George Eliot

George Eliot

"Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love - that makes life and nature harmonise. The birds are consulting about their migrations, the trees are putting on the hectic or the pallid hues of decay, and begin to strew the ground, that one's very footsteps may not disturb the repose of earth and air, while they give us a scent that is a perfect anodyne to the restless spirit. Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.[Letter to Miss Lewis, Oct. 1, 1841]"
153 Quotes
"Is not this a true autumn day? Just the still melancholy that I love - that makes life and nature harmonise. The birds are consulting about their migrations, the trees are putting on the hectic or the pallid hues of decay, and begin to strew the ground, that one's very footsteps may not disturb the repose of earth and air, while they give us a scent that is a perfect anodyne to the restless spirit. Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth seeking the successive autumns.[Letter to Miss Lewis, Oct. 1, 1841]"
George Eliot George Eliot’s Life, as Related in her Letters and Journals
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"We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass, the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows, the same redbreasts that we used to call ‘God’s birds’ because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known?"
George Eliot The Mill on the Floss
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"A medical man likes to make psychological observations, and sometimes in the pursuit of such studies is too easily tempted into momentous prophecy which life and death easily set at nought."
George Eliot Middlemarch
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"I desire no future that will break the ties of the past."
George Eliot The Mill on the Floss
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"Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure."
George Eliot The Mill on the Floss
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"“Poetry and art and knowledge are sacred and pure.”"
George Eliot The Mill on the Floss
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"“To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion--a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.”"
George Eliot Middlemarch
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"“O may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence; live In pulses stirred to generosity,In deeds of daring rectitude...”"
George Eliot O May I Join the Choir Invisible! And Other Favourite Poems
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"“It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.”"
George Eliot Middlemarch
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"Poor fellow! I think he is in love with you.'I am not aware of it. And to me it is one of the most odious things in a girl's life, that there must always be some supposition of falling in love coming between her and any man who is kind to her... I have no ground for the nonsensical vanity of fancying everybody who comes near me is in love with me."
George Eliot
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"All the learnin' my father paid for was a bit o' birch at one end and an alphabet at the other."
George Eliot
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"The reward of one duty is the power to fulfill another."
George Eliot
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"Wear a smile and have friends wear a scowl and have wrinkles."
George Eliot
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"What do we live for, if not to make life less difficult for each other?"
George Eliot
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"The golden moments in the stream of life rush past us, and we see nothing but sand; the angels come to visit us, and we only know them when they are gone."
George Eliot
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"In the vain laughter of folly wisdom hears half its applause."
George Eliot
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"Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds."
George Eliot
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"There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and have recovered hope."
George Eliot
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"It will never rain roses: when we want to have more roses we must plant more trees."
George Eliot
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"Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love."
George Eliot
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