George Eliot - Adam Bede (1859)

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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
College mostly makes people like bladders-just good for nothing but t'hold the stuff as is poured into 'em.

George Eliot
You told me the truth when you said to me once, "There's a sort of wrong that can never be made up for".

George Eliot
If you had a table spread for a feast, and was making merry with your friends, you would think it was kind to let me come and sit down and rejoice with you, because you'd think I should to share those good things; but I should better to share in your trouble and your labour.

George Eliot
Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state.

George Eliot
Leisure is gone — gone where the spinning-wheels are gone, and the pack-horses, and the slow wagons, and the peddlers who brought bargains to the door on sunny afternoons.

George Eliot
There are various orders of beauty, causing men to make fools of themselves in various styles, from the desperate to the sheepish.

George Eliot
Come in, Adam, and rest; it has been a hard day for thee.

George Eliot
Her own misery filled her heart; there was no room in it for other people's sorrow.

George Eliot
What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they are joined for life — to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the last parting?

George Eliot
There are few prophets in the world; few sublimely beautiful women; few heroes. I can't afford to give all my love and reverence to such rarities: I want a great deal of those feelings for my every-day fellow-men, especially for the few in the foreground of the great multitude, whose faces I know, whose hands I touch for whom I have to make way with kindly courtesy.

George Eliot
Trouble comes to us all in this life: we set our hearts on things which it isn't God's will for us to have, and then we go sorrowing.

George Eliot
Such young unfurrowed souls roll to meet each other like two velvet peaches that touch softly and are at rest; they mingle as easily as two brooklets that ask for nothing but to entwine themselves and ripple with ever-interlacing curves in the leafiest hiding-places.

George Eliot
I'm not one o' those as can see the cat i' the dairy, an' wonder what she's come after.

George Eliot
There are so many of us, and our lots are so different, what wonder that Nature's mood is often in harsh contrast with the great crisis of our lives? We are children of a large family, and must learn, as such children do, not to expect that our hurts will be made much of — to be content with little nurture and caressing, and help each other the more.

George Eliot
Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds...

George Eliot
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.

George Eliot
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
Our dead are never dead to us until we have forgotten them.

George Eliot
How is it that the poets have said so many fine things about our first love, so few about our later love? Are their first poems their best? Or are not those the best which come from their fuller thought, their larger experience, their deeper-rooted affections?

George Eliot
There's folks as make bad butter and trusten to the salt t' hide it.

George Eliot
It is better sometimes not to follow great reformers of abuses beyond the threshold of their homes.

George Eliot
I know forgiveness is a man's duty, but, to my thinking, that can only mean as you're to give up all thoughts o' taking revenge: it can never mean as you're t' have your old feelings back again, for that's not possible.

George Eliot
It is a vain thought to flee from the work that God appoints us, for the sake of finding a greater blessing, instead of seeking it where alone it is to be found - in loving obedience.

George Eliot
It's easy finding reasons why other folks should be patient.

George Eliot
It's them as take advantage that get advantage in this world.

George Eliot
In bed our yesterdays are too oppressive: if a man can only get up, though it be but to whistle or to smoke, he has a present which offers some resistance to the past—sensations which assert themselves against tyrannous memories.

George Eliot
Men's lives are as thoroughly blended with each other as the air they breathe: evil spreads as necessarily as disease.

George Eliot
Her heart lived in no cherished secrets of its own, but in feelings which it longed to share with all the world.

George Eliot
Don't you meddle with me, and I won't meddle with you.

George Eliot