George Eliot Quotes
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Family likeness has often a deep sadness in it. Nature, that great tragic dramatist, knits us together by bone and muscle, and divides us by the subtler web of our brains; blends yearning and repulsion; and ties us by our heart-strings to the beings that jar us at every movement.
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'There's folks as make bad butter and trusten to the salt t' hide it.'
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Nice distinctions are troublesome. It is so much easier to say that a thing is black, than to discriminate the particular shade of brown, blue, or green, to which it really belongs. It is so much easier to make up your mind that your neighbour is good for nothing, than to enter into all the circumstances that would oblige you to modify that opinion.
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People are almost always better than their neighbors think they are.
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Tito was experiencing that inexorable law of human souls, that we prepare ourselves for sudden deeds by the reiterated choice of good or evil that gradually determines character.
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There was no gleam, no shadow, for the heavens, too, were one still, pale cloud; no sound or motion in anything but the dark river that flowed and moaned like an unresting sorrow.
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Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love...
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It is good to be unselfish and generous; but don't carry that too far. It will not do to give yourself to be melted down for the benefit of the tallow-trade; you must know where to find yourself.
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The soul of man, when it gets fairly rotten, will bear you all sorts of poisonous toad-stools, and no eye can see whence came the seed thereof.
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The beauty of a lovely woman is like music ... the rounded neck, the dimpled arm, move us by something more than their prettiness--by their close kinship with all we have known of tenderness and peace.
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To an old memory like mine the present days are but as a little water poured on the deep.
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People who write finely must not expect to be left in repose; they will be molested with thanks, at least.
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This is a puzzling world, and Old Harry's got a finger in it.
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... when one's outward lot is perfect, the sense of inward imperfection is the more pressing.
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Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them.
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Perhaps the windWails so in winter for the summers dead,And all sad sounds are nature's funeral criesFor what has been and is not.
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Genius ... is necessarily intolerant of fetters.
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Melodies die out, like the pipe of Pan, with the ears that love them and listen for them.
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People who love downy peaches are apt not to think of the stone, and sometimes jar their teeth terribly against it.
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One gets a bad habit of being unhappy.
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It is always good to know, if only in passing, charming human beings. It refreshes one like flowers and woods and clear brooks.
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My childhood was full of deep sorrows - colic, whooping-cough, dread of ghosts, hell, Satan, and a Deity in the sky who was angry when I ate too much plumcake.
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Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them: they can be injured by us, they can be wounded; they know all our penitence, all our aching sense that their place is empty, all the kisses we bestow on the smallest relic of their presence.
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The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.