George Eliot - Daniel Deronda (1876)

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It was not that she was out of temper, but that the world was not equal to the demands of her fine organism.

George Eliot
The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, or novelist, is the extension of our sympathies.

George Eliot
How should all the apparatus of heaven and earth make poetry for a mind that had no movements of awe and tenderness, no sense of fellowship which thrills from the near to the distant, and back again from the distant to the near?

George Eliot
Those who have been indulged by fortune and have always thought of calamity as what happens to others, feel a blind incredulous rage at the reversal of their lot, and half believe that their wild cries will alter the course of the storm.

George Eliot
In the chequered area of human experience the seasons are all mingled as in the golden age: fruit and blossom hang together; in the same moment the sickle is reaping and the seed is sprinkled; one tends the green cluster and another treads the wine-press. Nay, in each of our lives harvest and spring-time are continually one, until Death himself gathers us and sows us anew in his invisible fields.

George Eliot
Let thy chief terror be of thine own soul: There, 'mid the throng of hurrying desires That trample o'er the dead to seize their spoil, Lurks vengeance, footless, irresistible As exhaltations laden with slow death, And o'er the fairest troop of captured joys Breathes pallid pestilence.

George Eliot
Deeds are the pulse of Time, his beating life, And righteous or unrighteous, being done, Must throb in after-throbs till Time itself Be laid in stillness, and the universe Quiver and breathe upon no mirror more.

George Eliot
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!

George Eliot
Sir Joshua would have been glad to take her portrait; and he would have had an easier task than the historian at least in this, that he would not have had to represent the truth of change - only to give stability to one beautiful moment.

George Eliot
Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning. Even Science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start with a make-believe unit, and must fix on a point in the stars' unceasing journey when his sidereal clock shall pretend that time is Nought.

George Eliot
There is a sort of human paste that when it comes near the fire of enthusiasm is only baked into harder shape.

George Eliot
Heat is a great agent and a useful word, but considered as a means of explaining the universe, it requires an extensive knowledge of differences..

George Eliot
The moment of finding a fellow-creature is often as full of mingled doubt and exultation, as the moment of finding an idea.

George Eliot
It is better - it shall be better with me because I have known you.

George Eliot
The best introduction to astronomy is to think of the nightly heavens as a little lot of stars belonging to one's own homestead.

George Eliot
I shall be so glad if you will tell me what to read. I have been looking into all the books in the library at Offendene, but there is nothing readable. The leaves all stick together and smell musty. I wish I could write books to amuse myself, as you can! How delightful it must be to write books after one's own taste instead of reading other people's! Home-made books must be so nice.

George Eliot
It is a common sentence that Knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of Ignorance? Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down.

George Eliot
Excellence encourages one about life generally; it shows the spiritual wealth of the world.

George Eliot
Here undoubtedly lies the chief poetic energy: - in the force of imagination that pierces or exalts the solid fact, instead of floating among cloud-pictures.

George Eliot
Genius at first is little more than a great capacity for receiving discipline.

George Eliot
In the schoolroom her quick mind had taken readily that strong starch of unexplained rules and disconnected facts which saves ignorance from any painful sense of limpness.

George Eliot
That farewell kiss which resembles greeting, that last glance of love which becomes the sharpest pang of sorrow.

George Eliot
Hostesses who entertain much must make up their parties as ministers make up their cabinets, on grounds other than personal liking.

George Eliot
No evil dooms us hopelessly except the evil we love, and desire to continue in, and make no effort to escape from.

George Eliot
Children demand that their heroes should be fleckless, and easily believe them so.

George Eliot
A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain upon the affections.

George Eliot
I think I dislike what I don't like more than I like what I like.

George Eliot
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; whereas Ignorance is a blind giant who, let him but wax unbound, would make it a sport to seize the pillars that hold up the long-wrought fabric of human good, and turn all the places of joy as dark as a buried Babylon.

George Eliot
It is one thing to see your road, another to cut it.

George Eliot
The embitterment of hatred is often as unaccountable to onlookers as the growth of devoted love, and it not only seems but is really out of direct relation with any outward causes to be alleged.

George Eliot