George Eliot, Middlemarch
"But let the wise be warned against too great readiness at explanation: it multiplies the sources of mistake, lengthening the sum for reckoners sure to go wrong."
101 Quotes
"But let the wise be warned against too great readiness at explanation: it multiplies the sources of mistake, lengthening the sum for reckoners sure to go wrong."
George Eliot, Middlemarch
"Men outlive their love, but they don’t outlive the consequences of their recklessness."
George Eliot, Middlemarch
"He has got no good red blood in his body," said Sir James."No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying glass, and it was all semicolons and parentheses," said Mrs. Cadwallader."
George Eliot, Middlemarch
"Rosamond, accustomed from her childhood to an extravagant household, thought that good housekeeping consisted simply in ordering the best of everything––nothing else 'answered;' and Lydgate supposed that 'if things were done at all, they must be done properly'–he did not see how they were to live otherwise. If each head of household expenditure had been mentioned to him beforehand, he would have probably observed that 'it could hardly come to much,' and if any one had suggested a saving on a particular article–for example, the substitution of cheap fish for dear–it would have appeared to him simply a penny-wise, mean notion."
George Eliot, Middlemarch
"People glorify all sorts of bravery except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest neighbors."
George Eliot, Middlemarch
"A man's mind must be continually expanding and shrinking between the whole human horizon and the horizon of an object-glass."
George Eliot, Middlemarch
"Doubtless some ancient Greek has observed that behind the big mask and the speaking-trumpet, there must always be our poor little eyes peeping as usual and our timorous lips more or less under anxious control."
George Eliot, Middlemarch
"If we had lost our own chief good, other people’s good would remain, and that is worth trying for."
George Eliot, Middlemarch
"Self-consciousness of the manner is the expensive substitute for simplicity."
George Eliot, Middlemarch
"For we all of us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them."
George Eliot, Middlemarch
"One’s self-satisfaction is an untaxed kind of property which it is very unpleasant to find deprecated."
George Eliot, Middlemarch
"Pride only helps us to be generous; it never makes us so, any more than vanity makes us witty."
George Eliot, Middlemarch
"It is a narrow mind which cannot look at a subject from various points of view."
George Eliot, Middlemarch
"Modesty, not temper."
George Eliot, Middlemarch
"A man vows, and yet will not east away the means of breaking his vow. Is it that he distinctly means to break it? Not at all; but the desires which tend to break it are at work in him dimly, and make their way into his imagination, and relax his muscles in the very moments when he is telling himself over again the reasons for his vow."
George Eliot, Middlemarch
"I don't see how a man is to be good for much unless he has some one woman to love him dearly."
George Eliot, Middlemarch
"It is just that I don’t know how I could live without the hope of her. It would be like learning to live with wooden legs."
George Eliot, Middlemarch
"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."
George Eliot, Middlemarch
"If a man has a capacity for great thoughts, he is likely to overtake them before he is decrepit."
George Eliot, Middlemarch
"When a tender affection has been storing itself in us through many of our years, the idea that we could accept any exchange for it seems to be a cheapening of our lives. And we can set a watch over our affections and our constancy as we can over other treasures."
George Eliot, Middlemarch
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