“What destroys us most effectively is not a malign fate but our own capacity for self-deception and for degrading our own best self.”
More from George Eliot on Philosophy
“For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it.”
“She hates everything that is not what she longs for.”
“No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.”
“And certainly, the mistakes that we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly raise some wonder that we are so fond of it.”
“If a man has a capacity for great thoughts, he is likely to overtake them before he is decrepit.”
“Ignorance gives one a large range of probabilities.”
“One’s self-satisfaction is an untaxed kind of property which it is very unpleasant to find deprecated.”
“The devil tempts us not; 'tis we who tempt him, beckoning his skill with opportunity.”
“For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them.”
“Self-consciousness of the manner is the expensive substitute for simplicity.”
Others on Philosophy
Ludwig Wittgenstein
22 quotes“The logic of the world is prior to all truth and falsehood.”
Christopher Hitchens
22 quotes“How much vanity must be concealed – not too effectively at that – in order to pretend that one is the personal object of...”
Nietzsche
22 quotes“One does not hate as long as one has a low esteem of someone, but only when one esteems him as an equal or a superior.”
Carl Jung
21 quotes“The pendulum of the mind oscillates between sense and nonsense, not between right and wrong.”
Immanuel Kant
20 quotes“Morality is not the doctrine of how we may make ourselves happy, but how we may make ourselves worthy of happiness.”
Heraclitus
19 quotes“All things flow nothing abides.”
H. L. Mencken
17 quotes“We are here and it is now. Further than that, all human knowledge is moonshine.”
C.S. Lewis
15 quotes“[Consciousness] is either inexplicable illusion, or else revelation.”
Fyodor Dostoevsky
14 quotes“Consciousness is man's greatest misfortune, still I know that man loves it and will not exchange it for any satisfaction...”
Samuel Beckett
14 quotes“The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.”
Napoleon
14 quotes“Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.”
Isaac Asimov
13 quotes“Society is much more easily soothed than one's own conscience.”