George Eliot Quotes

Writing and reading fiction is, I think, a human effort to make sense of the world.

The trouble with words is that you never know whose mouths they have been in.

Unless their use by readers bring them to life, books are indeed dead things.

I love language, and I love the failure of language.

Criticism is a misconception: we must read not to understand others but to understand ourselves.

To the scientist, nature is always and merely a 'phenomenon,' not in the sense of being defective in reality, but in the sense of being a spectacle presented to his intelligent observation; whereas the events of history are never mere phenomena, never mere spectacles for contemplation, but things which the historian looks, not at, but through, to discern the thought within them.

'Arcadia' is obviously a play that's got interesting things in it that are perhaps quite hard to grasp.

I do not feel happy when a collection is understood too well.

Whenever a poet or preacher, chief or wizard spouts gibberish, the human race spends centuries deciphering the message.

Reading is not walking on the words; it's grasping the soul of them.

I begin to see an object when I cease to understand it.

We find little in a book but what we put there. But in great books, the mind finds room to put many things.

When you know that something's going to happen, you'll start trying to see signs of its approach in just about everything. Always try to remember that most of the things that happen in this world aren't signs. They happen because they happen, and their only real significance lies in normal cause and effect. You'll drive yourself crazy if you start trying to pry the meaning out of every gust of wind or rain squall. I'm not denying that there might actually be a few signs that you won't want to miss. Knowing the difference is the tricky part.

More and more as we come closer and closer in touch with nature and its teachings are we able to see the Divine and are therefore fitted to interpret correctly the various languages spoken by all forms of nature about us.

I am interested not in individual readings, but in constructing networks of images and meanings capable of reflecting the complexity of the subject.

There were several ways of understanding her: there was what she said, and there was what she meant, and there was something between the two, that was neither.

In every object there is inexhaustible meaning.

The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him. That remark in itself wouldn’t make any sense if quoted as it stands. The average man ought to be allowed a quotation of no less than three sentences, one to make his statement and two to explain what he meant. Ralph Waldo Emerson was about the only one who could stand having his utterances broken up into sentence quotations, and every once in a while even he doesn’t sound so sensible in short snatches.

To those who do not know mathematics it is difficult to get across a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest beauty, of nature ... If you want to learn about nature, to appreciate nature, it is necessary to understand the language that she speaks in.

One should never mistake pattern for meaning.

The quote is always fascinating because it changes out of context, becomes different and sometimes more mysterious. It has a directness and assertiveness it may not have had in the original. I think the quality of inaccessibility, the mystery, is important - that whatever matters can't be taken in on just one reading or one seeing. This is certainly a quality of the little of art that lasts.

Every reading is partial, but that does not absolve us from the quest for meaning, which defines us as a species.

What's a book? Everything or nothing. The eye that sees it all.

Nature speaks in symbols and in signs.

Signatures of all things I am here to read.