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
choices argument indulgence
Inclination snatches arguments To make indulgence seem judicious choice.
love-is air blue
Knightly love is blent with reverence As heavenly air is blent with heavenly blue.
book order names
Examining the world in order to find consolation is very much like looking carefully over the pages of a great book in order to find our own name . ... Whether we find what we want or not, our preoccupation has hindered us from a true knowledge of the contents.
kings men royalty
A man's a man. But when you see a king, you see the work of many thousand men.
rain men wind
When we are dead : it is the living only who cannot be forgiven the living only from whom men's indulgence and reverence are held off, like the rain by the hard east wind .
giving trouble easy
Your trouble's easy borne when everybody gives it a lift for you.
ocean men air
Man finds his pathways: at first they were foot-tracks, as those of the beast in the wilderness; now they are swift and invisible: his thought dives through the ocean, and his wishes thread the air: has he found all the pathways yet? What reaches him, stays with him, rules him: he must accept it, not knowing its pathway.
levels savages emotion
Religion can only change when the emotions which fill it are changed; and the religion of personal fear remains nearly at the level of the savage.
mirrors done deeds
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.
running air breathing
Oh, sir, the loftiest hopes on earth Draw lots with meaner hopes: heroic breasts, Breathing bad air, run risk of pestilence; Or, lacking lime-juice when they cross the Line, May languish with the scurvy.
taken cutting hands
When you've been used to doing things, and they've been taken away from you, it's as if your hands had been cut off, and you felt the fingers as are of no use to you.
patterns conscience
Our consciences are not all of the same pattern.
omission sublime poet
What believer sees a disturbing omission or infelicity? The text, whether of prophet or of poet, expands for whatever we can put into it, and even his bad grammar is sublime.
eye men soul
The soul of man, when it gets fairly rotten, will bear you all sorts of poisonous toad-stools, and no eye can see whence came the seed thereof.