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Well, I aren't like a bird-clapper, forced to make a rattle when the wind blows on me. I can keep my own counsel when there's no good i' speaking.
George Eliot
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Those only can thoroughly feel the meaning of death who know what is perfect love.
George Eliot
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May I reach That purest heaven - be to other souls The cup of strength in some great agony; Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love, Beget the smiles that have no cruelty. Be the sweet presence of a good diffused, And in the diffusion ever more intense! So shall I join the choir invisible Whose music is the gladness of the world.
George Eliot
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If you deliver an opinion at all, it is mere stupidity not to do it with an air of conviction and well-founded knowledge. You make it your own in uttering it, and naturally get fond of it.
George Eliot
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Habit is the beneficent harness of routine which enables silly men to live respectfully and unhappy men to live calmly.
George Eliot
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Love supreme defies all sophistry.
George Eliot
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It is a sad weakness in us, after all, that the thought of a person's death consecrates him or her anew to us. It is as if life were not sacred too, as if it were comparatively a small thing to fail in love and reverence to the brother or sister who has to climb the whole toilsome mountain with us. It seems as if all our tears and tenderness were due to the one who is spared that hard journey.
George Eliot
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While the arm is strong to strike and heave, Let soul and arm give shape that will abide...
George Eliot
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All honour and reverence to the divine beauty of form! Let us cultivate it to the utmost in men, women and children -- in our gardens and in our houses. But let us love that other beauty too, which lies in no secret of proportion but in the secret of deep human sympathy.
George Eliot
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Correct English is the slang of prigs.
George Eliot
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It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view.
George Eliot
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Love has a way of cheating itself consciously, like a child who plays at solitary hide-and-seek; it is pleased with assurances that it all the while disbelieves.
George Eliot
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Life is so complicated a game that the devices of skill are liable to be defeated at every turn by air-blown chances, incalculable as the descent of thistle-down.
George Eliot
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Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.
George Eliot
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No man is matriculated to the art of life till he has been well tempted.
George Eliot
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She thought it was part of the hardship of her life that there was laid upon her the burthen of larger wants than others seemed to feel – that she had to endure this wide hopeless yearning for that something, whatever it was, that was greatest and best on this earth.
George Eliot
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Some people are born to make life pretty, and others to grumble that it is not pretty enough.
George Eliot
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We are led on, like little children, by a way we know not.
George Eliot
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Worldly faces, never look so worldly as at a funeral.
George Eliot
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He was of an impressible nature, and lived a great deal in other people's opinions and feelings concerning himself.
George Eliot
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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.
George Eliot
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Women should be protected from anyone's exercise of unrighteous power... but then, so should every other living creature.
George Eliot
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Them as ha' never had a cushion don't miss it.
George Eliot
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The very truth hath a colour from the disposition of the utterer.
George Eliot
