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2e79078
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There are conditions under which the most majestic person is obliged to sneeze, and our emotions are liable to be acted on in the same incongruous manner.
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George Eliot |
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324db60
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I'm determined to read no more books where the blond-haired women carry away all the happiness.
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George Eliot |
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7d37b79
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Joy and peace are not resignation: resignation is the willing endurance of a pain that is not allayed - that you don't expect to be allayed. Stupefaction is not resignation: and it is stupefaction to remain in ignorance - to shut up all the avenues by which the life of your fellow-men might become known to you. I am not resigned: I am not sure that life is long enough to learn that lesson. You are not resigned: you are only trying to stupef..
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George Eliot |
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36088a0
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That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, was certainly not the last of her kind. Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lig..
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George Eliot |
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3df0fd5
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Uncomfortable thoughts must be got rid of by good intentions for the future,
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wishing
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George Eliot |
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f878ca9
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Who with repentance is not satisfied, is not of heaven, nor earth.
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George Eliot |
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176c03d
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Language gives a fuller image, which is all the better for beings vague. After all, the true seeing is within; and painting stares at you with an insistent imperfection. I feel that especially about representations of women. As if a woman were a mere colored superficies! You must wait for movement and tone. There is a difference in their very breathing: they change from moment to moment.
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George Eliot |
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ceefdbd
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If you had a table spread for a feast, and was making merry with your friends, you would think it was kind to let me come and sit down and rejoice with you, because you'd think I should like to share those good things; but I should like better to share in your trouble and your labour.
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grief
empathy
friendship
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George Eliot |
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f13d701
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there are many blanks left in the weeks of courtship, which a loving faith fills with happy assurance.
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George Eliot |
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a3c8fe9
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Those who have been indulged by fortune and have always thought of calamity as what happens to others, feel a blinding credulous rage at the reversal of their lot and half believe that their wild cries will alter the course of the storm.
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George Eliot |
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2713bb6
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The wit of a family is usually best received among strangers.
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George Eliot |
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0ccd40a
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He was a quick fellow, and when hot from play, would toss himself in a corner, and in five minutes be deep in any sort of book that he could lay his hands on: if it were Rasselas or Gulliver, so much the better, but Bailey's Dictionary would do, or the Bible with the Apocrypha in it. Something he must read, when he was not riding the pony, or running and hunting, or listening to the talk of men. All this was true of him at ten years of age;..
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George Eliot |
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d682e02
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I used to come from the village with all that dirt and coarse ugliness like a pain within me, and the simpering pictures in the drawing-room seemed to me like a wicked attempt to find delight in what is false, while we don't mind how hard the truth is for the neighbors outside our walls. I think we have no right to come forward and urge wider changes for good, until we have tried to alter the evils which lie under our own hands.
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George Eliot |
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5c56c00
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But any one watching keenly the stealthy convergence of human lots, sees a slow preparation of effects from one life on another, which tells like a calculated irony on the indifference or the frozen stare with which we look at our unintroduced neighbor. Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded in her hand.
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George Eliot |
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151d529
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Everything is all one - that is the beginning and end with you.
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George Eliot |
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7697679
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We cannot speak a loyal word and be meanly silent, we cannot kill and not kill in the same moment; but a moment is room wide enough for the loyal and mean desire, for the outlash of a murderous thought and the sharp bakcward stroke of repetance.
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life
inspirational
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George Eliot |
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920a5ae
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Her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible,--or from one of our elder poets,--in a paragraph of to-day's newspaper.
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dignity
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George Eliot |
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8594c13
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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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b81f076
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In Rome it seems as if there were so many things which are more wanted in the world than pictures.
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want
rome
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George Eliot |
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f5e9547
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Fred dislikes the idea going into the ministry partly because he doesn't like "feeling obligated to look serious", and he centers his doubts on "what people expect of a clergyman"."
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ministry
popularity
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George Eliot |
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83e8b97
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Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing was, than simply to know it; for conjecture soon became more confident than knowledge, and had a more liberal allowance for the incompatible.
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knowledge
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George Eliot |
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db78218
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But it is one thing to like defiance, and another thing to like its consequences.
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George Eliot |
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d1fef86
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Dorothea, with all her eagerness to know the truths of life, retained very childlike ideas about marriage. She felt sure that she would have accepted the judicious Hooker, if she had been born in time to save him from that wretched mistake he made in matrimony; or John Milton when his blindness had come on; or any of the other great men whose odd habits it would have been glorious piety to endure; but an amiable handsome baronet, who said "..
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marriage
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George Eliot |
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1001ea6
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Mary was fond of her own thoughts, and could amuse herself well sitting in twilight with her hands in her lap; for, having early had strong reason to believe that things were not likely to be arranged for her peculiar satisfaction, she wasted no time in astonishment and annoyance at that fact. And she had already come to take life very much as a comedy in which she had a proud, nay, a generous resolution not to act the mean or treacherous p..
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George Eliot |
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7a34ebe
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Yes! Thank God; human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty--it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it... There are few prophets in the world; few sublimely beautiful women; few heroes. I can't afford to give all my love and reverence to such rarities: I want a great deal of those feelings for my every-day fellow-men, especially for the few in the foreground of the great multitude..
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love
feeling
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George Eliot |
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3a36d7e
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If there is an angel who records the sorrows of men as well as their sins, he knows how many and deep are the sorrows that spring from false ideas for which no man is culpable.
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silas-marner
sorrows
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George Eliot |
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b4b45ac
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Let even an affectionate Goliath get himself tied to a small tender thing, dreading to hurt it by pulling, and dreading still more to snap the cord, and which of the two, pray, will be master?
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George Eliot |
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474d66d
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I can't bear fishing. I think people look like fools sitting watching a line hour after hour--or else throwing and throwing, and catching nothing.
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George Eliot |
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826734f
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It is one of the secrets in that change of mental poise which has been fitly named conversion, that to many among us neither heaven nor earth has any revelation till some personality touches theirs with a peculiar influence, subduing them into receptiveness..
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George Eliot |
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70bbab5
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They had entered the thorny wilderness, and the golden gates of their childhood had for ever closed behind them.
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youth
growing-up
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George Eliot |
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fb01f39
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Sane people did what their neighbours did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.
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middlemarch
small-town-life
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George Eliot |
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06fadeb
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It is a common sentence that Knowledge is power; but who hath duly Considered or set forth the power of Ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down. Knowledge, through patient and frugal centuries, enlarges discovery and makes record of it; Ignorance, wanting its day's dinner, lights a fire with the record, and gives a flavor to its one roast with the burned souls of many generations. Knowledge, instructing th..
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George Eliot |
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9d69056
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Does any one suppose that private prayer is necessarily candid--necessarily goes to the roots of action? Private prayer is inaudible speech, and speech is representative: who can represent himself just as he is, even in his own reflections?
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self-justification
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George Eliot |
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4c21caa
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Our sweet illusions are half of them conscious illusions, like effects of colour that we know to be made up of tinsel, broken glass and rags.
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George Eliot |
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55b392a
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Our good depends on the quality and breadth of our emotions.
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George Eliot |
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975ebba
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She felt that she enjoyed it [horseback riding] in a pagan, sensuous way, and always looked forward to renouncing it.
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George Eliot |
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47031d1
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Bodily haste and exertion usually leave our thoughts very much at the mercy of our feelings and imagination.
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depression
fatigue
emotions
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George Eliot |
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3795f56
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There may be coarse hypocrites, who consciously affect beliefs and emotions for the sake of gulling the world, but Bulstrode was not one of them. He was simply a man whose desires had been stronger than his theoretic beliefs, and who had gradually explained the gratification of his desires into satisfactory agreement with those beliefs. If this be hypocrisy, it is a process which shows itself occasionally in us all....
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George Eliot |
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8348ee9
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How can a man's candour be seen in all its lustre unless he has a few failings to talk of? But he had an agreeable confidence that his faults were all of a generous kind--impetuous, arm-blooded, leonine; never crawling, crafty, reptilian.
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depravity
self-deception
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George Eliot |
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99aa035
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I suppose one reason why we are seldom able to comfort our neighbours with our words is that our good will gets adulterated, in spite of ourselves, before it can pass our lips. We can send black puddings and pettitoes without giving them a flavour of our own egoism; but language is a stream that is almost sure to smack of a mingled soil.
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George Eliot |
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bc5cf03
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The kindness fell on him as sunshine falls on the wretched - he had no heart to taste it, and felt that it was very far off him.
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George Eliot |
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fb65423
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It was one of those dangerous moments when speech is at once sincere and deceptive, when feeling, rising high above its average depth, leaves flood-marks which are never reached again.
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metaphor
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George Eliot |
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1450ae6
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More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.
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George Eliot |
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cbccfac
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I magnified, as usual, the impression any word or deed of mine could produce on others.
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George Eliot |