George Eliot Quotes
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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.
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It is impossible, to me at least, to be poetical in cold weather.
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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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Some gentlemen have made an amazing figure in literature by general discontent with the universe as a trap of dulness into which their great souls have fallen by mistake; but the sense of a stupendous self and an insignificant world may have its consolations. Lydgate's discontent was much harder to bear; it was the sense that there was a grand existence in thought and effective action lying around him, while his self was being narrowed into the miserable isolation of egoistic fears, and vulgar anxieties for events that might allay such fears.
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One couldn't carry on life comfortably without a little blindness to the fact that everything has been said better than we can put it ourselves.
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There is a sort of subjection which is the peculiar heritage of largeness and of love; and strength is often only another name for willing bondage to irremediable weakness.
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Human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty - it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it.
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Every man who is not a monster, a mathematician, or a mad philosopher, is the slave of some woman or other.
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I desire no future that will break the ties of the past.
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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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That golden sky, which was the doubly blessed symbol of advancing day and of approaching rest.
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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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There is a mercy which is weakness, and even treason against the common good.
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We have all got to exert ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same names as other people call them by.
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There are various orders of beauty, causing men to make fools of themselves in various styles.
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Duty has a trick of behaving unexpectedly -- something like a heavy friend whom we have amiably asked to visit us, and who breaks his leg within our gates.
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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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No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.
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Nature has the deep cunning which hides itself under the appearance of openness, so that simple people think they can see through her quite well, and all the while she is secretly preparing a refutation of their confident prophecies.
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Life's a vast sea That does its mighty errand without fail, Painting in unchanged strength though waves are changing.
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He was of an impressible nature, and lived a great deal in other people's opinions and feelings concerning himself.
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The poverty of our imagination is no measure of say the world's resources. Our posterity will no doubt get fuel in ways that we are unable to devise for them.
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Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life──the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within──can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.
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Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarreled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?