George Eliot Quotes
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Things are achieved when they are well begun.
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The presence of a noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger, quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in the wholeness of our character.
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It is a common sentence that Knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of Ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down. Knowledge, through patient and frugal centuries, enlarges discovery and makes record of it; Ignorance, wanting its day's dinner, lights a fire with the record, and gives a flavour to its one roast with the burnt souls of many generations.
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We have no right to come forward and urge wider changes for good, until we have tried to alter the evils which lie under our own hands.
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We are not apt to fear for the fearless, when we are companions in their danger.
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People who live at a distance are naturally less faulty than those immediately under our own eyes.
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Don't seem to he on the lookout for crows, else you'll set other people watching.
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The usual attitude of Christians towards Jews is - I hardly know whether to say more impious or more stupid, when viewed in the light of their professed principles. ... They hardly know Christ was a Jew. And I find men, educated, supposing that Christ spoke Greek. To my feeling, this deadness to the history which has prepared half our world for us, this inability to find interest in any form of life that is not clad in the same coat-tails and flounces as our own, lies very close to the worst kind of irreligion.
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All things except reason and order are possible with a mob.
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It is necessary to me, not simply to be but to utter, and I require utterance of my friends.
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There is hardly any mental misery worse than that of having our own serious phrases, our own rooted beliefs, caricatured by a charlatan or a hireling.
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No eye saw him, while with loving pride Each voice with each in praise of Jubal vied. Must he in conscious trance, dumb, helpless lie While all that ardent kindred passed him by? His flesh cried out to live with living men, And join that soul which to the inward ken Of all the hymning train was present there.
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I desire no future that will break the ties of the past.
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Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.
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The tale of the Divine Pity was never yet believed from lips that were not felt to be moved by human pity.
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Until every good man is brave, we must expect to find many good women timid--too timid even to believe in the correctness of their own best promptings, when these would place them in a minority.
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Wise books For half the truths they hold are honored tombs.
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But she took her husband's jokes and joviality as patiently as everything else, considering that "men would be so", and viewing the stronger sex in the light of animals whom it had pleased Heaven to make naturally troublesome, like bulls and turkey-cocks.
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Sir Joshua would have been glad to take her portrait; and he would have had an easier task than the historian at least in this, that he would not have had to represent the truth of change - only to give stability to one beautiful moment.
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Affection is the broadest basis of a good life.
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Brothers are so unpleasant.
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Them as ha' never had a cushion don't miss it.
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That golden sky, which was the doubly blessed symbol of advancing day and of approaching rest.
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There is nothing I should care more to do, if it were possible, than to rouse the imagination of men and women to a vision of human claims in those races of their fellow-men who most differ from them in customs and beliefs.