"More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us."
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George Eliot quotes (page 16 of 51)
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"For what we call illusions are often, in truth, a wider vision of past and present realities - a willing movement of a man's soul with the larger sweep of the world's forces - a movement towards a more assured end than the chances of a single life."
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"Opposition may become sweet to a man when he has christened it persecution."
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"Mankind is not disposed to look narrowly into the conduct of great victors when their victory is on the right side."
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"The beauty of a lovely woman is like music ... the rounded neck, the dimpled arm, move us by something more than their prettiness--by their close kinship with all we have known of tenderness and peace."
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"Upon my word, I think the truth is the hardest missile one can be pelted with."
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"Oh may I join the choir invisible Of those immortal dead who live again In minds made better by their presence."
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"Imagination is a licensed trespasser: it has no fear of dogs, but may climb over walls and peep in at windows with impunity."
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"What to one man is the virtue which he has sunk below the possibility of aspiring to, is to another the backsliding by which he forfeits his spiritual crown."
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"Worldly faces never look so worldly as at a funeral."
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"We learn words by rote, but not their meaning; that must be paid for with our life-blood, and printed in the subtle fibres of our nerves."
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"I'm proof against that word failure. I've seen behind it. The only failure a man ought to fear is failure of cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best."
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"There are new eras in one's life that are equivalent to youth-are something better than youth."
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"As to people saying a few idle words about us, we must not mind that, any more than the old church steeple minds the rooks cawing about it."
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"For my part I am very sorry for him. It is an uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small hungry shivering self--never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardour of a passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dimsighted."
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"It is a fact capable of amiable interpretation that ladies are not the worst disposed towards a new acquaintance of their own sex, because she has points of inferiority."
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"A proud woman who has learned to submit carries all her pride to the reinforcement of her submission, and looks down with severe superiority on all feminine assumption as unbecoming."
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"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."
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"They the royal-hearted women are Who nobly love the noblest, yet have grace For needy suffering lives in lowliest place, Carrying a choicer sunlight in their smile, The heavenliest ray that pitieth the vile."
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"In so complex a thing as human nature, we must consider it is hard to find rules without exception."
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