George Eliot Quotes About Suffering

• My own experience and development deepen every day my conviction that our moral progress may be measured by the degree in which we sympathize with individual suffering and individual joy.

  George Eliot

  Compassion, Joy, Suffering

  George Eliot (2016). “George Eliot's Life, Complete: Top Novelist Focus”, p.237, 谷月社

• There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope.

  George Eliot

  Hope, Sadness, Learning

  George Eliot (2016). “George Eliot Collection: Middlemarch, Adam Bede, Silas Marner, The Lifted Veil, and The Mill on the Floss”, p.316, Xist Publishing

• Our virtues are dearer to us the more we have had to suffer for them. It is the same with our children. All profound affection entertains a sacrifice. Our thoughts are often worse than we are, just as they are often better.

  George Eliot

  Children, Sacrifice, Thinking

• Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state. Suffering can be likened to a baptism - the passing over the threshold of pain and grief and anguish to claim a new state of being.

  George Eliot

  Pain, Grief, Baptism

  "Adam Bede". Book by George Eliot, 1859.

• You may try — but you can never imagine what it is to have a man's force of genius in you, and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl.

  George Eliot

  Girl, Men, Imagination

  "Daniel Deronda".

• We are contented with our day when we have been able to bear our grief in silence, and act as if we were not suffering.

  George Eliot

  Grief, Silence, Suffering

  George Eliot (2005). “Four Novels of George Eliot”, p.427, Wordsworth Editions

• Surely there was something taught her by this experience of great need; and she must be learning a secret of human tenderness and long-suffering, that the less erring could hardly know?

  George Eliot

  Long, Secret, Suffering

  George Eliot (2016). “The Mill On The Floss”, p.595, George Eliot

• So deeply inherent is it in this life of ours that men have to suffer for each other's sins, so inevitably diffusive is human suffering, that even justice makes its victims, and we can conceive no retribution that does not spread beyond its mark in pulsations of unmerited pain.

  George Eliot

  Pain, Men, Justice

  George Eliot (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated)”, p.6060, Delphi Classics

• ... as usual I am suffering much from doubt as to the worth of what I am doing and fear lest I may not be able to complete it so as to make it a contribution to literature and not a mere addition to the heap of books.

  George Eliot

  Book, Suffering, Doubt

  George Eliot, Margaret Harris, Judith Johnston (2000). “The Journals of George Eliot”, p.145, Cambridge University Press

• ... we are most of us brought up in the notion that the highest motive for not doing a wrong is something irrespective of the beings who would suffer the wrong.

  George Eliot

  Suffering, Morality, Motive

  George Eliot (2005). “Four Novels of George Eliot”, p.538, Wordsworth Editions

• When our life is a continuous trial, the moments of respite seem only to substitute the heaviness of dread for the heaviness of actual suffering; the curtain of cloud seems parted an instant only that we may measure all its horror as it hangs low, black, and imminent, in contrast with the transient brightness; the waterdrops that visit the parched lips in the desert bear with them only the keen imagination of thirst.

  George Eliot

  Life, Clouds, Imagination

  George Eliot (1869). “Silas Marner and Scenes of Clerical Life”, p.259

• Among the blessings of love there is hardly one more exquisite than the sense that in uniting the beloved life to ours we can watch over its happiness, bring comfort where hardship was, and over memories of privation and suffering open the sweetest fountains of joy.

  George Eliot

  Love, Memories, Blessing

  George Eliot (2009). “Daniel Deronda”, p.693, Oxford Paperbacks

• But faithfulness can feed on suffering,
  And knows no disappointment.

  George Eliot

  Disappointment, Suffering, Faithfulness

  George Eliot (1839). “Theophrastus Such, Jubal and other poems and The Spanish gypsy”, p.444

• They the royal-hearted women are
  Who nobly love the noblest, yet have grace
  For needy suffering lives in lowliest place,
  Carrying a choicer sunlight in their smile,
  The heavenliest ray that pitieth the vile.

  George Eliot

  Women, Grace, Suffering

  George Eliot (1839). “Theophrastus Such, Jubal and other poems and The Spanish gypsy”, p.226

• How impossible it is for strong healthy people to understand the way in which bodily malaise and suffering eats at the root of one's life! The philosophy that is true - the religion that is strength to the healthy - is constantly emptiness to one when the head is distracted and every sensation is oppressive.

  George Eliot

  Strong, Philosophy, Roots

  George Eliot (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of George Eliot (Illustrated)”, p.6781, Delphi Classics

• even those who call themselves 'intimate' know very little about each other - hardly ever know just how a sorrow is felt, and hurt each other by their very attempts at sympathy or consolation. We can bear no hand on our bruises.

  George Eliot

  Sympathy, Hurt, Hands

  George Eliot, John Walter Cross (2010). “George Eliot's Life, as Related in Her Letters and Journals”, p.44, Cambridge University Press

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