George Eliot (1819 – 1880)
English novelist and poet, more well-known by her pen name George Eliot, who also for a time used Marian and Mary Anne as variant spellings of her name.
Folks will want things intellectually done, so they take refuge in George Eliot. I am very fond of her, but I wish she'd take her specs off, and come down off the public platform.
Certain winds will make men's temper bad.
Howiver, I'm not denyin' the women are foolish: God Almighty made 'em to match the men.
High achievements demand some other unusual qualification besides an unusual desire for high prizes.
The difficulty is, to decide how far resolution should set in the direction of activity rather than in the acceptance of a more negative state.
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 to have recovered hope.
No farther will I travel: once again
My brethren I will see, and that fair plain
Where I and song were born. There fresh-voiced youth
Will pour my strains with all the early truth
Which now abides not in my voice and hands,
But only in the soul, the will that stands
Helpless to move. My tribe remembering Will cry,
"'Tis he!" and run to greet me, welcoming.
Once, when she [Eliot] was asked which real-life person had been the inspiration for Casaubon a man whose "soul was sensitive without being enthusiastic; it was too languid to thrill out of self-consciousness into passionate delight; it went on fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched, thinking of its own winds and never flying" she tapped her own breast.
Better spend an extra hundred or two on your son's education, than leave it him in your will.
Sudden and near the trumpet's notes out-spread,
And soon his eyes could see the metal flower,
Shining upturned, out on the morning pour
Its incense audible; could see a train
From out the street slow-winding on the plain
With lyres and cymbals, flutes and psalteries,
While men, youths, maids, in concert sang to these
With various throat, or in succession poured,
Or in full volume mingled. But one word
Ruled each recurrent rise and answering fall,
As when the multitudes adoring call
On some great name divine, their common soul,
The common need, love, joy, that knits them in one whole.
The word was "Jubal!"... "Jubal" filled the air,
And seemed to ride aloft, a spirit there,
Creator of the choir, the full-fraught strain
That grateful rolled itself to him again.
The aged man adust upon the bank
Whom no eye saw at first with rapture drank
The bliss of music, then, with swelling heart,
Felt, this was his own being's greater part,
The universal joy once born in him.
Inclination snatches arguments
To make indulgence seem judicious choice.
People who love downy peaches are apt not to think of the stone, and sometimes jar their teeth terribly against it.
I think I should have no other mortal wants, if I could always have plenty of music. It seems to infuse strength into my limbs, and ideas into my brain. Life seems to go on without effort, when I am filled with music.
I began ... to watch with peculiar alarm lest what I called my philosophic estimate of the human lot in general, should be a mere prose lyric expressing my own pain and consequent bad temper.
The mother's yearning, that completest type of the life in another life which is the essence of real human love, feels the presence of the cherished child even in the debased, degraded man.
If art does not enlarge men's sympathies, it does nothing morally.
His mind was destitute of that dread which has been erroneously decried as if it were nothing higher than a mans animal care for his own skin: that awe of the Divine Nemesis which was felt by religious pagans, and, though it took a more positive form under Christianity, is still felt by the mass of mankind simply as a vague fear at anything which is called wrong-doing. Such terror of the unseen is so far above mere sensual cowardice that it will annihilate that cowardice: it is the initial recognition of a moral law restraining desire, and checks the hard bold scrutiny of imperfect thought into obligations which can never be proved to have any sanctity in the abscence of feeling.
The darkest night that ever fell upon the earth never hid the light, never put out the stars. It only made the stars more keenly, kindly glancing, as if in protest against the darkness.
Human feeling is like the mighty rivers that bless the earth: it does not wait for beauty it flows with resistless force and brings beauty with it.