George Eliot Quotes
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History, we know, is apt to repeat itself, and to foist very old incidents upon us with only a slight change of costume.
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It seems to me now, if I was to find Father at home to-night, I should behave different; but there's no knowing - perhaps nothing 'ud be a lesson to us if it didn't come too late.
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Rome - the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.
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Do we not wile away moments of inanity or fatigued waiting by repeating some trivial movement or sound, until the repetition has bred a want, which is incipient habit?
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I love words; they are the quoits, the bows, the staves that furnish the gymnasium of the mind.
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I think the effective use of quotation is an important point in the art of writing. Given sparingly, quotations serve admirably as a climax or as a corroboration, but when they are long and frequent, they seriously weaken the effect of a book. We lose sight of the writer - he scatters our sympathy among others than himself - and the ideas which he himself advances are not knit together with our impression of his personality.
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I flutter all ways, and fly in none.
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It seems to me we can never give up longing and wishing while we are thoroughly alive. There are certain things we feel to be beautiful and good, and we must hunger after them. How can we ever be satisfied without them until our feelings are deadened?
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Apropos of the 'The Lifted Veil,' I think it will not be judicious to reprint it at present. I care for the idea which it embodies, and which justifies its painfulness. A motto which I wrote on it yesterday perhaps is a sufficient indication of that idea: -
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Childhood is only the beautiful and happy time in contemplation and retrospect: to the child it is full of deep sorrows, the meaning of which is unknown.
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With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer undertakes to reveal to any chance comer far-reaching visions of the past. This is what I undertake to do for you, reader.
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There are characters which are continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them. Their susceptibilities will clash against objects that remain innocently quiet.
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In the days when the spinning wheels hummed busily in the farmhouses--and even great ladies, clothed in silk and thread lace, had their toy spinning wheels of polished oak--there might be seen, in districts far away among the lanes, or deep in the bosom of the hills, certain palled undersized men who, by the side of the brawny country-folk, looked like the remnants of a disinherited race.
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Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds ...
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His smile is sweetened by his gravity.
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Comments on The Lifted Veil with a motto for it used in the 'Cabinet Edition' of her works (1878), in a letter to John Blackwood (28 February 1873), published in George Eliot's Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals (1885), Vol. 4
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The fact is, both callers and work thicken - the former sadly interfering with the latter.
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Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the most gratuitous.
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Love does not aim simply at the conscious good of the beloved object: it is not satisfied without perfect loyalty of heart; it aims at its own completeness.
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Perhaps his might be one of the natures where a wise estimate of consequences is fused in the fires of that passionate belief which determines the consequences it believes in.
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If the past is not to bind us, where can duty lie? We should have no law but the inclination of the moment.
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Net the large fish and you are sure to have the small fry.
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A peasant can no more help believing in a traditional superstition than a horse can help trembling when be sees a camel.
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He seemed to weave, like the spider, from pure impulse, without reflection. Every man's work, pursued steadily, tends in this way to become an end in itself, and so to bridge over the loveless chasms of his life.