George Eliot Quotes
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Great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion.
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I have nothing to tell except travellers' stories, which are always tiresome, like the description of a play which was very exciting to those who saw it.
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If a man goes a little too far along a new road, it is usually himself that he harms more than any one else.
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Explain! Tell a man to explain how he dropped into hell! Explain my preference! I never had a PREFERENCE for her, any more than I have a preference for breathing. No other woman exists by the side of her. I would rather touch her hand if it were dead, than I would touch any other woman's living.
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Hatred is like fire, it makes even light rubbish deadly.
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In the man whose childhood has known caresses and kindness, there is always a fiber of memory that can be touched to gentle issues.
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What courage and patience are wanted for every life that aims to produce anything!
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Of a truth, Knowledge is power, but it is a power reined by scruple, having a conscience of what must be and what may be. . . .
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The sweetest of all success is that which one wins by hard exertion.
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A man vows, and yet will not east away the means of breaking his vow. Is it that he distinctly means to break it? Not at all; but the desires which tend to break it are at work in him dimly, and make their way into his imagination, and relax his muscles in the very moments when he is telling himself over again the reasons for his vow.
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Death was not to be a leap: it was to be a long descent under thickening shadows.
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When one wanted one's interests looking after whatever the cost, it was not so well for a lawyer to be over honest, else he might not be up to other people's tricks.
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Joy and sorrow are both my perpetual companions, but the joy is called Past and the sorrow Present.
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There is hardly any contact more depressing to a young ardent creature than that of a mind in which years full of knowledge seem to have issued in a blank absence of interest or sympathy.
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All things journey: sun and moon, Morning, noon, and afternoon, Night and all her stars; 'Twixt the east and western bars Round they journey, Come and go! We go with them!
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When a homemaking aunt scolds a niece for following her evangelistic passion instead of domestic pursuits, her reply is interesting. First, she clarifies that God's individual call on her doesn't condemn those in more conventional roles. Then, she says she can no more ignore the cry of the lost than her aunt can the cry of her child.
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A good horse makes short miles.
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A bachelor's children are always young: they're immortal children - always lisping, waddling, helpless, and with a chance of turning out good.
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She hates everything that is not what she longs for.
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A prig is a fellow who is always making you a present of his opinions.
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My books don't seem to belong to me after I have once written them; and I find myself delivering opinions about them as if I had nothing to do with them.
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After all, the true seeing is within.
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There are new eras in one's life that are equivalent to youth-are something better than youth.
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Errors look so very ugly in persons of small means -one feels they are taking quite a liberty in going astray; whereas people of fortune may naturally indulge in a few delinquencies.