George Eliot Quotes About Emotions

• To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion--a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.

  George Eliot

  Hands, Soul, Feelings

  George Eliot (2015). “Middlemarch: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.153, Penguin

• If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind. Each crisis seems final, simply because it is new. We are told that the oldest inhabitants in Peru do not cease to be agitated by the earthquakes, but they probably see beyond each shock, and reflect that there are plenty more to come.

  George Eliot

  Thinking, Earthquakes, Hopeful

  George Eliot (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated)”, p.2528, Delphi Classics

• Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual. That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind, and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.

  George Eliot

  Real, Lying, Heart

  Middlemarch bk. 2, ch. 20 (1871 - 1872)

• What deep and worthy love is so, whether of woman or child, or art or music. Our caresses, our tender words, our still rapture under the influence of autumn sunsets, or pillared vistas, or calm majestic statues, or Beethoven symphonies all bring with them the consciousness that they are mere waves and ripples in an unfathomable ocean of love and beauty; our emotion in its keenest moment passes from expression into silence, our love at its highest flood rushes beyond its object and loses itself in the sense of divine mystery.

  George Eliot

  Art, Children, Ocean

  George Eliot (2016). “George Eliot Collection: Middlemarch, Adam Bede, Silas Marner, The Lifted Veil, and The Mill on the Floss”, p.35, Xist Publishing

• It belongs to every large nature, when it is not under the immediate power of some strong unquestioning emotion, to suspect itself, and doubt the truth of its own impressions, conscious of possibilities beyond its own horizon.

  George Eliot

  Strong, Doubt, Horizon

  George Eliot (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated)”, p.1328, Delphi Classics

• Religion can only change when the emotions which fill it are changed; and the religion of personal fear remains nearly at the level of the savage.

  George Eliot

  Savages, Levels, Emotion

  George Eliot (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated)”, p.2593, Delphi Classics

• [It is easier] to quell emotion than to incur the consequences of venting it.

  George Eliot

  Venting, Emotion, Easier

  George Eliot (1872). “Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life”, p.105

• Unwonted circumstances may make us all rather unlike ourselves: there are conditions under which the most majestic person is obliged to sneeze, and our emotions are liable to be acted on in the same incongruous manner.

  George Eliot

  May, Majestic, Emotion

  George Eliot (2015). “Middlemarch: (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition)”, p.412, Penguin

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