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
failure hug purpose
The only failure one should fear, is not hugging to the purpose they see as best.
self taught aging
It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self.
good-luck men unlucky
As they who make Good luck a god count all unlucky men.
poverty world misery
It is seldom that the miserable of the world can help regarding their misery as a wrong inflicted by those who are less miserable.
errors feelings illusion
Great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion.
giving grease benefits
It is good to be helpful and kindly, but don't give yourself to be melted into candle grease for the benefit of the tallow trade.
fall autumn air
Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love - that makes life and nature harmonise. The birds are consulting about their migrations, the trees are putting on the hectic or the pallid hues of decay, and begin to strew the ground, that one's very footsteps may not disturb the repose of earth and air, while they give us a scent that is a perfect anodyne to the restless spirit. Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.
sports ignorance knowledge
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.
pride men faults
There is nothing that will kill a man so soon as having nobody to find fault with but himself.
hate light fire
Hatred is like fire, it makes even light rubbish deadly.
peace shadow sin
I couldn't live in peace if I put the shadow of a willful sin between myself and God.
eggs silence doe
Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled egg; and when it takes to cackling will have nothing to announce but that addled delusion.
wine joy
Joy is the best of wine.
kissing oblivion
Kisses honeyed by oblivion.