George Eliot Quotes
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Men and women make sad mistakes about their own symptoms, taking their vague uneasy longings, sometimes for genius, sometimes for religion, and oftener still for a mighty love.
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The natur o' things doesn't change, though it seems as if one's own life was nothing but change. The square o' four is sixteen, and you must lengthen your lever in proportion to your weight, is as true when a man's miserable as when he's happy; and the best o' working is, it gives you a grip hold o' things outside your own lot'.
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There's folks 'ud hold a sieve under the pump and expect to carry away the water.
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There is no sort of wrong deed of which a man can bear the punishment alone; you can't isolate yourself and say that the evil that is in you shall not spread. Men's lives are as thoroughly blended with each other as the air they breathe; evil spreads as necessarily as disease.
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Such patience have the heroes who begin, Sailing the first toward lands which others win. Jubal must dare as great beginners dare, Strike form's first way in matter rude and bare, And, yearning vaguely toward the plenteous choir Of the world's harvest, make one poor small lyre.
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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 a subject for panegyric.
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You told me the truth when you said to me once, 'There's a sort of wrong that can never be made up for'.
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You should read history and look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of thing. They always happen to the best men, you know.
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There comes a night when all too late The mind shall long to prompt the achieving hand, The eager thought behind closed portals stand, And the last wishes to the mute lips press Buried ere death in silent helplessness.
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Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled egg; and when it takes to cackling will have nothing to announce but that addled delusion.
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Satan was a blunderer ... who made a stupendous failure. If he had succeeded, we should all have been worshipping him, and his portrait would have been more flattering.
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In travelling I shape myself betimes to idleness And take fools' pleasure.
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Quick souls have their intensest life in the first anticipatory sketch of what may or will be, and the pursuit of their wish is the pursuit of that paradisiacal vision which only impelled them, and is left farther and farther behind, vanishing forever even out of hope in the moment which is called success.
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Certain winds will make men's temper bad.
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Conscience is harder than our enemies, Knows more, accuses with more nicety.
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To superficial observers his chin had too vanishing an aspect, looking as if it were being gradually reabsorbed. And it did indeed cause him some difficulty about the fit of his satin stocks, for which chins were at that time useful.
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I'm proof against that word failure. I've seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.
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Conscientious people are apt to see their duty in that which is the most painful course.
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The difficulty is, to decide how far resolution should set in the direction of activity rather than in the acceptance of a more negative state.
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The yoke a man creates for himself by wrong-doing will breed hate in the kindliest nature; . . .
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The blessed work of helping the world forward, happily does not wait to be done by perfect men.
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He had a sense that the old man meant to be good-natured and neighbourly; but 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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The best augury of a man's success in his profession is that he thinks it the finest in the world.
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The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another.