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Home > Dictionary of Science Quotations > Scientist Names Index E > George Eliot Quotes

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George Eliot
(22 Nov 1819 - 22 Dec 1880)

English novelist and journalist , the pen name of Mary Anne Evans, a leading Victorian writer, whose well-known works include major works include Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861)and Middlemarch (1871–72). She used a male pen name to distinguish her work from the typical romantic novels usually associated with female writers of her time.

Science Quotes by George Eliot (11 quotes)

Painting of George Eliot, upper body, facing forward
George Eliot at age 30
Portrait by Alexandre-Louis-François d'Albert-Durade (source)
Animals are such agreeable friends; they ask no questions, pass no criticisms.
— George Eliot
(Mary Ann Evans, English Novelist)
Science quotes on:  |  Agreeable (20)  |  Animal (651)  |  Ask (420)  |  Criticism (85)  |  Friend (180)  |  Pass (241)  |  Question (649)

Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving in words evidence of the fact.
— George Eliot
(Mary Ann Evans, English Novelist)
Science quotes on:  |  Abstain (7)  |  Bless (25)  |  Blessed (20)  |  Evidence (267)  |  Fact (1257)  |  Give (208)  |  Man (2252)  |  Nothing (1000)  |  Say (989)  |  Word (650)

Breed is stronger than pasture.
— George Eliot
(Mary Ann Evans, English Novelist)
Science quotes on:  |  Breed (26)  |  Genetics (105)  |  Pasture (15)  |  Strong (182)  |  Stronger (36)

Examine your words well, and you will find that even when you have no motive to be false, it is a very hard thing to say the exact truth, even about your own immediate feelings—much harder than to say something fine about them which is not the exact truth.
— George Eliot
In Adam Bede (1859, 1860), 151.
Science quotes on:  |  Exact (75)  |  Examine (84)  |  False (105)  |  Feeling (259)  |  Feelings (52)  |  Find (1014)  |  Fine (37)  |  Hard (246)  |  Harder (6)  |  Immediate (98)  |  Motive (62)  |  Say (989)  |  Something (718)  |  Thing (1914)  |  Truth (1109)  |  Will (2350)  |  Word (650)

Falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult.
— George Eliot
In Adam Bede (1859, 1860), 151.
Science quotes on:  |  Difficult (263)  |  Easy (213)  |  Falsehood (30)  |  Truth (1109)

I’ve been turning it over in after-dinner speeches, but it looks awkward—it’s not what people are used to—it wants a good deal of Latin to make it go down.
— George Eliot
From Felix Holt: The Radical (1866), Vol. 1, 59.
Science quotes on:  |  Awkward (11)  |  Deal (192)  |  Down (455)  |  Good (906)  |  Latin (44)  |  Look (584)  |  People (1031)  |  Speech (66)  |  Want (504)

It is never too late to be what you might have been.
— George Eliot
…...
Science quotes on:  |  Late (119)  |  Never (1089)

It’s but little good you’ll do a-watering the last year’s crop.
— George Eliot
In Adam Bede (1862), 175.
Science quotes on:  |  Crop (26)  |  Do (1905)  |  Good (906)  |  Irrigation (12)  |  Last (425)  |  Little (717)  |  Water (503)  |  Year (963)

Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them.
— George Eliot
In Adam Bede (1859, 1860), 89.
Science quotes on:  |  Dead (65)  |  Forgotten (53)  |  Never (1089)

Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.
— George Eliot
In Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1873), 255.
Science quotes on:  |  Alive (97)  |  Breath (61)  |  Charter (4)  |  Conscience (52)  |  Contest (6)  |  Dogma (49)  |  Give (208)  |  Keep (104)  |  Mistake (180)  |  More (2558)  |  Must (1525)  |  Scrupulous (7)

When God makes his presence felt through us, we are like the burning bush: Moses never took any heed what sort of bush it was—he only saw the brightness of the Lord.
— George Eliot
In Adam Bede (1859), Vol. 1, 167.
Science quotes on:  |  Brightness (12)  |  Burn (99)  |  Burning (49)  |  Bush (11)  |  Feel (371)  |  God (776)  |  Heed (12)  |  Lord (97)  |  Moses (8)  |  Never (1089)  |  Presence (63)  |  Religion (369)  |  Saw (160)  |  See (1094)  |  Sort (50)  |  Through (846)


Carl Sagan Thumbnail In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion. (1987) -- Carl Sagan
Quotations by:Albert EinsteinIsaac NewtonLord KelvinCharles DarwinSrinivasa RamanujanCarl SaganFlorence NightingaleThomas EdisonAristotleMarie CurieBenjamin FranklinWinston ChurchillGalileo GalileiSigmund FreudRobert BunsenLouis PasteurTheodore RooseveltAbraham LincolnRonald ReaganLeonardo DaVinciMichio KakuKarl PopperJohann GoetheRobert OppenheimerCharles Kettering  ... (more people)

Quotations about:Atomic  BombBiologyChemistryDeforestationEngineeringAnatomyAstronomyBacteriaBiochemistryBotanyConservationDinosaurEnvironmentFractalGeneticsGeologyHistory of ScienceInventionJupiterKnowledgeLoveMathematicsMeasurementMedicineNatural ResourceOrganic ChemistryPhysicsPhysicianQuantum TheoryResearchScience and ArtTeacherTechnologyUniverseVolcanoVirusWind PowerWomen ScientistsX-RaysYouthZoology  ... (more topics)
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Sophie Germain
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Ernest Rutherford
James Chadwick
Marcel Proust
William Harvey
Johann Goethe
John Keynes
Carl Gauss
Paul Feyerabend
- 90 -
Antoine Lavoisier
Lise Meitner
Charles Babbage
Ibn Khaldun
Euclid
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Robert Bunsen
Frederick Banting
Andre Ampere
Winston Churchill
- 80 -
John Locke
Bronislaw Malinowski
Bible
Thomas Huxley
Alessandro Volta
Erwin Schrodinger
Wilhelm Roentgen
Louis Pasteur
Bertrand Russell
Jean Lamarck
- 70 -
Samuel Morse
John Wheeler
Nicolaus Copernicus
Robert Fulton
Pierre Laplace
Humphry Davy
Thomas Edison
Lord Kelvin
Theodore Roosevelt
Carolus Linnaeus
- 60 -
Francis Galton
Linus Pauling
Immanuel Kant
Martin Fischer
Robert Boyle
Karl Popper
Paul Dirac
Avicenna
James Watson
William Shakespeare
- 50 -
Stephen Hawking
Niels Bohr
Nikola Tesla
Rachel Carson
Max Planck
Henry Adams
Richard Dawkins
Werner Heisenberg
Alfred Wegener
John Dalton
- 40 -
Pierre Fermat
Edward Wilson
Johannes Kepler
Gustave Eiffel
Giordano Bruno
JJ Thomson
Thomas Kuhn
Leonardo DaVinci
Archimedes
David Hume
- 30 -
Andreas Vesalius
Rudolf Virchow
Richard Feynman
James Hutton
Alexander Fleming
Emile Durkheim
Benjamin Franklin
Robert Oppenheimer
Robert Hooke
Charles Kettering
- 20 -
Carl Sagan
James Maxwell
Marie Curie
Rene Descartes
Francis Crick
Hippocrates
Michael Faraday
Srinivasa Ramanujan
Francis Bacon
Galileo Galilei
- 10 -
Aristotle
John Watson
Rosalind Franklin
Michio Kaku
Isaac Asimov
Charles Darwin
Sigmund Freud
Albert Einstein
Florence Nightingale
Isaac Newton


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