George Eliot

George Eliot
Mary Ann Evans, known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She is the author of seven novels, including Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, Felix Holt, the Radical, Middlemarch, and Daniel Deronda, most of them set in provincial England and known for their realism and psychological insight...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth22 November 1819
best die feeling grass grow hearing heart human keen lies ordinary roar side vision walk
If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the best of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.
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Perfect love has a breath of poetry which can exalt the relation of the least-instructed human beings...
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Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life 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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She was perfectly quiet now, but not asleep--only soothed by sweet porridge and warmth into that wide-gazing calm which makes us older human beings, with our inward turmoil, feel a certain awe in the presence of a little child, such as we feel before some quiet majesty or beauty in the earth or sky--before a steady glowing planet, or a full-flowered eglantine, or the bending trees over a silent pathway.
companion grief lasting longer sit wrestling
She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.
gentle
Men's men: gentle or simple, they're much of a muchness
draught helpful pity simple wisdom
More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple pity that will not forsake us
greater human silent souls strengthen
What greater thing is there for two human souls that to feel that they are joined... to strengthen each other... to be at one with each other in silent unspeakable memories.
might
You are never too old to be what you might have been.
inspirational motivational karma
Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds.
sympathy goodbye lonely
Only in the agony of parting do we look into the depths of love.
cherished child degraded essence feels human life presence type
But the mother's yearning, that completest type of the life in another life which is the essence of real human love, feels the presence of the cherished child even in the debased, degraded man.
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It's no trifle at her time of life to part with a doctor who knows her constitution
among channel character confident energies influence lapse liable mind native process self transient valued whose wrong
For character too is a process and an unfolding... among our valued friends is there not someone or other who is a little too self confident and disdainful; whose distinguished mind is a little spotted with commonness; who is a little pinched here and protuberant there with native prejudices; or whose better energies are liable to lapse down the wrong channel under the influence of transient solicitations?