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
passion men games
Fancy what a game of chess would be if all the chessmen had passions and intellects, more or less small and cunning; if you were not only uncertain about your adversary's men, but a little uncertain also about your own... You would be especially likely to be beaten, if you depended arrogantly on your mathematical imagination, and regarded your passionate pieces with contempt. Yet this imaginary chess is easy compared with a game a man has to play against his fellow-men with other fellow-men for instruments.
life games play
Life is like a game of whist. I don't enjoy the game much; but I like to play my cards well, and see what will be the end of it.
life air games
Life is so complicated a game that the devices of skill are liable to be defeated at every turn by air-blown chances, incalculable as the descent of thistle-down.
affections affliction against best confess danger defense delight experience gifts ideas joy laughed life living ought passionate perhaps personal sake share study surely sweet teaching though women
We women are always in danger of living too exclusively in the affections; and though our affections are perhaps the best gifts we have, we ought also to have our share of the more independent life -- some joy in things for their own sake. It is piteous to see the helplessness of some sweet women when their affections are disappointed -- because all their teaching has been, that they can only delight in study of any kind for the sake of a personal love. They have never contemplated an independent delight in ideas as an experience which they could confess without being laughed at. Yet surely women need this defense against passionate affliction even more than men.
active among claim deformed easily fellowship foot form frustrated hidden imagination inexorable nature rarer sorrow spiritual takes turns
The sense of an entailed disadvantage -- the deformed foot doubtfully hidden by the shoe, makes a restlessly active spiritual yeast, and easily turns a self-centered, unloving nature into an Ishmaelite. But in the rarer sort, who presently see their own frustrated claim as one among a myriad, the inexorable sorrow takes the form of fellowship and makes the imagination tender.
british-author choice growth human lies principle strongest
The strongest principle of growth lies in human choice.
accepting ate drank families rich
. . . the rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families . . .
errors feels few fortune indulge liberty means mistakes naturally people persons quite small taking ugly whereas
Errors look so very ugly in persons of small means --one feels they are taking quite a liberty in going astray; whereas people of fortune may naturally indulge in a few delinquencies.
duty fulfill power reward
The reward of one duty done is the power to fulfill another
city funeral gathered hemisphere images moving past seems strange trophies visible
Rome, the city of visible history, where the past of a whole hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and trophies gathered from afar.
form gratuitous prophecy
Prophecy is the most gratuitous form of error.
blessed evidence giving man worthy
Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us worthy evidence of the fact.
center common dissimilar feeling girl people understand
A toddling little girl is a center of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other.
bred moments movement repeating repetition trivial until waiting
Do we not wile away moments of inanity or fatigued waiting by repeating some trivial movement or sound, until the repetition has bred a want, which is incipient habit?