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"The select natures who pant after the ideal, and find nothing in pantaloons or petticoats great enough to command their reverence and love, are curiously in unison with the narrowest and pettiest."
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"None could be the most perfect. If indeed any, it is only perfect."
"That's the thing you girls never get. It doesn't matter if you just woke up, or just got done bawling, or just finished your make-up. When a guy's all love-sick over a chick, she looks exactly the same to him all the time: perfect."
"The young all have the same dream: to save the world. Some quickly forget this dream, convinced that there are more important things to do, like having a family, earning money, traveling, and learning a foreign language. Others, though, decide that it really is possible to make a difference in society and to shape the world we will hand on to future generations."
"Do you think it is a vain hope that one day man will find joy in noble deeds of light and mercy, rather than in the coarse pleasures he indulges in today -- gluttony, fornication, ostentation, boasting, and envious vying with his neighbor? I am certain this is not a vain hope and that the day will come soon."
"I prefer truth-based entertaining idealism."
"There was something better in life than this rubbish, if only he could get to it-love-nobility-big spaces where passion clasped peace, spaces no science could reach, but they existed for ever, full of woods some of them, and arched with majestic sky and a friend. . ."
"A fly, Sir, may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but, one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still."
"Should we continue to look upwards? Is the light we can see in the sky one of those which will presently be extinguished? The ideal is terrifying to behold... brilliant but threatened on all sides by the dark forces that surround it: nevertheless, no more in danger than a star in the jaws of the clouds."
"I have always found that mercy bears richer fruits than strict justice."
"I want to make this world perfect."
Explore more quotes by George Eliot
"Perfect love has a breath of poetry which can exalt the relations of the least-instructed human beings."
"It is a mere cowardice to seek safety in negations. No character becomes strong in that way. You will be thrown into the world some day and then every rational satisfaction your nature that you deny now will assault like a savage appetite."
"It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self-never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardor of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted."
"To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion."
"In Rome it seems as if there were so many things which are more wanted in the world than pictures."
"The terror of being judged sharpens the memory: it sends an inevitable glare over that long-unvisited past which has been habitually recalled only in general phrases. Even without memory, the life is bound into one by a zone of dependence in growth and decay; but intense memory forces a man to own his blameworthy past. 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 not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame."
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