George Eliot Quotes About Literature
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In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations.
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Ignorant kindness may have the effect of cruelty; but to be angry with it as if it were direct cruelty would be an ignorant unkindness.
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For years after Lydgate remembered the impression produced in him by this involuntary appeal-this cry from soul to soul, without other consciousness than their moving with kindred natures in the same embroiled medium, the same troublous fitfully-illuminated life.
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When we get to wishing a great deal for ourselves, whatever we get soon turns into mere limitation and exclusion.
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If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.
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Knowledge slowly builds up what Ignorance in an hour pulls down.
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The Jews are among the aristocracy of every land; if a literature is called rich in the possession of a few classic tragedies, what shall we say to a national tragedy lasting for fifteen hundred years, in which the poets and the actors were also the heroes.
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When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.
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There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.
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The beginning of compunction is the beginning of a new life.
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People who can't be witty exert themselves to be devout and affectionate.
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Harold, like the rest of us, had many impressions which saved him the trouble of distinct ideas.
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Iteration, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress.
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Hostesses who entertain much must make up their parties as ministers make up their cabinets, on grounds other than personal liking.
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Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma. Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive.
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Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out of their neighbour's buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no murder.
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Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.
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The sons of Judah have to choose that God may again choose them. The divine principle of our race is action, choice, resolved memory.
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bad literature of the sort called amusing is spiritual gin.
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Death is the king of this world: 'Tis his park where he breeds life to feed him. Cries of pain are music for his banquet.
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But what we call our despair is often only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.
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Falsehood is easy, truth so difficult.
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The world is full of hopeful analogies and handsome, dubious eggs, called possibilities.
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More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.
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Play not with paradoxes. That caustic which you handle in order to scorch others may happen to sear your own fingers and make them dead to the quality of things.
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The strongest principle of growth lies in the human choice.
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I like trying to get pregnant. I'm not so sure about childbirth.
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That's what a man wants in a wife, mostly; he wants to make sure one fool tells him he's wise.
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... as usual I am suffering much from doubt as to the worth of what I am doing and fear lest I may not be able to complete it so as to make it a contribution to literature and not a mere addition to the heap of books.
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Every woman is supposed to have the same set of motives, or else to be a monster.
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