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
useless-things useless consumerism
We get a deal o' useless things about us, only because we've got the money to spend.
spring inspiration growing
the mysterious complexity of our life is not to be embraced by maxims ... to lace ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to repress all the divine promptings and inspirations that spring from growing insight and sympathy.
water common-sense pumps
There's folks 'ud hold a sieve under the pump and expect to carry away the water.
church band watches
the Press has no band of critics who go the round of the churches and chapels, and are on the watch for a slip or defect in the preacher, to make a 'feature' in their article: the clergy are, practically, the most irresponsible of all talkers.
beautiful children happy-times
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.
thinking fortune cheerfulness
I think cheerfulness is a fortune in itself.
busybodies
Don't you meddle with me, and I won't meddle with you.
littles modern states
It is always your heaviest bore who is astonished at the tameness of modern celebrities: naturally; for a little of his company has reduced them to a state of flaccid fatigue.
thinking bored bores
to my thinking, it is more pitiable to bore than to be bored.
mistake men world
autobiography at least saves a man or woman that the world is curious about from the publication of a string of mistakes called 'Memoirs.
littles appearance
Appearances have very little to do with happiness.
vanishing causes fit
To superficial observers his chin had too vanishing an aspect, looking as if it were being gradually reabsorbed. And it did indeed cause him some difficulty about the fit of his satin stocks, for which chins were at that time useful.
cutting action one-thing
It is one thing to see your road, another to cut it.
spring giving justice
We reap what we sow, but nature has love over and above that justice, and gives us shadow and blossom and fruit, that spring from no planting of ours.