George Eliot Soul Quotations

To the receptive soul the river of life pauseth not, nor is diminished.

To know intense joy without a strong bodily frame, one must have an enthusiastic soul.

... it is one of the gains of advancing age that the good of young creatures becomes a more definite intense joy to us. With that renunciation for ourselves which age inevitably brings, we get more freedom of soul to enter into the life of others; what we can never learn they will know, and the gladness which is a departed sunlight to us is rising with the strength of morning to them.

The first sense of mutual love excludes other feelings; it will have the soul all to itself.

Souls live on in perpetual echoes.

The human soul is hospitable, and will entertain conflicting sentiments and contradictory opinions with much impartiality.

When the soul is just liberated from the wretched giant's bed of dogmas on which it has been racked and stretched ever since it began to think, there is a feeling of exultation and strong hope.

The soul of man, when it gets fairly rotten, will bear you all sorts of poisonous toad-stools, and no eye can see whence came the seed thereof.

Quick souls have their intensest life in the first anticipatory sketch of what may or will be, and the pursuit of their wish is the pursuit of that paradisiacal vision which only impelled them, and is left farther and farther behind, vanishing forever even out of hope in the moment which is called success.

Often the soul is ripened into fuller goodness while age has spread an ugly film, so that mere glances can never divine the preciousness of the fruit.

O the anguish of that thought that we can never atone to our dead for the stinted affection we gave them, for the light answers we returned to their plaints or their pleadings, for the little reverence we showed to that sacred human soul that lived so close to us, and was the divinest thing God had given us to know!

Let thy chief terror be of thine own soul: There, 'mid the throng of hurrying desires That trample o'er the dead to seize their spoil, Lurks vengeance, footless, irresistible As exhaltations laden with slow death, And o'er the fairest troop of captured joys Breathes pallid pestilence.

Strong souls Live like fire-hearted suns to spend their strength In farthest striving action; breathe more free In mighty anguish than in trivial ease.

Great Love has many attributes, and shrines For varied worshippers, but his force divine Shows most its many-named fulness in the man Whose nature multitudinously mixed-- Each ardent impulse grappling with a thought-- Resists all easy gladness, all content Save mystic rapture, where the questioning soul Flooded with consciousness of good that is Finds life one bounteous answer.

Souls have complexions too: what will suit one will not suit another

A supreme love, a motive that gives a sublime rhythm to a woman's life, and exalts habit into partnership with the soul's highest needs, is not to be had where and how she wills.

and we must learn to accommodate ourselves to the discovery that some of those cunningly-fashioned instruments called human souls have only a very limited range of music, and will not vibrate in the least under a touch that fills others with tremulous rapture or quivering agony.

Let my body dwell in poverty, and my hands be as the hands of the toiler; but let my soul be as a temple of remembrance where the treasures of knowledge enter and the inner sanctuary is hope.

The difficult task of knowing another soul is not for young gentlemen whose consciousness is chiefly made up of their own wishes.

What greater thing is there for two human souls that to feel that they are joined... to strengthen each other... to be at one with each other in silent unspeakable memories.

I found it better for my soul to be humble before the mysteries o' God's dealings, and not be making a clatter about what I could never understand.

For years after Lydgate remembered the impression produced in him by this involuntary appeal-this cry from soul to soul, without other consciousness than their moving with kindred natures in the same embroiled medium, the same troublous fitfully-illuminated life.

The pride of the body is a barrier against the gifts that purify the soul.

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.

No soul is desolate as long as there is a human being for whom it can feel trust and reverence.