft bills, or babies just beginning to toddle and to engage in conscious mischief — a beauty with which you can never be angry, but that you feel ready to crush for inability to comprehend the state of mind into which it throws you.

The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.

The best augury of a man’s success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.

Renunciation remains sorrow, though a sorrow borne willingly.

Necessity does the work of courage.

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.

How could a man be satisfied with a decision between such alternatives and under such circumstances No more than he can be satisfied with his hat, which he's chosen from among such shapes as the resources of the age offer him....

Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy: — in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures.

For what is love itself, for the one we love best? An enfolding of immeasurable cares which yet are better than any joys outside our love.

Certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we're so fond of it.

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.

Our words have wings, but fly not where we would.

I’m not denyin’ the women are foolish: God Almighty made ‘em to match the men.

And when a woman's will is as strong as the man's who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment.

A woman's hopes are woven of sunbeams; a shadow annihilates them.

A woman's heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed receipt.

People who can't be witty exert themselves to be devout and affectionate.

When we get to wishing a great deal for ourselves, whatever we get soon turns into mere limitation and exclusion.

It's but little good you'll do awatering the last year's crop.

Our virtues are dearer to us the more we have had to suffer for them. It is the same with our children. All profound affection entertains a sacrifice. Our thoughts are often worse than we are, just as they are often better.

Any coward can fight a battle when he's sure of winning, but give me the man who has pluck to fight when he's sure of losing. That's my way, sir; and there are many victories worse than a defeat.

In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause.

A maggot must be born i’ the rotten cheese to like it.

I at least have so much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web....

In the schoolroom her quick mind had taken readily that strong starch of unexplained rules and disconnected facts which saves ignorance from any painful sense of limpness.

Wise books For half the truths they hold are honored tombs.

The responsibility of tolerance lies in those who have the wider vision.

A toddling little girl is a center of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other.

What do we live for if it is not to make life less difficult for each other.

Most of us who turn to any subject we love remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to voices within....

We want people to feel with us more than to act for us.

No great deed is done by falterers who ask for certainty.

But what we strive to gratify, though we may call it a distant hope, is an immediate desire; the future estate for which men drudge up city alleys exists already in their imagination and love.

No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.

May I reach That purest heaven — be to other souls The cup of strength in some great agony; Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love, Beget the smiles that have no cruelty. Be the sweet presence of a good diffused, And in the diffusion ever more intense! So shall I join the choir invisible Whose music is the gladness of the world.

A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.

A supreme love, a motive that gives a sublime rhythm to a woman's life, and exalts habit into partnership with the soul's highest needs, is not to be had where and how she wills.

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?

If you please to take the privilege o’ sitting down.

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.

Self-confidence is apt to address itself to an imaginary dullness in others; as people who are well off speak in a cajoling tone to the poor.

There is a great deal of unmapped country within us.

Blows are sarcasms turned stupid.

Rome, the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.

The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another.

When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.

Of what use, however, is a general certainty that an insect will not walk with his head hindmost, when what you need to know is the play of inward stimulus that sends him hither and thither in a network of possible paths?

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.

Rosamond has questioned Mary about her feelings for Mr. Lydgate. Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?

Solomon's Proverbs, I think, have omitted to say, that as the sore palate findeth grit, so an uneasy consciousness heareth innuendos.

Prophecy is the most gratuitous form of error.

The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character.

The poverty of our imagination is no measure of say the world's resources. Our posterity will no doubt get fuel in ways that we are unable to devise for them.

Plainness has its peculiar temptations quite as much as beauty.

More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.

Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance!

The only failure a man ought to fear is failure in cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.

The important work of moving the world forward does not wait to be done by perfect men.

A patronizing disposition always has its meaner side.

Our passions do not live apart in locked chambers but dress in their small wardrobe of notions, bring their provisions to a common table and mess together, feeding out of the common store according to their appetite.

But human experience is usually paradoxical, that means incongruous with the phrases of current talk or even current philosophy.

Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.

What is opportunity to the man who can't use it? An unfecundated egg, which the waves of time wash away into nonentity.

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.

Is it not rather what we expect in men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by side and never compare them with each other?

It will never rain roses; when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees.

But the mother's yearning, that completest type of the life in another life which is the essence of real human love, feels the presence of the cherished child even in the debased, degraded man.

A mother's yearning feels the presence of the cherished child even in the degraded man.

Mighty is the force of motherhood! It transforms all things by its vital heat.

Perhaps the most delightful friendships are those in which there is much agreement, much disputation, and yet more personal liking.

Debasing the moral currency

Might, could, would — they are contemptible auxiliaries.

We hand folks over to God’s mercy, and show none ourselves.

Men’s men: gentle or simple, they’re much of a muchness.

All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.

But most of us are apt to settle within ourselves that the man who blocks our way is odious, and not to mind causing him a little of the disgust which his personality excites in ourselves.

I tell you there isn't a thing under the sun that needs to be done at all, but what a man can do better than a woman, unless it's bearing children, and they do that in a poor makeshift way; it had better have been left to the men.

If you could make a pudding wi' thinking o' the batter, it 'ud be easy getting dinner.

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 kind. 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.

Life is too precious to be spent in this weaving and unweaving of false impressions, and it is better to live quietly under some degree of misrepresentation than to attempt to remove it by the uncertain process of letter-writing.

The law and medicine should be very serious professions to undertake, should they not? People's lives and fortunes depend on them.

Of a truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what may be....

Kisses honeyed by oblivion.

If we had a keen vision and feeling it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of the roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.

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.

Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.

Iteration, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress.

But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to be done away with.

I’m not one o’ those as can see the cat i’ the dairy, an’ wonder what she’s come after.

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.

Harold, like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas.

Our impartiality is kept for abstract merit and demerit, which none of us ever saw.

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.

Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.

Ignorance... is a painless evil; so, I should think, is dirt, considering the merry faces that go along with it.

Ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities.

It always remains true that if we had been greater, circumstance would have been less strong against us.

He who rules must humor full as much as he commands.

Human beliefs, like all other natural growths, elude the barrier of systems.

Hostesses who entertain much must make up their parties as ministers make up their cabinets, on grounds other than personal liking.

What we call despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.

Hell is oneself; Hell is alone, the other figures in it merely projections. There is nothing to escape from and nothing to escape to. One is always alone.

The scornful nostril and the high head gather not the odors that lie on the track of truth.

Hatred is like fire; it makes even light rubbish deadly.

It was a pity he couldna be hatched o’er again, an’ hatched different.

The intense happiness of our union is derived in a high degree from the perfect freedom with which we each follow and declare our own impressions.

Be unselfish. That is the first and final commandment for those who would be useful and happy in their usefulness. If you think of yourself only. you cannot develop because you are choking thee source of development, which is spiritual expansion through thought for others.

Whether happiness may come or not, one should try and prepare one's self to do without it.

She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.

Gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-pipes of those who diffuse it: it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker.

May every soul that touches mine— Be it the slightest contact— Get therefrom some good; Some little grace; one kindly thought; One aspiration yet unfelt; One bit of courage For the darkening sky; One gleam of faith To brave the thickening ills of life; One glimpse of brighter skies Beyond the gathering mists— To make this life worth while.

‘Tis God gives skill, But not without men’s hands: He could not make Antonio Stradivari’s violins Without Antonio.

The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory.

Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.

I desire no future that will break the ties with the past.

Friendships begin with liking or gratitude — roots that can be pulled up.

How unspeakably the lengthening of memories in common endears our old friends!

Blessed is the influence of one true, loving human soul on another.

Friendship is the inexpressible comfort of feeling safe with a person, having neither to weigh thoughts nor measure words.

No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence.

He was at a starting point which makes many a man's career a fine subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an arduous purpose....

Failure after long perseverance is much grander than never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure.

In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations.

Expectations of women Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster.

Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand.

Excessive literary production is a social offense.

Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.

Errors look so very ugly in persons of small means —one feels they are taking quite a liberty in going astray; whereas people of fortune may naturally indulge in a few delinquencies.

Great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion.

An election is coming. Universal peace is declared, and the foxes have a sincere interest in prolonging the lives of the poultry.

Education was almost always a matter of luck usually ill luck in those distant days.

We must find our duties in what comes to us, not in what might have been.

In all private quarrels the duller nature is triumphant by reason of dullness.

Keep true, never be ashamed of doing right; decide on what you think is right, and stick to it.

Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in her hand.

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

It was not that she was out of temper, but that the world was not equal to the demands of her fine organism.

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.

Our deeds still travel with us from afar, And what we have been makes us what we are.

Death is th’ king of this world: 'tis his park where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music for his banquet.

Cruelty, like every other vice, requires no motive outside of itself; it only requires opportunity.

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.

I've never any pity for conceited people, because I think they carry their comfort about with them.

If we use common words on a great occasion, they are the more striking, because they are felt at once to have a particular meaning, like old banners, or everyday clothes, hung up in a sacred place.

So shall I join the choir invisible Whose music is the gladness of the world.

Oh may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence.

Children demand that their heroes should be fleckless, and easily believe them so ...

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....

‘Character,' says Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms — character is destiny’.

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

Life is measured by the rapidity of change, the succession of influences that modify the being.

Each thought is a nail that is driven In structures that cannot decay; And the mansion at last will be given To us as we build it each day.

Breed is stronger than pasture.

Boots and shoes are the greatest trouble of my life. Everything else one can turn and turn about, and make old look like new; but there's no coaxing boots and shoes to look better than they are.

Best friend, my wellspring in the wilderness!

There is hardly any mental misery worse than that of having our own serious phrases, our own rooted beliefs, caricatured by a charlatan or a hireling.

It is generally a feminine eye that first detects the moral deficiencies hidden under the 'dear deceit' of beauty.

He was like the cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow.

Animals are such agreeable friends — they ask no questions, they pass no criticisms.

An ass may bray a good while before he shakes the stars down.

What a wretched lot of old shriveled creatures we shall be by-and-by. Never mind — the uglier we get in the eyes of others, the lovelier we shall be to each other; that has always been my firm faith about friendship.

It's them as take advantage that get advantage i' this world.

Human beings must have action; and they will make it if they cannot find it.

Abstinence is whereby a man refraineth from anything which he may lawfully claim.

'Abroad,' that large home of ruined reputations.

With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavours and the tinglings of a merited shame.

When one wanted one's interests looking after whatever the cost, it was not so well for a lawyer to be over honest, else he might not be up to other people's tricks.

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

Those who trust us educate us.

It is seldom that the miserable of the world can help regarding their misery as a wrong inflicted by those who are less miserable.

This is a puzzling world, and Old Harry's got a finger in it.

Sympathetic people often don't communicate well, they back reflected images which hide their own depths.

You have such strong words at command, that they make the smallest argument seem formidable.

One soweth and another reapeth is a verity that applies to evil as well as good.

Strange, that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us.

There are many victories worse than a defeat.

Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled egg; and when it takes to cackling will have nothing to announce but that addled delusion.

Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.

To manage men, one ought to have a sharp mind in a velvet sheath.

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.

It is, I fear, but a vain show of fulfilling the heathen precept, 'Know thyself,' and too often leads to a self-estimate which will subsist in the absence of that fruit by which alone the quality of the tree is made evident.

Would not love see returning penitence afar off, and fall on its neck and kiss it?

There is no private life which is not determined by a wider public life.

The happiest women, like the happiest nations, have no history.

Abroad, that large home of ruined reputations.

Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.

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

Speech is but broken light upon the depth Of the unspoken.

Pain is no evil unless it conquers us.

Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.

No man is matriculated to the art of life till he has been well tempted.

In every parting there is an image of death.

Character is not cut in marble; it is not something solid And unalterable. It is something living and changing...

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

I should like to know what is the proper function of women, if it is not to make reasons for husbands to stay at home, and still stronger reasons for bachelors to go out.

Debasing the moral currency.

I'm not denying the women are foolish: God Almighty made 'em to match the men.

Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love.

Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.

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