George Eliot Quotes

Any mind that is capable of real sorrow is capable of good.

When you love someone, you don't want them to suffer at all.

Tell the people... please, tell the people of Alabama that I love them. Tell them I'm suffering a lot, but I love them.

Present unhappiness is selfish; past sorrow is compassionate.

Love does not cause suffering: what causes it is the sense of ownership, which is love's opposite.

...those who love suffer when who they love suffers.

When you truly know the meaning of the word love, you will also know the meaning of the word pain.

If you love someone, truly love them, you should never cause them pain. Never fill their eyes with something so close to grief.

Do not pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living, and, above all those who live without love.

May my soul bloom in love for all existence.

I cannot tell how much my heart suffered for my people while at Leavenworth.

He gave to misery (all he had) a tear.

I didn't want readers to think I was asking to be praised for taking care of my wife while she was ill. Lots of people are heroic, more heroic than I was, when faced with the suffering of someone they love.

No deep and strong feeling, such as we may come across here and there in the world, is unmixed with compassion. The more we love, the more the object of our love seems to us to be a victim.

We need to move into a culture of peace. What I hope to promote is the idea that we all need each other and that the greatest happiness in life is not how much we have but how much we give. That's a wealth that's priceless. You can't buy compassion.

If Love dwelt not in Trouble, it could have nothing to love. But its substance which it loves, namely the poor soul, being in trouble and pain, it hath thence cause to love this its own substance and to deliver it from pain, that so itself may by it be again beloved.

We may thank God that we can feel pain and know sadness, for these are the human sentiments that constitute our glory as well as our grief.

There is no true love save in suffering, and in this world we have to choose either love, which is suffering, or happiness. Man is the more man - that is, the more divine - the greater his capacity for suffering, or rather, for anguish.

Love is the most terrible, and also the most generous of the passions; it is the only one which includes in its dreams the happiness of someone else.

Sometimes the hardest thing to do is just to stay human.

If you and I are having a single thought of violence or hatred against anyone in the world at this moment, we are contributing to the wounding of the world.

The moment something happens to one you love, it's twenty times more intense. You experience pain and enlightenment on a much vaster scale.

However, without considering this connection, there is no doubt but that more good than evil, more delight than sorrow, arises from compassion itself; there being so many things which balance the sorrow of it.

Pain and sorrow and misery have a right to our assistance: compassion puts us in mind of the debt, and that we owe it to ourselves as well as to the distressed.

One cannot be deeply responsive to the world without being saddened very often.