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
discipline genius receiving
Genius is the capacity for receiving and improving by discipline.
weather impossible cold
It is impossible, to me at least, to be poetical in cold weather.
winning victory sides
Mankind is not disposed to look narrowly into the conduct of great victors when their victory is on the right side.
firsts goodness reverence
The first condition of human goodness is something to love; the second, something to reverence.
mean blessing thinking
I have always been thinking of the different ways in which Christianity is taught, and whenever I find one way that makes it a wider blessing than any other, I cling to that as the truest--I mean that which takes in the most good of all kinds, and brings in the most people as sharers in it. It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much.
fighting men done
I hold it a blasphemy to say that a man ought not to fight against authority: there is no great religion and no great freedom that has not done it, in the beginning.
men wind certain
But certain winds will make men's temper bad.
noble vengeance scorn
In high vengeance there is noble scorn.
opportunity skills temptation
The devil tempts us not--'tis we tempt him, Reckoning his skill with opportunity.
cutting two ties
Life is very difficult. It seems right to me sometimes that we should follow our strongest feelings; but then such feelings continually come across the ties that all our former life has made for us,--the ties that have made others dependent on us,--and would cut them in two.
men joy forever
There are robberies that leave man or woman forever beggared of peace and joy, yet kept secret by the sufferer.
eggs silence may
Speech may be barren; but it is ridiculous to suppose that silence is always brooding on a nestful of eggs.
tone unexpected persons
Susceptible persons are more affected by a change of tone that by unexpected words.
darkness secret wish
Under every guilty secret there is hidden a brood of guilty wishes, whose unwholesome infecting life is cherished by the darkness.