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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 6a1b92e | It is our habit to say that while the lower nature can never understand the higher, the higher nature commands a complete view of the lower. But I think the higher nature has to learn this comprehension, as we learn the art of vision, by a good deal of hard experience, often with bruises and gashes incurred in taking things up by the wrong end, and fancying our space wider than it is. | George Eliot | ||
| 790437f | there are always people who can't forgive an able man for differing from them. | George Eliot | ||
| c85e99a | Anxiety is good for nothing if we can't turn it into a defense. | george eliot | ||
| 03824ae | Some gentlemen have made an amazing figure in literature by general discontent with the universe as a trap of dulness into which their great souls have fallen by mistake; but the sense of a stupendous self and an insignificant world may have its consolations. Lydgate's discontent was much harder to bear; it was the sense that there was a grand existence in thought and effective action lying around him, while his self was being narrowed into.. | George Eliot | ||
| 0370e40 | Miss Lucy's called the bell o' St. Ogg's, they say: that's a cur'ous word,' observed Mr. Pullet, on whom the mysteries of etymology sometimes fell with an oppressive weight. | George Eliot | ||
| ddc9dd8 | Author describes one character's optimism as, that quiet well-being which perhaps you and I have felt on a sunny afternoon when, in our brightest youth and health, life has opened a new vista for us, and long to-morrows of activity have stretched before us like a lovely plain which there was no need for hurrying to look at, because it was all our own. | potential youth | George Eliot | |
| 2d7e098 | For the fragment of a life, however typical, is not the sample of an even web: promises may not be kept, and an ardent outset may be followed by declension; latent powers may find their long-awaited opportunity; a past error may urge a grand retrieval. | epilogue finale | George Eliot | |
| 9cdec0a | Even when she was speaking, her soul was in prayer reposing on an unseen support. | speech | George Eliot | |
| 08362dd | As the child's mind was growing into knowledge, his mind was growing into memory: as her life unfolded, his soul, long stupefied in a cold, narrow prison, was unfolding too, and trembling gradually into full consciousness. | George Eliot | ||
| 0308fd2 | I thought it was all over with me, and there was nothing to try for-only things to endure. | George Eliot | ||
| 40904d6 | When a homemaking aunt scolds a niece for following her evangelistic passion instead of domestic pursuits, her reply is interesting. First, she clarifies that God's individual call on her doesn't condemn those in more conventional roles. Then, she says she can no more ignore the cry of the lost than her aunt can the cry of her child. | evangelism | George Eliot | |
| d03f895 | He was conscious of being irritated by ridiculously small causes, which were half of his own creation. Why was he making any fuss about Mrs. Casaubon? And yet he felt as if something had happened to him with regard to her. There are characters which are continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them. Their susceptibilities will clash against objects that remain innocently quiet. | George Eliot | ||
| 7944e8a | We are poor plants buoyed up by the air-vessels of our own conceit: alas for us, if we get a few pinches that empty us of that windy self-subsistence! The very capacity for good would go out of us. For, tell the most impassioned orator, suddenly, that his wig is awry, or his shirt-lap hanging out, and that he is tickling people by the oddity of his person, instead of thrilling them by the energy of his periods, and you would infallibly dry .. | George Eliot | ||
| 4f07c40 | Love gives insight, Maggie, and insight often gives foreboding. Listen to me, let me supply you with books; do let me see you sometimes, be your brother and teacher, as you said at Lorton. It is less wrong that you should see me than that you should be committing this long suicide. | bookish caring compassion foreboding gentleman insight love suicide wrong | George Eliot | |
| b571cbf | If you could only speak the devil fair enough, he might save you the cost of the doctor. Such strange lingering echoes of the old demon-worship might perhaps even now be caught by the diligent listener among the grey-haired peasantry; for the rude mind with difficulty associates the ideas of power and benignity. A shadowy conception of power that by much persuasion can be induced to refrain from inflicting harm, is the shape most easily tak.. | George Eliot | ||
| 930546f | Conceive the condition of the human mind if all propositions whatsoever were self-evident except one, which was to become self-evident at the close of a summer's day, but in the meantime might be the subject of question, of hypothesis, of debate. Art and philosophy, literature and science, would fasten like bees on that one proposition which had the honey of probability in it, and be the more eager because their enjoyment would end with sun.. | George Eliot | ||
| 6a056bf | Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life--the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it--can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances. | happier-times intellectual middlemarch misery pain | George Eliot | |
| 3c96a02 | In the chill hours of the morning twilight, when all was dim around her, she awoke--not with any amazed wondering where she was or what had happened, but with the clearest consciousness that she was looking into the eyes of sorrow. She rose, and wrapped warm things around her, and seated herself in a great chair where she had often watched before. She was vigorous enough to have borne that hard night without feeling ill in body, beyond some.. | George Eliot | ||
| 54cc9a2 | Ruins and basilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst of a sordid present, where all that was living and warm-blooded seemed sunk in the deep degeneracy of a superstition divorced from reverence; the dimmer but yet eager titanic life gazing and struggling on walls and ceilings; the long vistas of white forms whose marble eyes seemed to hold the monotonous light of an alien world--all this vast wreck of ambitious ideals, sensuous and sp.. | George Eliot | ||
| dd32e17 | A man carries within him the germ of his most exceptional action; and if we wise people make eminent fools of ourselves on any particular occasion, we must endure the legitimate conclusion that we carry a few grains of folly to our ounce of wisdom. | fallibility | George Eliot | |
| 457b89d | We may handle even extreme opinions with impunity while our furniture, our dinner giving, and preference for armorial bearings in our own case link us indissolubly with the established order. | George Eliot | ||
| c541e29 | That is beautiful mysticism, it is a--" "Please not to call it by any name," said Dorothea, putting out her hands entreatingly. "You will say it is Persian, or something geographical. It is my life. I have found it out and cannot part with it." | George Eliot | ||
| b0ca0f3 | The sense of security more frequently springs from habit than from conviction, and for this reason it often subsists after such a change in the conditions as might have been expected to suggest alarm. The lapse of time during which a given event has not happened, is, in this logic of habit, constantly alleged as a reason why the event should never happen, even when the lapse of time is precisely the added condition which makes the event imm.. | George Eliot | ||
| d11e04d | She seated herself on a dark ottoman with the brown books behind her, looking in her plain dress of some thin woollen-white material, without a single ornament on her besides her wedding-ring, as if she were under a vow to be different from all other women; and Will sat down opposite her at two yards' distance, the light falling on his bright curls and delicate but rather petulant profile, with its defiant curves of lip and chin. Each looke.. | George Eliot | ||
| 94830e0 | A woman may get to love by degrees--the best fire does not flare up the soonest. | passion patience timing | George Eliot | |
| bdefb82 | people were so ridiculous with their illusions, carrying their fool's caps unawares, thinking their own lies opaque while everybody else's were transparent, making themselves exceptions to everything, as if when all the world looked yellow under a lamp they alone were rosy. | George Eliot | ||
| 2f1e7e3 | That was the way with Casaubon's hard intellectual labours. Their most characteristic result was not the 'Key to all Mythologies', but a morbid consciousness that others did not give him the place which he had not demonstrably merited - a perpetual suspicious conjecture that the views entertained of him were not to his advantage - a melancholy absence of passion in his efforts at achievement, and a passionate resistance to the confession th.. | intellect validation | George Eliot | |
| 9c4d2ab | But he had something else to curse--his own viscious folly, which now seemed as mad and unaccountable to him as almost all our follies and vices do when their promptings have long passed away. | George Eliot | ||
| eb1a3a1 | We are poor plants buoyed up by the air-vessels of our own conceit: alas for us, if we get a few pinches that empty us of that windy self-subsistence. | George Eliot | ||
| 54f2165 | Each lived in a world of which the other knew nothing. | individual introvert | George Eliot | |
| 9f8514e | Follows here the strict receipt For that sauce to faint meat, Named idleness, which many eat By preference, and call it sweet: First watch for morsels, like a hound Mix well with buffets, stir them round With good thick oil of flattered, And froth with mean self-lauding lies. Serve warm: the vessels you must choose To keep it in are dead men's shoes. | George Eliot | ||
| 39c619d | Every man's work, pursued steadily, tends in this way to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life. | work writing | George Eliot | |
| 197645b | The brethren sometimes err in measuring the Divine love by the sinner's knowledge. | gods-love | George Eliot | |
| 82826da | Though there's reasons in things as nobody knows on---- that's pretty much what I've made out; yet some folks are so wise they'll find you fifty reasons straight off, and all the while the real reason's winking at 'em in the corner, and they niver see't. | wisdom | George Eliot | |
| e9183f4 | Our consciousness rarely registers the beginning of a growth within us any more than without us: there have been many circulations of the sap before we detect the smallest sign of the bud. | George Eliot | ||
| 74927da | I suppose it's the name: there's a deal in the name of a tune. | names | George Eliot | |
| 56e633b | She] looked as if her nerves were quivering with the expectation that something would be thrown at her. But she never had anything worse than words to dread. | George Eliot | ||
| 0599ea4 | He was one of those men, and they are not the commonest, of whom we can know the best only by following them away from the marketplace, the platform, and the pulpit, entering with them into their own homes, hearing the voice with which they speak to the young and aged about their own hearthstone, and witnessing their thoughtful care for the everyday wants of everyday companions, who take all their kindness as a matter of course, and not as .. | humility lifestyle relationships | George Eliot | |
| 98f204a | Happiness is endless hapiness, innocent of its own sure passing. Pain is endless pain. | Tobias Wolff | ||
| f6fad66 | You can't be selfish. But we men-it's a wonder we forget ourselves long enough to buy a birthday card. As for love... we can love, but we're always forgetting. | Tobias Wolff | ||
| 438ff83 | It was like fishing a swamp, where you feel the tug of something that at first seems promising and then resistant and finally hopeless as you realize that you've snagged the bottom, that you have the whole planet on the other end of your line. | Tobias Wolff | ||
| 86da3df | That room - once you enter it, you never really leave. You can forget you're there, you can go on as if you hold the reins, that the course of your life, yeah even its length, will reflect the force of your character and the wisdom of your judgments. And then you hit an icy path on a turn one sunny March day and the wheel in your hands becomes a joke and you no more than a spectator to your own dreamy slide toward the verge, and then you re.. | Tobias Wolff | ||
| f1168ff | Colonisation is violence, and there are many ways to carry out that violence. In addition to military and administrative chiefs and a veritable army of churchmen, the Belgians dispatched scientists to Rwanda. The scientists brought scales and measuring tapes and callipers, and they went about weighing Rwandans, measuring Rwandan cranial capacities, and conducting comparative analyses of the relative protuberance of Rwandan noses. Sure enoug.. | Philip Gourevitch | ||
| f94d7c0 | So there is responsibility. I cry, you cry. We all come running, and the one that stays quiet, the one that stays home, must explain. Is he in league with the criminals? Is he a coward? And what would he exect when he cries? This is simple. This is normal. This is community. | Philip Gourevitch |