Daniel Deronda Quotes

“No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“Those who trust us educate us.”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“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.”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“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

“Let my body dwell in poverty, and my hands be as the hands of the toiler; but let my soul be as a temple of remembrance where the treasures of knowledge enter and the inner sanctuary is hope.”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“I think I dislike what I don't like more than I like what I like.”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“It is better - it shall be better with me because I have known you.”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“It is one of the secrets in that change of mental poise which has been fitly named conversion, that to many among us neither heaven nor earth has any revelation till some personality touches theirs with a peculiar influence, subduing them into receptiveness..”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“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, Daniel Deronda

“People talk of their motives in a cut and dried way. Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster. I am not a monster but I have not felt exactly what other women feel, or say they feel, for fear of being thought unlike others.”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“All meanings, we know, depend on the key of interpretation.”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a
beginning. Even science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start
with a make-believe unit, and must fix on a point in the stars'
unceasing journey when his sidereal clock shall pretend that time
is at Nought. His less accurate grandmother Poetry has always been
understood to start in the middle; but on reflection it appears
that her proceeding is not very different from his; since Science,
too, reckons backward as well as forward, divides his unit into
billions, and with his clock-finger at Nought really sets off
in medias res. No retrospect will take us to the true
beginning; and whether our prologue be in heaven or on earth, it is
but a fraction of that all-presupposing fact with which our story
sets out.”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“Ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities.”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“No chemical process shows a more wonderful activity than the transforming influence of the thoughts we imagine to be going on in another.”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“The most powerful movement of feeling with a liturgy is the prayer which seeks for nothing special, but is a yearning to escape from the limitations of our own weakness and an invocation of all Good to enter and abide with us.”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“Our guides, we pretend, must be sinless: as if those were not often the best teachers who only yesterday got corrected for their mistakes.”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“No retrospect will take us to the true beginning”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“In the checkered area of human experience the seasons are all mingled as in the golden age: fruit and blossom hang together; in the same moment the sickle is reaping and the seed is sprinkled; one tends the green cluster and another treads the winepress. Nay, in each of our lives harvest and spring-time are continually one, until himself gathers us and sows us anew in his invisible fields.”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“We are all of us denying or fulfilling prayers – and men in their careless deeds walk amidst invisible outstretched arms and pleadings made in vain.”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“I daresay some would never get their eyes opened if it were not for a violent shock from the consequences of their own actions”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“Those who have been indulged by fortune and have always thought of calamity as what happens to others, feel a blinding credulous rage at the reversal of their lot and half believe that their wild cries will alter the course of the storm.”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“I had a terror of the world. None knew me; all would mistake me. I had seen so many in my life who made themselves glad with scorning, and laughed at another's shame. What could I do? This life seemed to be closing in upon me with a wall of fire—everywhere there was scorching that made me shrink. The high sunlight made me shrink. And I began to think that my despair was the voice of God telling me to die.”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“She was one of those women who are never handsome till they are old, and she had had the wisdom to embrace the beauty of age as early as possible.”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“I shall never love anybody. I can't love people. I hate them.'

'The time will come, dear, the time will come.”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“Passion is of the nature of seed, and finds nourishment within, tending to a predominance which determines all currents towards itself, and makes the whole life its tributary.”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“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. Knowledge, through patient and frugal centuries, enlarges discovery and makes record of it; Ignorance, wanting its day’s dinner, lights a fire with the record, and gives a flavor to its one roast with the burned souls of many generations. Knowledge, instructing the sense, refining and multiplying needs, transforms itself into skill and makes life various with a new six days’ work; comes Ignorance drunk on the seventh, with a firkin of oil and a match and an easy “Let there not be,” and the many-coloured creation is shriveled up in blackness. 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; whereas Ignorance is a blind giant who, let him but wax unbound, would make it a sport to seize the pillars that hold up the long-wrought fabric of human good, and turn all the places of joy dark as a buried Babylon.”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“Attempts at description are stupid. Who can all at once describe a human being? Even when he is presented to us we only begin that knowledge of his appearance which must be completed by innumerable impressions under differing circumstances.”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“I will wait till after Christmas.” What should we all do without the calendar, when we want to put off a disagreeable duty? The admirable arrangements of the solar system, by which our time is measured, always supply us with a term before which it is hardly worthwhile to set about anything we are disinclined to.”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“Let thy chief terror be of thine own soul:
There, 'mid the throng of hurrying desires
That trample on the dead to seize their spoil,
Lurks vengeance, footless, irresistible
As exhalations laden with slow death,
And o'er the fairest troop of captured joys
Breathes pallid pestilence.”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda

“Men, like planets, have both a visible and an invisible history. The astronomer threads the darkness with strict deduction, accounting so for every visible arc in the wanderer's orbit; and the narrator of human actions, if he did his work with the same completeness, would have to thread the hidden pathways of feeling and thought which lead up to every moment of action, and to those moments of intense suffering which take the quality of action--like the cry of Prometheus, whose chained anguish seems a greater energy than the sea and sky he invokes and the deity he defies.”
― George Eliot, Daniel Deronda