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Truth is the precious harvest of the earth. But once, when harvest waved upon a land, The noisome cankerworm and caterpillar, Locusts, and all the swarming foul-born broods, Fastened upon it with swift, greedy jaws, And turned the harvest into pestilence, Until men said, What profits it to sow?
George Eliot -
Genius ... is necessarily intolerant of fetters.
George Eliot
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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.
George Eliot -
It was a room where you had no reason for sitting in one place rather than in another.
George Eliot -
Plainness has its peculiar temptations and vices quite as much as beauty.
George Eliot -
People who love downy peaches are apt not to think of the stone, and sometimes jar their teeth terribly against it.
George Eliot -
‘Why, what can a man do when he takes to adoring one of you mermaids? He only neglects his work and runs up bills.’
George Eliot -
... when one's outward lot is perfect, the sense of inward imperfection is the more pressing.
George Eliot
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People who write finely must not expect to be left in repose; they will be molested with thanks, at least.
George Eliot -
It is always good to know, if only in passing, charming human beings. It refreshes one like flowers and woods and clear brooks.
George Eliot -
the rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families . . .
George Eliot -
But veracity is a plant of paradise, and the seeds have never flourished beyond the walls.
George Eliot -
No farther will I travel: once again My brethren I will see, and that fair plain Where I and song were born. There fresh-voiced youth Will pour my strains with all the early truth Which now abides not in my voice and hands, But only in the soul, the will that stands Helpless to move. My tribe remembering Will cry, ''Tis he!' and run to greet me, welcoming.
George Eliot -
It is not true that a man's intellectual power is, like the strength of a timber beam, to be measured by its weakest point.
George Eliot
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If a man means to be hard, let him keep in his saddle and speak from that height, above the level of pleading eyes, and with the command of a distant horizon.
George Eliot -
We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it...
George Eliot -
I take a dose of mathematics every day to prevent my brain from becoming quite soft.
George Eliot -
The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.
George Eliot -
These bitter sorrows of childhood! when sorrow is all new and strange, when hope has not yet got wings to fly beyond the days and weeks, and the space from summer to summer seems measureless.
George Eliot -
Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand - ...
George Eliot
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With memory set smarting like a reopened wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.
George Eliot -
Her heart lived in no cherished secrets of its own, but in feelings which it longed to share with all the world.
George Eliot -
when a man had deserved his good luck, it was the part of his neighbours to wish him joy.
George Eliot -
What a wretched lot of old shrivelled creatures we shall be by-and-by. Never mind - the uglier we get in the eyes of others, the lovelier we shall be to each other; that has always been my firm faith about friendship.
George Eliot