"People who can't be witty exert themselves to be devout and affectionate."
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George Eliot quotes (page 23 of 51)
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"How could a man be satisfied with a decision between such alternatives and under such circumstances No more than he can be satisfied with his hat, which he's chosen from among such shapes as the resources of the age offer him. . . ."
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"It always seemed to me a sort of clever stupidity only to have one sort of talent - like a carrier pigeon."
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"I have always been thinking of the different ways in which Christianity is taught, and whenever I find one way that makes it a wider blessing than any other, I cling to that as the truest--I mean that which takes in the most good of all kinds, and brings in the most people as sharers in it. It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much."
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"Life is very difficult. It seems right to me sometimes that we should follow our strongest feelings; but then such feelings continually come across the ties that all our former life has made for us,--the ties that have made others dependent on us,--and would cut them in two."
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"Speech may be barren; but it is ridiculous to suppose that silence is always brooding on a nestful of eggs."
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"Susceptible persons are more affected by a change of tone that by unexpected words."
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"All things journey: sun and moon, Morning, noon, and afternoon, Night and all her stars; 'Twixt the east and western bars Round they journey, Come and go! We go with them!"
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"It is in these acts called trivialities that the seeds of joy are forever wasted, until men and women look round with haggard faces at the devastation their own waste has made, and say, the earth bears no harvest of sweetness - calling their denial knowledge."
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"Ignorance ... is a painless evil; so, I should think, is dirt, considering the merry faces that go along with it."
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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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"A difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections."
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"And when a woman's will is as strong as the man's who wants to govern her, half her strength must be concealment."
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"Man cannot choose his duties."
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"Wine and the sun will make vinegar without any shouting to help them."
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"In spite of his practical ability, some of his experience had petrified into maxims and quotations."
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"Truth has rough flavours if we bite it through."
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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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"Breed is stronger than pasture."
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"Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some of them woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable."
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