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
mistake lying self
Some gentlemen have made an amazing figure in literature by general discontent with the universe as a trap of dulness into which their great souls have fallen by mistake; but the sense of a stupendous self and an insignificant world may have its consolations. Lydgate's discontent was much harder to bear; it was the sense that there was a grand existence in thought and effective action lying around him, while his self was being narrowed into the miserable isolation of egoistic fears, and vulgar anxieties for events that might allay such fears.
light feet soldier
As soon as we lay ourselves entirely at His feet, we have enough light given to us to guide our own steps. We are like the foot soldiers, who hear nothing of the councils that determine the course of the great battle they are in, but hear plainly enough the word of command that they must themselves obey.
conjecture allowance knows
Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing was, than simply to know it; for conjecture soon became more confident than knowledge, and had a more liberal allowance for the incompatible.
work love-you play
You must love your work and not always be looking over the edge of it wanting your play to begin.
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.
firsts goodness reverence
The first condition of human goodness is something to love; the second, something to reverence.
winning victory sides
Mankind is not disposed to look narrowly into the conduct of great victors when their victory is on the right side.
weather impossible cold
It is impossible, to me at least, to be poetical in cold weather.
discipline genius receiving
Genius is the capacity for receiving and improving by discipline.
clever stupidity pigeons
It always seemed to me a sort of clever stupidity only to have one sort of talent - like a carrier pigeon.
doors tools use
When a workman knows the use of his tools, he can make a door as well as a window.
pain grief baptism
Deep, unspeakable suffering may well be called a baptism, a regeneration, the initiation into a new state. Suffering can be likened to a baptism - the passing over the threshold of pain and grief and anguish to claim a new state of being.
shoes boots trouble
Boots and shoes are the greatest trouble of my life.
deeds action fetters
Our deeds are fetters that we forge ourselves.