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
draught helpful pity simple wisdom
More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple pity that will not forsake us
breath exalt human love perfect poetry relation
Perfect love has a breath of poetry which can exalt the relation of the least-instructed human beings...
gentle
Men's men: gentle or simple, they're much of a muchness
activity falls grief intelligence-and-intellectuals life serene struggle supremacy understand worldly
Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.
awe beauty bending calm certain earth glowing human inward majesty older perfectly presence quiet silent steady sweet trees warmth
She was perfectly quiet now, but not asleep--only soothed by sweet porridge and warmth into that wide-gazing calm which makes us older human beings, with our inward turmoil, feel a certain awe in the presence of a little child, such as we feel before some quiet majesty or beauty in the earth or sky--before a steady glowing planet, or a full-flowered eglantine, or the bending trees over a silent pathway.
companion grief lasting longer sit wrestling
She was no longer wrestling with the grief, but could sit down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.
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.
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.
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?
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.
accepting ate drank families rich
. . . the rich ate and drank freely, accepting gout and apoplexy as things that ran mysteriously in respectable families . . .
duty fulfill power reward
The reward of one duty done is the power to fulfill another