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9656a3a
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Mr. Craig was not above talking politics occasionally, though he piqued himself rather on a wise insight than on specific information.
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politics
opinion
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George Eliot |
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0cf0256
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Not at all," said Dorothea, with the most open kindness. "I like you very much." Will was not quite contented, thinking that he would apparently have been of more importance if he had been disliked. He said nothing, but looked dull, not to say sulky."
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liked
importance
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George Eliot |
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de1ae3a
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But we are frightened at much that is not strictly conceivable.
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unseen
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George Eliot |
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f1f5933
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But, for the point of wisdom, I would choose / To know the mind that stirs between the wings / Of bees...
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George Eliot |
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91ff8bc
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It is a mere cowardice to seek safety in negations. No character becomes strong in that way. You will be thrown into the world some day and then every rational satisfaction your nature that you deny now will assault like a savage appetite.
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fear
life
inconfidence
rationalism
weakness
emotions
decisions
safety
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George Eliot |
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4bee96f
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A man with an affectionate disposition, who finds a wife to concur with his fundamental idea of life, easily comes to persuade himself that no other woman would have suited him so well, and does a little daily snapping and quarreling without any sense of alienation.
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George Eliot |
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27c3414
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But no story is the same to us after a lapse of time-- or rather, we who read it are no longer the same interpreters.
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George Eliot |
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fe5eb3a
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Dorothea was not only his wife: she was a personification of that shallow world which surrounds the appreciated or desponding author.
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George Eliot |
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af63679
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Let any lady who is inclined to be hard on Mrs. Cadwallader inquire into the comprehensiveness of her own beautiful views and be quite sure that they afford accommodation for all the lives which have the honour to coexist with hers.
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George Eliot |
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14ced82
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At all events, it is certain that if any medicinal man had come to Middlemarch with the reputation of having very definite religious views, of being given to prayer, and of otherwise showing an active piety, there would have been a general presumption against his medical skill.
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George Eliot |
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644bad6
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You must be sure of two things: you must love your work, and not be always looking over the edge of it, wanting your play to begin.
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George Eliot |
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4612fcc
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The only conscience we can trust to is the massive sense of wrong in a class, and the best wisdom that will work is the wisdom of balancing claims. That's my text--which side is injured? I support the man who supports their claims, not the virtuous upholder of the wrong.
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George Eliot |
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8aeea61
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Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy:--in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures. To glory in a prophetic vision of knowledge covering the earth, is an easier exercise of believing imagination than to see its beginning in newspaper placards, staring at you from the bridge beyond the corn-fields; and it might well happen to most of us dainty people that we were in the..
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George Eliot |
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0a9f843
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It is offensive to tell a lady when she is expressing her amazement at your skill, that she is altogether mistaken and rather foolish in her amazement.
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George Eliot |
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fd5399a
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Imagination is often truer than fact," said Gwendolen, decisively, though she could no more have explained these glib words than if they had been Coptic or Etruscan. "I shall be so glad to learn all about Tasso--and his madness especially. I suppose poets are always a little mad." "To be sure--'the poet's eye in a fine frenzy rolling'; and somebody says of Marlowe-- 'For that fine madness still he did maintain, Which always should possess t..
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George Eliot |
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b54a00a
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She felt that she was beginning to know the pang of disappointed love, and that no other man could be the occasion of such delightful aerial building as she had been enjoying for the last six months.
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George Eliot |
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b9bad56
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Having once embarked on your marital voyage, it is impossible not to be aware that you make no way and that the sea is not within sight--that, in fact, you are exploring an enclosed basin.
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George Eliot |
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dc58944
|
Her shrewdness had a streak of satiric bitterness continually renewed and never carried utterly out of sight, except by a strong current of gratitude towards those who, instead of telling her that she ought to be contented, did something to make her so.
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George Eliot |
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ea653e1
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When a conversation has taken a wrong turn for us, we only get farther and farther into the swamp of awkwardness.
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George Eliot |
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b87ee48
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Our consciences are not all of the same pattern, an inner deliverance of fixed laws: they are the voice of sensibilities as various as our memories.
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George Eliot |
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057477b
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I don't mean your resentment toward them," said Philip... "I mean your extending the enmity to a helpless girl, who has too much sense and goodness to share their narrow prejudices. She has never entered into the family quarrels." "What does that signify? We don't ask what a woman does; we ask whom she belongs to. It's altogether a degrading thing to you, to think of marrying old Tulliver's daughter."
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George Eliot |
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e060d49
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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. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.
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George Eliot |
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8f91921
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Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning.
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George Eliot |
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6f10d7b
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It is a wonderful subduer, this need of love--this hunger of the heart--as peremptory as that other hunger by which Nature forces us to submit to the yoke, and change the face of the world.
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George Eliot |
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3ffa94a
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it had already occurred to him that books were stuff, and that life was stupid.
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George Eliot |
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05ccce8
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On both occasions Fred had felt confident that he should meet the bill himself, having ample funds at disposal in his own hopefulness. You will hardly demand that his confidence should have a basis in external facts; such confidence, we know, is something less coarse and materialistic: it is a comfortable disposition leading us to expect that the wisdom of providence or the folly of our friends, the mysteries of luck or the still greater my..
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George Eliot |
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deeb8af
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This awakening of a new interest--this passing from the supposition that we hold the right opinions on a subject we are careless about, to a sudden care for it, and a sense that our opinions were ignorance--is an effectual remedy for ennui, which, unhappily, cannot be secured on a physician's prescription;
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George Eliot |
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c802bb1
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Whatever else she might be, she was not disagreeable. She was not coldly clever and indirectly satirical, but adorably simple and full of feeling. She was an angel beguiled. It would be a unique delight to wait and watch for the melodious fragments in which her heart and soul came forth so directly and ingenuously.
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George Eliot |
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2fb1eb2
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It is strange how deeply colors seem to penetrate one, like scent. I suppose that is the reason why gems are used as spiritual emblems in the Revelation of St John. They look like fragments of heaven. I think the emerald is more beautiful than any of them.
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romance-of-stones
middlemarch
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George Eliot |
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afae798
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If a princess in the days of enchantment had seen a four-footed creature from among those which live in herds come to her once and again with a human gaze which rested upon her with choice and beseeching, what would she think of in her journeying, what would she look for when the herds passed her? Surely for the gaze which had found her, and which she would know again.
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George Eliot |
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c49b0ba
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Many men have been praised as vividly imaginative on the strength of their profuseness in indifferent drawing or cheap narration:--reports of very poor talk going on in distant orbs; or portraits of Lucifer coming down on his bad errands as a large ugly man with bat's wings and spurts of phosphorescence; or exaggerations of wantonness that seem to reflect life in a diseased dream. But these kinds of inspirations Lydgate regarded as rather v..
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George Eliot |
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8f0c5bb
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What's broke can never be whole again.
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George Eliot |
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739dd5b
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Maggie felt an unexpected pang. She had thought beforehand chiefly at her own deliverance from her teasing hair and teasing remarks about it, and something also of the triumph she should have over her mother and her aunts by this very decided course of action; she didn't want her hair to look pretty,-that was out of the question,-she only wanted people to think her a clever little girl, and not to find fault with her. But now, when Tom bega..
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George Eliot |
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5b58cc3
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I think there are stores laid up in our human nature that our understandings can make no complete inventory of.
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George Eliot |
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f336024
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Her imagination was not easily acted on, but she could not help thinking that her case was a hard one, since it appeared that other people thought it hard.
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George Eliot |
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2ba0eb1
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But oppositions have the illimitable range of objections at command, which need never stop short at the boundary of knowledge, but can draw forever on the vasts of ignorance.
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George Eliot |
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e1f41c0
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These familiar flowers, these well-remembered bird-notes, this sky, with its fitful brightness, these furrowed and grassy fields, each with a sort of personality given to it by the capricious hedgerows--such things as these are the mother-tongue of our imagination, the language that is laden with all the subtle, inextricable associations the fleeting hours of our childhood left behind them. Our delight in the sunshine on the deep-bladed gra..
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George Eliot |
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aca843d
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A perfectly sane intellect is hardly at home in this insane world.
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George Eliot |
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4ff3ef5
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Poor child! it was very early for her to know one of those supreme moments in life when all we have hoped or delighted in, all we can dread or endure, falls away from our regard as insignificant; is lost, like a trivial memory, in that simple, primitive love which knits us to the beings who have been nearest to us, in their times of helplessness or of anguish.
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George Eliot |
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b27c51e
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You are a poem--and that is to be the best part of a poet--what makes up the poet's consciousness in his best moods.
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poetry
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George Eliot |
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31ededa
|
it is in these acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are forever wasted, until men and women look round with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste has made, and say, the earth bears no harvest of sweetness--calling their denial knowledge.
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George Eliot |
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c198355
|
Described by Harold Bloom as "the beginning of the end of the traditional novel of social morality" (xii), George Eliot's Middlemarch is nonetheless replete with a kind of authorial intervention that modern readers might find tiresome. Readers today are accustomed to the contemporary fictional maxim of "show, don't tell" but Eliot had different aesthetic ideas, for she always tells us right away who we are dealing with. At the beginning of ..
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George Eliot |
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2467d87
|
I have often felt since I have been in Rome that most of our lives would look much uglier and more bungling than the pictures, if they could be put on the wall." Dorothea" --
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George Eliot |
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c2afa9a
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Solomon's Proverbs, I think, have omitted to say, that as the sore palate findeth grit, so an uneasy consciousness heareth innuendoes.
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George Eliot |