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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| d2bc748 | It was too intolerable that Dorothea should be worshiping this husband: such weakness in a woman is pleasant to no man but the husband in question. Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour's buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder. | George Eliot | ||
| 5bb1fee | In my opinion, legal training only makes a man more incompetent in questions that require knowledge of another kind. People talk about evidence as if it could really be weighed in scales by a blind Justice. No man can judge what is good evidence on any particular subject, unless he knows that subject well. A lawyer is no better than an old woman at a post-mortem examination. | George Eliot | ||
| d8a7708 | Those slight words and looks and touches are part of the soul's language; and the finest language, I believe, is chiefly made up of unimposing words, such as "light," "sound," "stars," "music"--words really not worth looking at, or hearing, in themselves, any more than "chips" or "sawdust." It is only that they happen to be the signs of something unspeakably great and beautiful. I am of opinion that love is a great and beautiful thing too, .. | love spring | George Eliot | |
| 60217d0 | I should never like scolding any one else so well; and that is a point to be thought of in a husband. | George Eliot | ||
| 623309c | I am not quite sure whether clever men ever dance. | George Eliot | ||
| 2d26ae7 | The secret of our emotions never lies in the bare object, but in its subtle relations to our own past. | personal-history | George Eliot | |
| 873c09c | Mrs. Tulliver, as we have seen, was not without influence over her husband. No woman is; she can always incline him to do either what she wishes, or the reverse... | George Eliot | ||
| 99ce5a5 | There's no work so tirin' as danglin' about an' starin' an' not rightly knowin' what you're goin' to do next; and keepin' your face i' smilin' order like a grocer o' market-day for fear people shouldna think you civil enough. | fatigue uncertainty | George Eliot | |
| 09c4564 | Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive. | dogma mistake science | George Eliot | |
| 45bbd05 | To the receptive soul the river of life pauseth not, nor is diminished. | George Eliot | ||
| ed057e4 | There are episodes in most men's lives in which their highest qualities can only cast a deterring shadow over the objects that fill their inward version. | George Eliot | ||
| dfbe495 | The most obstinate beliefs that mortals entertain about themselves are such as they have no evidence for beyond a constant, spontaneous pulsing of their self-satisfaction--as it were a hidden seed of madness, a confidence that they can move the world without precise notion of standing-place or lever. | George Eliot | ||
| ec013ae | To be candid, in Middlemarch phraseology, meant, to use an early opportunity of letting your friends know that you did not take a cheerful view of their capacity, their conduct, or their position; and a robust candor never waited to be asked for its opinion. | correction motive prophecy | George Eliot | |
| ccb3b24 | the religion of personal fear remains nearly at the level of the savage. | George Eliot | ||
| 3d96d92 | Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some of them woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable. | George Eliot | ||
| 5755dc3 | To have taken Maggie by the hand and said, "I will not believe unproved evil of you: my lips should not utter it; my ears shall be closed against it. I, too, am an erring mortal, liable to stumble, apt to come short of my most earnest efforts. Your lot has been harder than mine, your temptation greater. Let us help each other to stand and walk without more falling -" to have done this would have demanded courage, deep pity, self-knowledge, .. | George Eliot | ||
| 89fec9e | We insignificant people with our daily words and acts are preparing the lives of many Dorotheas, some of which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that of the Dorothea whose story we know. | George Eliot | ||
| 20d317a | The intensity of her religious disposition, the coercion it exercised over her life, was but one aspect of a nature altogether ardent, theoretic, and intellectually consequent: and with such a nature struggling in the bands of a narrow teaching, hemmed in by a social life which seemed nothing but a labyrinth of petty courses, a walled-in maze of small paths that led no whither, the outcome was sure to strike others as at once exaggeration a.. | George Eliot | ||
| 58f65f4 | It is the favourite stratagem of our passions to sham a retreat, and to turn sharp round upon us at the moment we have made up our minds that the day is our own. | flesh pride | George Eliot | |
| 404b790 | A man's mind must be continually expanding and shrinking between the whole human horizon and the horizon of an object-glass. | George Eliot | ||
| cfd7c7d | Scenes which make vital changes in our neighbors' lot are but the background of our own, yet, like a particular aspect of the fields and trees, they become associated for us with the epochs of our own history, and make a part of that unity which lies in the selection of our keenest consciousness. | George Eliot | ||
| feda9a9 | Our deeds still travel with us from afar, And what we have been makes us what we are | George Eliot | ||
| 73225a1 | Doubtless some ancient Greek has observed that behind the big mask and the speaking-trumpet, there must always be our poor little eyes peeping as usual and our timorous lips more or less under anxious control. | drama masks metaphor perception self-knowledge speech theatre | George Eliot | |
| da48098 | scepticism, as we know, can never be thoroughly applied, else life would come to a standstill | George Eliot | ||
| 2f03a9a | Let thy chief terror be of thine own soul: There, 'mid the throng of hurrying desires That trample on the dead to seize their spoil, Lurks vengeance, footless, irresistible As exhalations laden with slow death, And o'er the fairest troop of captured joys Breathes pallid pestilence. | George Eliot | ||
| cd24741 | We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, 'Oh, nothing!' Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts - not to hurt others. | George Eliot | ||
| e0932ab | As Celia bent over the paper, Dorothea put her cheek against her sister's arm caressingly. Celia understood the action. Dorothea saw that she had been in the wrong, and Celia pardoned her. Since they could remember, there had been a mixture of criticism and awe in the attitude of Celia's mind towards her elder sister. The younger had always worn a yoke, but is there any yoked creature without its private opinions? | George Eliot | ||
| dc23d56 | One must be poor to know the luxury of giving! | George Eliot | ||
| f2325e5 | But a good wife--a good unworldly woman--may really help a man, and keep him more independent. | temptation | George Eliot | |
| e3eebbc | And to me it is one of the most odious things in a girl's life, that there must always be some supposition of falling in love coming between her and any man who is kind her, and to whom she is grateful. | George Eliot | ||
| 35b99e1 | So much of our early gladness vanishes utterly from our memory: we can never recall the joy with which we laid our heads on our mother's bosom or rode on our father's back in childhood. Doubtless that joy is wrought up into our nature, as the sunlight of long-past mornings is wrought up in the soft mellowness of the apricot, but it is gone for ever from our imagination, and we can only BELIEVE in the joy of childhood. | George Eliot | ||
| 727724d | He had no longer free energy enough for spontaneous research and speculative thinking, but by the bedside of patients the direct external calls on his judgment and sympathies brought the added impulse needed to draw him out of himself. It was not simply that beneficent harness of routine which enables silly men to live respectably and unhappy men to live calmly - it was a perpetual claim on the immediate fresh application of thought, and on.. | George Eliot | ||
| dc8cb73 | Mrs. Tulliver was what is called a good-tempered person,-never cried, when she was a baby, on any slighter ground than hunger and pins; and from the cradle upward had been healthy, fair, plump, and dull-witted; in short, the flower of her family for beauty and amiability. But milk and mildness are not the best things for keeping, and when they turn only a little sour, they may disagree with young stomachs seriously. I have often wondered wh.. | George Eliot | ||
| 13b8c66 | She had no tears this morning. She had wept them all away last night, and now she felt that dry-eyed morning misery, which is worse than the first shock, because it has the future in it as well as the present. Every morning to come, as far as her imagination could stretch, she would have to get up and feel that the day would have no joy for her. For there is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first grea.. | George Eliot | ||
| 4bfc7e5 | Society never made the preposterous demand that a man should think as much about his own qualifications for making a charming girl happy as he thinks of hers for making himself happy. As if a man could choose not only his wife but his wife's husband! Or as if he were bound to provide charms for his posterity in his own person! | George Eliot | ||
| df42bcb | My dear Mrs Casaubon," said Farebrother, smiling gently at her ardour, "character is not cut in marble - it is not something solid and unalterable. It is something living and changing, and may become diseased as our bodies do." "Then it may be rescued and healed," said Dorothea." | life positive-thinking | George Eliot | |
| 657e20b | People talk about evidence as if it could really be weighed in scales by a blind Justice. | George Eliot | ||
| 7e400b4 | Instead of trying to still his fears he encouraged them, with that superstitious impression which clings to us all that if we expect evil very strongly it is the less likely to come... | George Eliot | ||
| 2855d8d | That was an evil terror---- an ugly inmate to have found a nestling-place in Godfrey's kindly disposition; but no disposition is a security from evil wishes to a man whose happiness hangs on duplicity. | happiness | George Eliot | |
| 6803893 | Vanity is as ill at ease under indifference as tenderness is under a love which it cannot return. | George Eliot | ||
| e2705bd | One gets a bad habit of being unhappy. | George Eliot | ||
| 084a786 | I don't see how a man is to be good for much unless he has some one woman to love him dearly.' 'I think the goodness should come before he expects that. | George Eliot | ||
| 223094d | When we are treated well, we naturally begin to think that we are not altogether unmeritous, and that it is only just we should treat ourselves well, and not mar our own good fortune. | George Eliot | ||
| 468f523 | Timid people always reek their peevishness on the gentle. | fear wrath | George Eliot |